(ANSA) - ROME, OCTOBER 16 - In 2020, Caritas in Italy supported a total of 1.9 million people, an average of 286 individuals for each of the 6,780 services managed by the same circuit of diocesan and parish Caritas. Of the people supported in the year of spread of Covid19, almost half, 44%, referred to the Caritas network for the first time. The regions with the highest incidence of "new poor" include Valle d'Aosta (61.1%) Campania (57.0), Lazio (52.9), Sardinia (51.5%) and Trentino Alto Adige (50.8%). For young adults aged between 18 and 34, the new forms of poverty account for 57.7%.
Almost 30 percent of the 'new poor', those linked to the pandemic who had never turned to Caritas before 2020,continued to need help in this 2021 as well.
"Of the new poor followed in 2020, whose requests for help we can imagine are strongly correlated to the socio-health crisis linked to the pandemic, over two thirds (exactly 70.3%) have no longer made use of the Caritas services. which lends itself to an ambivalent interpretation. On the one hand it can be taken as a signal of despair and a fresh start; at the same time, however - underlines the Caritas dossier 'Beyond the obstacle' - we cannot fail to care and worry about those 29.7% of people who even today in 2021 they continue to 'not make it' and risk their condition of need becoming ossified in some way ".
(HANDLE).