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Official data shows that more than 14 million people in the UK are classed as living in poverty, or nearly one-quarter of the population.

Some 4.2 million children are poor, or around 30 % of the total, government figures show.

The situation is worsening with Britons losing jobs en masse as the UK experiences lockdown.

“The risk of poverty is particularly high for workers in sectors like hospitality and retail where people are more likely to be on low wages and in insecure work,” said Dave Innes, head of economics at the Joseph Rowntree Foundation, an organization for social change.

Over the past fortnight, almost one million adults in the UK have applied for Universal Credit, the government’s main form of state aid.

That is nearly 10 times the level in an average two-week period.

“If families who were earning decent wages before the pandemic move on to the Universal Credit, they will very suddenly find themselves living in poverty,” said Louisa McGeehan, a director at Child Poverty Action Group UK.

As for families who were already classed as living in poverty prior to the outbreak and whose children are stuck at home owing to schools being shut the demands of online education add to the problem, she said.

McGeehan noted that “a lot of schools are putting lessons on the Internet for children to do at home.

“If those children are in households who don’t have Internet or don’t have a computer, they are not able to do that learning.”

McGeehan told AFP: “We have a nation where a child poverty crisis has been amplified by the impact of coronavirus.”

But unlike the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis when the government slashed public spending, COVID-19 has sparked huge state stimulus, including a boost to Universal Credit.

An adult receiving the benefit who is aged over 25 will receive £1,000 ($1,239, 1,137 euros) extra per year.

However, an increase in the monthly amount to £400 remains far below the level of £600 considered sufficient for a single-person household to avoid “poverty” in the UK.

“Economically we know there is very likely to be a big recession and it’s difficult to recover quickly from a big recession,“ said Innes.

“We know that recessions tend to hit people in poverty or in risk of poverty hardest,“ he told AFP.

Meanwhile, food banks, which help feed the most vulnerable people including the homeless, are seeing fewer donations amid fallout from the coronavirus.

The Trussell Trust, which has a national network of 1,200 food banks, said it faced an “unprecedented challenge”.

The government is however still providing children who ordinarily received free school meals with lunches.

“In my own school, we provide packed lunch that kids can come and pick up,“ said teacher Amanda Martin, who is also president of the National Education Union.

But she added: “In the short term, there is a real worry that some of these people that would be in school, that would be warm and safe and being fed, aren’t.”

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Speaking at a cabinet meeting on Sunday, Rouhani added, “It is not like we say that in a week or 10 days there would be no coronavirus in Iran and the world,” IRNA reported.

He said the coronavirus has come, entered the society and is here, noting that, “We are required to prepare the society for a kind of confrontation with it.”

Commenting on his video conference with Iranian medical experts and specialists on Saturday, the president said, “I asked them whether we are past the peak of the coronavirus contagion in the country, and they said in some provinces, yes, but in some others, this cannot be said for certain. Some said we should wait until the end of the New Year holidays (April 3) to be able to assess the country’s situation.”

He noted that all of them agreed that the coronavirus spread was a surprising issue for the world and that no medical authority predicted that almost all countries would, one day, be grappling with such an invasive and contagious disease, capable of infecting such a large number of people in such a short time.

Rouhani added the experts said a similar virus had attacked the world 140 years ago, but nothing like that had happened up to now.

He said the experts and specialists noted that coronavirus is like the seasonal flu that comes and goes and reaches a peak at a certain time of the year. “Thus we are required to prepare ourselves for learning how to continue our life under the circumstances where the virus is still in the society until a vaccine or effective cure would be developed, which is not the case at present.”

Therefore, Rouhani, said, efforts are required to prevent a peak in the spread of the virus in a particular province or city lest the health system would experience severe difficulty and anxiety.

“We are required to manage the situation in such a way to enable our health system to treat patients and thus help gradually overcome the crisis.”

He said perhaps a large number of the experts stressed that the government should continue enforcement of the restrictions for another week, noting that the move would boost confidence about a better resumption of activities in the society.

On Friday, the Iranian government began implementing a social-distancing plan to contain the coronavirus spread and announced that it will continue until April 8. Under the scheme, the government banned unnecessary intercity and intracity travels, closed inessential businesses and commercial centers and imposed a public lockdown.

Rouhani added the resumption of activities does not mean that the conditions will return to normal and the society can stop complying with the hygiene protocols.

“We are required to continue this new lifestyle which includes refraining from shaking hands, keeping a certain distance from each other, promoting the use of telephone, cyberspace and the Internet. Our life has become electronic and this has to continue for a while.”

The president stressed that the disease may help create opportunities for progress in certain fields, such as promoting the use of the cyberspace and online businesses in the country.

He said the experts told him that the government’s efforts to fight coronavirus have been acceptable and effective and called for special investments to develop a vaccine for the disease in the country.

Rouhani stressed that the National Headquarters for Managing and Fighting Coronavirus has, up to now, made no decision without discussing it in expert committees first.

The president added in addition to protecting the public health, boosting domestic production is also an important issue for the government as people have a number of basic needs that must be met.

He described as very important ensuring the security of the society, saying Iran’s Armed Forces and police are constantly working to this end.

Warning against sparking any political, partisan or racial disputes, Rouhani said the coronavirus spread is a global issue and “we want to resolve it successfully”.

He called on his government and people to strengthen their confidence in each other and do their best to become closer to one another in order to achieve better results.

The president said according to a report by Health Minister Saeid Namaki, Iran has an acceptable place in the global ranking in terms of fighting the coronavirus spread and the number of the recovered patients.

