More than 1,000 people queued up to get free food parcels in Geneva, underscoring the impact of the coronavirus epidemic on the working poor and undocumented immigrants even in wealthy Switzerland.
“At the end of the month, my pockets are empty. We have to pay the bills, the insurance, everything,” said Ingrid Berala, a Geneva resident from Nicaragua who works part-time. “This is great, because there is food for a week, a week of relief [...] I don’t know for next week.”
In a nation of nearly 8.6 million, 660,000 people in Switzerland were poor in 2018, charity Caritas says.
More than 1.1 million people were at risk of poverty, which means they have less than 60% of the median income, which was 6,538 Swiss francs ($6,736) for a full-time job in 2018.
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