This summer I got the chance to go back to California after five years. Before going, I was curious how different the state was since the last time I went and wanted to see how COVID impacted California. To my surprise, California was pretty much exactly how I remembered it, and the only change was the extent of poverty I saw. I realized many people had lost their jobs due to the COVID-19 Pandemic. One of the times I witnessed poverty was when my mom and I went to a restaurant in Santa Monica and saw a homeless man pulling out food from the trash can close to where we were sitting I remember wondering why nobody else at the restaurant seemed to be bothered by it. To me, seeing a homeless person so close to me felt so strange and so rare. Looking back at this moment, I now understand why nobody else seemed to care, and that was because they were used to it.
I’ve lived in Singapore for 11 years, and seeing poverty here would be considered an unusual encounter. The US has the second-highest rate of poverty among rich countries, while Singapore currently ranks the 26th most income disparate. COVID 19 impacted poverty in the US harder than in Singapore, as unemployment soared in the US causing their economy to suffer. While Singapore’s economy did suffer like most countries during the pandemic, the government was able to control this by introducing incentives and putting money into the economy.
In order to understand how Singapore did a better job of recovering from the pandemic versus other countries like the US, I decided to research more.
I found that the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) which is a measure of the value of the goods and services made in a country and is an indicator of the economic health of a country is an easy way to understand how well a country did during a period.
The US economy which had been on a record growth until 2019, experienced two consecutive periods of Gross Domestic Product (GDP) decline during COVID and also recorded its highest drop of 9.1% in its GDP in the second quarter of 2020 which has not happened since 1941. This shows that the impact of COVID 19 on the US economy was severe.
The US also lost 9.6 million jobs due to COVID as compared to 2.6 million job losses in the European Union (EU) which has a larger population of 100 million people compared to the US.
It is also estimated that around 24 million Americans experienced hunger and 6 million feared being evicted from their homes.
On the other hand, Singapore’s recovery from COVID-19 was more rapid as its GDP grew to 7.6% in 2021 compared to a decline of 4.14% in 2020. Whilst Singapore also saw a significant increase in job losses to 196,400 as compared to its population of around 5.5 million, the recovery was much quicker due to the effective vaccination program of the government that resulted in almost 92% of the population being vaccinated compared to 67% of the US population. This allowed the government to quickly reopen the economy to allow foreign visitors, tourists to travel to promote tourism and also to further popularize Singapore as an important country in Asia for business.
This demonstrates that strong government controls and a higher vaccination rate is important to reduce the impact of a pandemic on an economy that results in job losses, poverty and homelessness.
matcha for the mind 