Are we killing millions to save thousands?

It’s time public health leaders acknowledge they’re sentencing many to early graves.

The negative impact of pandemic lockdowns and forced unemployment are not limited to mental health. The increase in poverty resulting from these policies can be expected to strike years, even decades, off the lives of everyone affected.

But, because those early deaths may not happen for decades, we are minimizing the very real sacrifice they represent for potentially millions of Canadians. It’s far too easy for politicians and public health officials to ignore these deaths because they’re not likely to happen during their time in office.

It’s time to bring the future suffering and deaths of these Canadians – whose lives are arguably more valuable than those of our frail and vulnerable seniors – into our calculations.

In 2011, the Hamilton Spectator published a series of reports called “Code Red: Explaining average age of death in Hamilton” based on research conducted at McMaster University.

The research found a significant difference in average age of death (life expectancy) depending on where you lived. Hamiltonians living in the city’s richest neighbourhoods could expect to live almost 21 years longer than those living in its poorest boroughs.[i]

This data supported the broadly-accepted correlation between wealth and health.[ii] Generally, the poorer you are – the more health problems you have, the lower the quality of healthcare you receive, and the earlier you die.

The upshot: People in poverty die as much as two decades younger than people who live without financial stressors.

So, when government makes deliberate policy decisions that push people en masse into poverty, the evidence suggests those people will live shorter lives as a result.

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, governments across Canada implemented a range of restrictions on commerce, closures of workplaces and widespread lockdowns that forced millions of Canadians out of work. Employment, of course, is the key determinant in poverty.

Without work, people lose their income. They are forced to consume their savings at a faster rate, cannot afford to pay their bills, don’t eat as healthily, skip prescription refills, experience higher levels of stress, etc. Even with government supports such as the Canada Emergency Response Benefit (CERB), the vast majority of Canadians receiving these benefits did not get as much income as they had lost.

While the subsidies allowed many to keep eating and feeding their kids, many individuals and families burned through their savings and fell behind on rents and mortgage payments – which may have been deferred, but were not forgiven. Those debts have continued to accumulate at the same time these affected families have not been working. They have been pushed towards or into poverty.

Even if affected individuals are able to go back to work at the end of the government restrictions, or find similar employment elsewhere, they are unlikely to ever recoup the months of lost income while they were in forced unemployment. But, the debts will remain and continue to grow as next year’s income increasingly must be used to pay last year’s rent. 

Canadians will never fully recover from up to a year or more of lost income.

As a result, most of these families – parents and children – will live the rest of their lives with fewer economic benefits and opportunities. They will, at best,  live closer to poverty. Many will spend the rest of their lives impoverished. As a result, they will experience poorer health outcomes and are likely to die much earlier than they otherwise would have. Poverty will steal years – even decades – from their lives.

While government implemented lockdowns and forced millions into unemployment as part of a bona fide effort to save thousands of lives from a deadly virus, the cost of these preventive measures is likely to be the loss of decades of life from millions of Canadians pushed into poverty.

The tradeoff gets even worse when you consider that most people dying from COVID-19 are over 80 and have few years of life remaining – even without the virus.

Life expectancy at birth in Canada is 82.1 years.[iii] Having already beaten the odds, each octogenarian saved by lockdowns may live up to another 9 years of life according to Statistics Canada.[iv]

Everyone forced into poverty can reasonably be expected to lose up to 20 years of life. You’d have to save at least two 80-plus seniors for every Canadian who lost their jobs during the pandemic – just to break even. That’s simply not happening.

To date, some 20,000 Canadians have died from COVID-19. Seventy percent of them over 80-years old.[v] Meanwhile, 8.9 million Canadians received the CERB benefit because they lost their incomes.[vi] Children in those families will also have to live their lives in poverty as a result.

The math simply doesn’t work.

We may well be killing millions of Canadians decades earlier – in order to save a few months or years of life for thousands of seniors who have already lived longer than most.

It’s time our political and public health leaders at least had the decency to acknowledge they’re sentencing many Canadians to early graves.

SOURCES:

[i] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC5690439/

[ii] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/n1/pub/82-624-x/2011001/article/11427-eng.htm

[iii] https://yourhealthsystem.cihi.ca/hsp/inbrief?lang=en#!/indicators/011/life-expectancy-at-birth/;mapC1;mapLevel2;/

[iv] https://www150.statcan.gc.ca/t1/tbl1/en/tv.action?pid=1310013401[v]https://health-infobase.canada.ca/covid-19/epidemiological-summary-covid-19-cases.html

[vi] https://www.canada.ca/en/services/benefits/ei/claims-report.html