Another day, another round of lockdowns and more economic hardships.
Starting yesterday, India imposed a lockdown on its capital, New Delhi, as COVID cases spiked in the city of 29 million people.
The shelter-in-place dictates require people to not leave their homes, and “non-essential” businesses, including factories, must close for at least a week.
PUBLISHER’S NOTE: As we have continually noted, and as illustrated by India’s new one-week lockdown order, the COVID rules being imposed on the general public by politicians and bureaucrats lack a scintilla of scientific data to support them. For example, why not six days, 15 days, or 19 days?
Does COVID vanish in exactly one week?
And does the virus stay away from “essential” businesses but attack “non-essential” ones?
As we reported when the COVID War was launched in March 2020, India’s Prime Minister Narendra Modi ordered a nationwide clampdown on public activity for at least three weeks: “To save India, and every Indian, there will be a total ban on venturing out of your homes. Every state, every union territory, every district, every village and every locality is being put under a lockdown.”
Pain and Suffering
The Pew Research Center released a report that estimates more than 30 million people in India were driven out of the middle class amid the COVID-19 outbreak, which is a significant percentage of the 54 million around the globe now in poverty.
Pew considers middle-class households as those that earn between $10 to $50 a day. Before the COVID War was launched, nearly 100 million in the country of nearly 1.4 billion fit that category. The middle class has now shrunk to about 65 million.
As we have been reporting in the Trends Journal, before the coronavirus, India had several quarters of rapidly slowing economic growth. And long before the virus, millions were suffering from a lack of basic living conditions and were taking to the streets. Thus, a terrible situation will become much worse with the new lockdowns and possibly more to follow.
The IMF predicted that the global economy in 2024 will be up to 3 percent smaller due to the virus, according to Bloomberg. The poorest countries will be most affected because they cannot “spend their way to recovery.”
The Trends Journal has reported extensively on the impact the COVID-19 outbreak has had on poverty levels around the globe while the billionaire class has never been richer.
On 23 March, in our article titled, “$4 TRILLION FOR BILLIONAIRES AS MIDDLE CLASS SINKS,” we reported the World Bank announced for the first time since the 1990s that the global middle class decreased.
Rakesh Kochhar, the author of the study, said the official count does not truly reflect the total impact and said 62 million people considered “high income” saw their income drop to the middle tier group, the report said.
According to Oxfam, billionaires saw their wealth increase by some $4 trillion between 18 March and 31 December:
“The increase in the wealth of the 10 richest billionaires since the crisis began is more than enough to prevent anyone on Earth from falling into poverty because of the virus and to pay for a COVID-19 vaccine for all.”
TRENDPOST: To date, there are nearly 180,000 people in India, a country of 1.4 billion, who died from the virus over a year, or 0.0128 percent of its population.
This compares to the U.S., where 582,000 died of the virus since last March, in a nation of 332.5 million… or 0.175 percent of the population.
Yet, the Indian government and the media sell fear and hysteria to a nation where, according to the U.N., some 28 percent of the population lived in poverty in 2019… a year before the COVID War began! And more than one-third of the world’s malnourished children live in India.
Also ignored by the media is the fact that some 2.3 million die each year from air pollution, according to Global Alliance on Health and Pollution.
Despite almost 200,000 air pollution-related deaths per year in America, these factual statistics are ignored by Presstitutes and politicians.
It should also be noted, unlike the COVID death numbers that are now being added up year after year, the deaths from pesticides, air pollution, chemicals, malnutrition, etc., are only reported annually.
TRENDPOST: At the start of the year, India’s currency was an emerging market leader. But with pushes to lock down the nation increasing, its rupee has dropped 3 percent against the dollar since the beginning of April. According to Bloomberg, the rupee has fallen the hardest among a basket of two dozen emerging market currencies, which includes Russia’s ruble and Turkey’s lira.
