Although there have been some differences in how national governments across the world have chosen to respond to the corona pandemic, the general trend among large countries has been to restrict the transmission of the disease by prohibiting markets to exist and paying people to stay home from work through a variety of economic programs. The shutting down of markets here not only reduces our own well-being in the western world but also, perhaps more importantly, does tremendous harm to people living at the margin in poor countries. Furthermore, in many cases, the public programs during the coronavirus have been funded by borrowing money from the future and thus increasing the current money supply. This has led to major inflation problems across the world, which of course hurts the people at the margin the most. Public policies in response to the coronavirus have and will continue to cause hundreds of millions of cases of poverty globally, which raises the question: was it all worth it?

Negative events after the pandemic, such as the rise of global extreme poverty, are usually referred to as being caused by the coronavirus. However, this is misleading in most cases. It is the public policies that caused the projection in the figure above to spike, not the virus itself. The scale is not to be underestimated, where between 50 to 100 million additional people are expected by the World Bank to have gone into extreme poverty. The jump in extreme poverty, perfectly correlating with the time when most countries initiated their responses to the virus, also has a long-term impact. We are not there yet, but as the future brings us further to the right on the x-axis above, there will continuously be a gap between the line of extreme poverty with and without a history with covid policies. This means that, if accounting for sufficiently many years ahead of time, the present value of the covid policies is many hundreds of millions of total years lived by people in extreme poverty conditions.

It is not a controversial suggestion to say that banning working results in more poverty, it was even predicted in the initial stages of the pandemic. According to the United Nations, extreme poverty has been constantly reducing during the 21st century up until 2018. The group of 650 million people living in extreme poverty before the pandemic was predicted by the UN to increase by 150 million people due to policies regarding the coronavirus. This figure seems to be pretty accurate. According to the World Data Lab, the following graph represents the development of extreme poverty since 2016. One can only imagine how low we would have reached had we been able to keep going as we did, and one can easily see that hundreds of millions of additional people may have been put into extreme poverty due to the policies to restrict the transmission of the coronavirus. 

How do these figures of extreme poverty relate to the number of people severely affected by the coronavirus? The World Health Organization says that 660 million people have gotten infected by the virus, while 6,7 million people have tragically died due to the virus. The question then becomes how many people would have died had the antitransmission policies not existed. Perhaps a couple of million people got saved due to the restrictions, and every saved life is of course amazing. 

Unfortunately, the gain on one end may be outweighed by the losses on the other. It is of course impossible to value human lives against each other, but had we realized the enormous scale of the harm extreme poverty does to hundreds of millions of people, perhaps we would reassess some of the restrictive policies during the pandemic. The lives saved among the western population through corona policies may distort us into believing they are worth it, but for one concerned with minimizing the amount of human pain globally, I think many policies ended up having a clear negative net effect on human well-being.