Can we now create a death-rate model from these unjustifiable lockdowns?
NYTimes -
Latest projection: A deep recession and ballooning unemployment in Europe.
The European Union’s economy is set to shrink by 7.4 percent this year, investment is expected to collapse and unemployment rates, debts and deficits will balloon in the brutal aftermath of the coronavirus pandemic, the European Commission said Wednesday.
To put these figures in perspective, the European Union’s economy had been predicted to grow by 1.2 percent this year, and in its worst recession, in 2009 during the financial crisis, its economy shrank by 4.5 percent.
Predicting the breadth of a recession can be a moving target, the commission admitted, and things could end up being much worse.
“The danger of a deeper and more protracted recession is very real,” the head of the commission’s economic unit, Maarten Verwey, said in the forecast’s foreword. The commission issues these forecasts four times a year.
Italy and Spain, the two countries worst hit by the disease, will see their economies shrink by more than 9 percent each. Greece, which had started turning a corner after a decade of economic calamity, will suffer the most of the union’s 27 nations, according to the forecasts, losing 9.7 of its economic output this year.
And unemployment is expected to be rampant, averaging 9 percent across the bloc and reaching 19.9 percent in Greece, the European Commission said.
The bloc’s biggest economy, Germany, will also be hammered, and its economy is projected to shrink by 6.5 percent for the year. France, the bloc’s second-largest economy, is expected to contract by 8.5 percent this year.
www.nytimes.com/2020/04/22/world/africa/coronavirus-hunger-crisis.html
“This hunger crisis, experts say, is global and caused by a multitude of factors linked to the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing interruption of the economic order: the sudden loss in income for countless millions who were already living hand-to-mouth;...”