The Forces COVID Can’t Stop
THE DAY BEFORE this issue of Fortune went to press, the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation released its 2020 Goalkeepers Report: the philanthropy’s latest scorecard on the global war on poverty and disease. In a sea of disappointing numbers—and line charts bending the wrong way—one data point stands out as particularly alarming: The COVID-19 pandemic has thrust an additional 37 million people around the world into extreme poverty. In case you’re wondering, the World Bank defines that threshold as living on less than $1.90 a day. Those looking for a culprit here can blame a spiky virus around 100 nanometers in diameter. Until the SARS-CoV-2 pathogen spread around the world, we had been steadily making progress in the bulk of the United Nations’ Sustainable Development Goals. But the pandemic—and the economic…