WASHINGTON - Poverty in the United States has risen sharply in recent months amid the coronavirus pandemic, with 7.8 million Americans falling into poverty since the summer, according to new data released this month.In November, the poverty rate spiked to 11.7%, an increase of 2.4 percentage points since June.
The figures were released Dec. 15 as part of a study by researchers at the University of Chicago, the University of Notre Dame and Zhejiang University in China.The poverty rate in the U.S.
is low compared to figures in previous decades.But 2020 had the biggest increase in poverty in a single year since the government began tracking these figures in the 1960s, study authors James X.