“Some 4.5 million Californians have filed for unemployment since mid-March and this week it was announced the unemployment fund is out of money and has to borrow from the federal government. The figures alone are distressing. Add this to that the vast mental and physical cost of the stress to families and strain of job loss.
Drs. Sandro Galea and Nason Maani write in Scientific American: “The true costs of the COVID-19 pandemic….Unemployment has long been associated with significantly increased risk of death in general….The risk of heart disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S. at almost 650,000 deaths per year, has been shown to increase by 15-30 percent in men (and women) unemployed for 90 days.”