The US must take urgent additional steps to prevent tens of millions of middle-class Americans hit by the COVID-19 pandemic from plunging into poverty, an independent UN human rights expert has said.
UN Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights Philip
Alston has warned that significant portions of America will soon face destitution unless Congress takes “far-reaching” actions.
“Low-income and poor people face far higher risks from the coronavirus due to chronic neglect and discrimination, and a muddled, corporate-driven, federal response [that] has failed them,” said Mr Alston, who made a fact-finding visit to the US in 2017.
He painted a grim picture of record layoffs, a weak safety net, and a government “focusing primarily on businesses and the well-off”.
On March 27, President Donald Trump signed into law a historic USD 2 trillion emergency relief package which made its way through Congress, to provide stopgap funding for workers, small businesses and industry, impacted by the need to lockdown much of the country to halt the transmission of the Covid-19.
The US must take urgent additional steps to prevent tens of millions of middle-class Americans hit by the
Covid-19 pandemic from being “plunged into poverty”, he said.
Over a four-week period, more than 22 million people have filed for unemployment and US Federal Reserve economists reportedly project up to 47 million job losses through the summer.