Pandemic desperation deepens
Added toll: Joblessness linked to 30,000 deaths
After eight years as a hotel telephone operator, Rodeo resident Felicia Carter was laid off in March when the pandemic struck. At first, unemployment benefits sustained her and the two granddaughters she is raising. But she hasn’t received a penny since December, when the state froze 1.4 million accounts as it struggled to combat fraud.
“It’s at the point where we can’t afford laundry, soap, toilet tissue, tampons, toothpaste,” she said. “Do they want us to go steal them? I can’t risk going to jail and losing my grandkids.”
The widespread unemployment wrought by the pandemic — it peaked in April at 14.7%, the
highest since the Great Depression — left millions of Americans desperate to keep food on the table and a roof over their heads. It also may have led to more than 30,231 excess deaths nationwide over the past year, on top of the nearly half a million people who died from the coronavirus, according to a UCSF study being published Thursday in the American Journal of Public Health.
“The number of deaths directly due to COVID19 are substantial and well documented,” said Ellicott Matthay, the study’s lead author and a postdoctoral scholar at the Center for Health and Community at UCSF. “There has been far less attention given to the indirect social and economic consequences of the pandemic, which also have consequences for health.”
Losing a job can lead to a range of health problems — from a lack of medical care and poor nutrition to mental illness and stress. Those pressures can exacerbate existing health conditions such as heart disease and result in premature death, research shows.
The UCSF authors used existing data on how joblessness increases mortality, called “hazard ratios,” and applied it to statistics on pandemicrelated unemployment to derive estimates. If anything, the numbers could be low, as the study only considered people who lost their jobs in March and April. Millions more Americans have filed new unemployment claims over the months since then.
The study also did not consider freelancers and selfemployed people, millions of whom were thrown out of work by the pandemic. Assuming that adding in gig workers meant unemployment was actually 26.5% rather than 14.7%, the mortality figures could have been 57,872, Matthay said.
The study offered ranges for different scenarios. In a bestcase scenario, the deaths attributable to pandemic unemployment could have been just 8,315, it said, while in a worstcase — assuming higher unemployment and higher rates of health impacts — deaths may have been as high as 201,968.
Jobloss mortality disproportionately hit groups already walloped by the virus — what the study called “an unjust double burden.”
While Black people make up 12% of the population, they accounted for 19% of unemploymentrelated deaths. People with a high school education or less represent 37% of the population but 72% of the deaths attributed to pandemic job losses. Men and people aged 45 to 64 were also disproportionately impacted. (The study looked only at workers ages 25 to 64.)
The disproportionate distribution of deaths stems from longstanding unjust social structures, Matthay said.
“Until we change those — income inequality, structural racism, unfair distribution of power and resources — we are likely to see the same disproportionate impacts manifest for a multitude of health outcome,” she said. “We need proactive public policies.”
Daniela Urban, executive director of the Center for Workers’ Rights in Sacramento, said she’s witnessed the impact of job loss on mental health among her clients.
“One reason it has been so difficult during the pandemic is that those who are seeking safetynet benefits and trying their best to comply with all the requests from (California’s Employment Development Department) still aren’t able to get benefits,” she said. “They feel a larger sense of desperation when they know there’s help there, they are reaching out for the help and they aren’t able to get it.”
After some clients discussed wishing to end their lives, her agency now has a protocol to connect people with suicide prevention services.
“We never had to have that before,” she said.