According to a research released Monday by the Poor People’s Campaign, Americans in poorer areas died at nearly twice the rate of those in richer counties during the pandemic.
The study, which used income and death data from over 3,200 counties across the United States, found an even greater disparity during the Delta variant of the fourth coronavirus wave in the United States, when people in the lowest income counties died at five times the rate of those in the highest income counties.
The 300 counties with the highest death rates have a 45 percent poverty rate and household median earnings that are $23,000 lower on average than counties with lower death rates. The report and an accompanying map of death rates and income online demonstrate that several of the top twenty counties were thinly populated locations in Georgia, Texas, and Virginia.
“The country’s neglect of poor and low-wealth people during a pandemic is immoral, shocking, and unjust, especially in light of the trillions of dollars profit-driven entities received,” said William Barber, director of the Poor People’s Campaign, an activist group aimed at reducing income inequality in the United States.
The United States is the only wealthy country that does not provide universal health care, and it saw the greatest drop in male life expectancy among the 29 countries analysed by Oxford University during the Covid epidemic.
Covid has claimed the lives of over 980,000 Americans, the most of any country on the planet.
Vaccine hesitancy, which has left one-fourth of all adult Americans unvaccinated, is thought to be responsible for hundreds of thousands of preventable deaths, according to public health experts.