He noted, “The health minister said that, in general, this week the situation of the country had been better compared to the previous one.

“Despite being under US unilateral sanctions, we have been able to resist well against the virus.”

In May 2018, President Donald Trump pulled the US out of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), ‎signed between Iran and the P5+1 in July 2015, and reimposed Washington’s unilateral sanctions on ‎Tehran. The sanctions have hindered, among many other things, the delivery of international humanitarian ‎aid, drugs, and medical equipment to Iran, particularly, now that the country is fighting against the ‎coronavirus. ‎

He stressed, “We are required to be ready for the post-coronavirus period.”

The president appreciated efforts by the country’s physicians, nurses and medical staff, saying the Iranian government uses all its capacities to fully support those who are fighting coronavirus at the forefront of the domestic health sector, as people’s health is the most important issues of the country.

The coronavirus, which causes a respiratory disease, emerged in the central Chinese city of Wuhan in ‎Hubei Province late last year and is currently affecting a large number of countries and territories across ‎the globe. It has infected and killed people in a large number of countries. ‎

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Overlapping travel bans and lockdowns have hammered businesses and led to millions of job losses, punctuated by a spike in US unemployment claims to more than three million this week and a warning of a deep recession this year in trade bellwether Singapore.

“It is now clear that we have entered a recession as bad or worse than in 2009,” Kristalina Georgieva, managing director of the IMF, said Friday. Rising bankruptcies and layoffs could undermine any recovery and do long-lasting damage to the world economy, she said, The Wall Street Journal reported.

The risks have added urgency for countries around the world to extend relief packages to ease financial distress.

US President Donald Trump on Friday signed a $2 trillion stimulus plan, the largest economic relief package in history.

With the pneumonia-causing virus swiftly spreading across the US and Europe, after it was first detected in central China three months ago, governments around the world have ramped up efforts to limit people’s movement and began imposing wide-ranging closures on businesses, restaurants, and schools domestically in recent weeks.

Increasingly strict travel bans set up by large countries including the US and China have put a dent in global commerce, complicating efforts to reignite growth.

Cancellations of major events continued to pile up. The organizer of the Shangri-La Dialogue, a high-level regional security forum in Singapore, has canceled the gathering originally scheduled for June.

The US added more than 15,000 cases of the COVID-19 disease, pushing the total past 104,000 on Saturday, with a surge of cases in New York and increased testing. The growth outstripped that of Italy and China, the countries with the second and third most infections, where confirmed cases stayed around 86,000 and 81,000 respectively, according to data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

As a result, the number of confirmed infections globally has more than doubled over the past week to more than 600,000. The death toll from the pathogen rose to more than 27,000 on Saturday, with roughly one-third of the fatalities in Italy, data from Johns Hopkins showed.

The IMF warned that low-income countries will be hit particularly hard given a combination of a health crisis, a sudden reversal of capital flows and in some cases a plunge in commodity prices. It estimated that at least $2.5 trillion is needed to contain economic contraction for emerging markets.

The Chinese government is also wrestling with the economic blow from the SARS-like virus, first from a prolonged halt in domestic business activities and now from weaker consumer sentiment and shrinking export demand as the coronavirus engulfs Europe and the US.

On Friday, the country’s top decision-making body said the government plans to boost spending by increasing its fiscal deficit this year, as well as speed up issuance of treasury bonds and so-called local government special-purpose bonds to support funding of infrastructure projects, as part of the stimulus measures to curtail economic impact from the pandemic.

“The fiscal policy needs to be more proactive, and the prudent monetary policy needs to be more flexible,” said a statement from Friday’s meeting of the Politburo Standing Committee, chaired by President Xi Jinping. The government also called for a gradual reopening of shopping malls and markets to boost consumer spending.

Lu Ting, an economist with Nomura, estimated that, over the second and possibly third quarters, China’s exports could contract by a total of 30% from a year earlier, wiping out 18 million jobs, or about a third of those tied to trade. To counter the negative impact from the outbreak, Beijing is likely to cut its benchmark deposit rate as well as raise the fiscal deficit target to 3.5% of GDP, up from 2.8% in 2019, he wrote in a research note on Saturday.

China’s National Health Commission reported 54 new infections Friday, saying all were imported from abroad, bringing the total to 81,394.

Other countries in Asia continue to tighten rules on social distancing.

Hong Kong banned public gatherings of four or more people beginning midnight Sunday, with those violating the rules facing fines of more than $3,000 and six months in jail. Singapore said it would fine people who violate its social distancing rules up to about $7,000.

Australia said it will quarantine citizens returning from overseas in hotels for 14 days beginning midnight Saturday. The effort will be overseen by the army and police, reflecting concerns that some people returning from abroad weren’t complying with self-isolation rules. The country’s total confirmed cases stood at 3,378, as of Saturday morning, Australia’s health department said.

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“Stability in forex market, stock exchange market, the growth in foreign trade and domestic production, and exports surplus besides reduction of our reliance on oil revenues are all among the positive signs that Iran is experiencing,” he added.

Rabeie also informed that the current MAPNA Group’s Managing Director Abbas Aliabadi is to be appointed as the new managing director of the giant Iranian car manufacturing company Iran Khodro (IKCO).

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Head of Islamic Revolution Mostazafan Foundation Mohammad Saeedikia revealed the allocation of 15 billion rials worth of credit to one of the deprived cities in Sistan and Baluchestan province.

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