US coronavirus crisis will cause massive poverty, permanent business closures: Expert

The still-exploding coronavirus pandemic in the United States will increase the country’s suicide rate and domestic violence, as well as causing massive poverty and permanent business closures, says an American political commentator.

“What we're hearing about here I think are a couple of things. One being the increase in suicides, but the other being an increase in domestic violence as people are cooped up in close quarters,” said Charles Dunaway, a political analyst from the US state of Oregon.

The system here in the West, everything is market-driven and so it's not clear whether jobs will return when the virus threat subsides,” Dunaway told Press TV in a phone interview on Saturday.

Public health specialists in the US are warning that mass shutdowns of businesses and schools to enforce social distancing measures over the coronavirus outbreak will lead to thousands of deaths and suicides that are unrelated to the disease itself.

The US and other countries have taken sweeping suppression steps to combat the coronavirus that could last for months or more, and the longer the suppression lasts, the worse the unintended outcomes will be, Reuters said in a report, citing interviews with researchers.

During the 2007-2009 economic recession, the bleak job market triggered a surge in suicide rates in the United States and Europe, claiming the lives of 10,000 more people than prior to the downturn, researchers found.

A surge of unemployment in 1982 also cut the life spans of Americans by a collective two to three million years. This time, such effects could be even deeper in the weeks, months and years ahead if, as many business and political leaders are warning, the economy crashes and unemployment skyrockets to historic levels.

Researchers warn COVID-19 lockdown will cause thousands of deaths in US

US health experts warn that mass shutdowns of businesses and schools over the coronavirus outbreak will lead to thousands of deaths and suicides unrelated to the disease itself.

“The government has so far just come up with what $1,200 per person and that's it. That's not per person per month. That's all together….. whereas of course there's $4.5 trillion to be passed out to corporations andn banks to help them weather the crisis,” Dunaway said.

“But this is going to what this is going to end up with at the end of this is a lot of people financially destitute, possibly homeless. A lot of people, a lot of small businesses, the mom and pop stores and restaurants and so forth are going to be out of business,” he added.

In the United States and Europe, suicide rates rise about 1 percent for every one percentage point increase in unemployment, according to research published by Oxford University.

Already, there are reports that isolation measures in the US and Europe are triggering more domestic violence in some areas.

Trapped at home with their abusers, some domestic violence victims in the US are already suffering more frequent and extreme violence, Katie Ray-Jones, the chief executive officer of the National Domestic Violence Hotline, told Reuters.

Domestic violence programs across the US have cited increases in calls for help, Reuters said in its report. “There are special populations that are going to have impacts that go way beyond COVID-19,” said Ray-Jones, citing domestic violence victims as one.

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