Switzerland
Coronavirus crisis exacerbates poverty Caritas’ largest relief effort in Switzerland Since the start of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020, Caritas has been there for people who have fallen on hard times. Until the end of 2020, Caritas Switzerland and the 16 Regional Caritas Organisations supported more than 100,000 people in need with direct payments, social counselling and targeted projects. This is Caritas’ largest-ever relief effort in Switzerland. In Geneva in spring, thousands of people queued for hours to receive a free food parcel. The images published by the media in Switzerland and abroad shook the people in Switzerland. The pictures made visible what had been going on in silence: The coronavirus crisis deprives people of their income, and as a result, they are plunged into an existential crisis from one day to the next. Some families lost their extra earnings from a second job which had enabled them to just about make ends meet. Others were on short-time work. The 80 per cent compensation was not enough for people in the lowwage sector, so that many of those affected tried to survive by using their hard-earned savings, until these were used up and they needed more help. People who were trying to build a livelihood through self-employment suddenly had no orders coming in but could not count on assistance from the public sector.
Mélanie Dieguez, a social worker at Caritas Vaud, experienced the direct consequences first hand: ‘Sometimes we received up to 50 calls a day on our specially installed hotline’, she recalls as she looks back to the first wave of coronavirus. ‘We had many people on the line who had lost their already small income from one day to the next. They could no longer pay their rent and could only buy the most essential food items.’ The requests to Caritas for support and advice remained at a high level and increased again with the start of the second wave and the associated restrictions towards the end of the year. Lorenz Bertsch, head of the debt counselling service St. Gallen-Appenzell, described the situation at the end of the year to Radio SRF as follows: ‘It is becoming clear now that many people only just managed to get by since the lockdown in the spring. They are in arrears or have agreed to pay in instalments. First and fore-
Ruth Mauron (56) lost a large proportion of her income due to the lockdown in spring. Her budget was already very tight before that, and now it can’t be stretched any further. She turned to Caritas St. Gallen, who helped her with shopping vouchers for the Caritas Market.
