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<\/p>\nRoseville, CA…The accumulating death toll from Covid-19 can be seen minute-by-minute on cable news channels.\u00a0 But there\u2019s another death toll few seem to care much about: the number of poverty-related deaths being set in motion by deliberately plunging millions of Americans into poverty and despair.<\/p>\n
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In the first three weeks since governors began shutting down commerce in their states, 17 million Americans filed for unemployment, and according to\u00a0one survey<\/a>, one quarter of Americans have lost their jobs or watched their paychecks cut.\u00a0\u00a0Goldman Sachs predicts<\/a>\u00a0that the economy will shrink 34 percent in the second quarter, with unemployment leaping to 15 percent.<\/p>\n Until the Covid-19 economic shut-down, the poverty rate in the United States had dropped to its lowest in 17 years.\u00a0 What does that mean for public health?\u00a0\u00a0A 2011 Columbia University study<\/a>\u00a0funded by the National Institutes of Health estimated that 4.5 percent of all deaths in the United States are related to poverty.\u00a0\u00a0Over the last four years, 2.47 million Americans<\/a>\u00a0had been lifted out of that condition, meaning 111,000 fewer poverty-related deaths each year.<\/p>\n It\u2019s a good bet these gains have been completely wiped out, and it\u2019s anyone\u2019s guess how many tens of millions of Americans will have been pushed below the poverty line as governments destroy their livelihoods.\u00a0 It\u2019s also a good bet the resulting deaths won\u2019t get the same attention.<\/p>\n And that doesn\u2019t count an unknown number of Americans whose medical appointments have been postponed indefinitely while hospitals keep beds open for Covid-19 patients.\u00a0 How many of the\u00a01.8 million new cancers<\/a>\u00a0each year in the United States will go undetected for months because routine screenings and appointments have been postponed?\u00a0 How many heart, kidney, liver, and pulmonary illnesses will fester while people\u2019s lives are on hold?\u00a0 How many suicides or domestic homicides will occur as families watch their livelihoods evaporate before their eyes?\u00a0 How many drug and alcohol deaths can we expect as Americans stew in their homes under police-enforced indefinite home detention orders?\u00a0 How many new cases of obesity-related diabetes and heart disease will emerge as Americans are banished from outdoor recreation and instead spend their idle days within a few steps of the refrigerator?<\/p>\n I have participated in many discussions among top policymakers in Congress and the Administration over the last few weeks.\u00a0 Such considerations are rarely raised and always ignored.\u00a0 Instead, policymakers fixate on\u00a0\u00a0epidemiological models that have already been dramatically disproven by actual data.<\/p>\n On March 30, Drs. Deborah Birx and Anthony Fauci gave their\u00a0best-case projection<\/a>\u00a0that between 100,000 and 200,000 Americans will perish of Covid-19 \u201cif we do things almost perfectly.\u201d\u00a0 As appalling as their prediction seems, it is a far cry from the 200,000 to 1.7 million deaths the\u00a0CDC projected<\/a>\u00a0in the United States just a few weeks before.\u00a0 And even their down-sized predictions look increasingly exaggerated as we see actual data.<\/p>\n Sometimes the experts are just wrong.\u00a0 In 2014, the CDC projected<\/a>\u00a0up to 1.4 million infections from African Ebola.\u00a0\u00a0There were 28,000<\/a>.<\/p>\n Life is precious and every death is a tragedy.\u00a0 Yet last year,\u00a038,800 Americans<\/a>\u00a0died in automobile accidents and no one has suggested saving all those lives by forbidding people from driving \u2013 though surely we could.<\/p>\n