The health crisis of Covid-19 is compounded by the crisis of poverty, due to government ineptitude.

It’s become commonplace to refer to the “dark winter” that this Covid-bedeviled country is about to experience. That is an understatement.

First, there’s the catastrophic public health situation, presided over by a zombie Trump administration that can’t even make the pretense of caring about the alarming daily death toll.

The public health catastrophe that this cruel and inept administration has inflicted is, however, not the only unfolding disaster. It is being magnified by a cascading poverty crisis as well. This isn’t a crisis of the markets – in fact, the stock market, buoyed by the prospect of widespread vaccine distribution over the coming months, is in record territory. Instead, it is a crisis disproportionately borne by lower-income Americans who live paycheck to paycheck.

Already, after nine months of Covid-related economic restrictions and job market contractions, those at the bottom of America’s economic pyramid are suffering increased hunger, diminished job prospects, less reliable access to health care and a growing vulnerability to homelessness.

Without a credible federal strategy to mitigate the spread of the disease, states are having to improvise. In California, Gov. Gavin Newsom – who sacrificed much of his credibility on pandemic response last month by going to a lobbyist’s soiree at the French Laundry even as he urged Californians not to go out to eat – announced last week that the state would be divided into five regions. If the spare ICU-bed capacity in a region falls below 15 percent, then within two days the entire region will have to go into lockdown for a minimum of three weeks. Most of California is already in lockdown.

Some of the measures, such as the shuttering of bars, are unpleasant but hard to argue against from a public health perspective. But others seem arbitrary, to say the least, smacking more of panic than carefully thought-through public policy. Why, for example, should a restaurateur who has spent tens of thousands of dollars retrofitting his or her establishment to meet previous safety mandates for outdoor dining suddenly have to shut down because hundreds of miles away Covid rates are spiking?

California’s new diktats sound tough – they present an image of an in-charge governor – but in reality they are unlikely to significantly lower transmission rates.

With the president AWOL and his coronavirus task force dysfunctional, with Congress bickering over a relief package, many states are doing what they had to do back in March: shutting down again. But this time around, they are asking their low-income residents and small-business owners to take a massive economic hit, with precious little prospect of adequate federal relief to mitigate the hurt.

Newsom is almost certainly gambling that Congress will blink and pass a comprehensive relief package. But if that’s the strategy, it’s a hell of a gamble. There’s nothing in Congress’ recent track record to suggest a modicum of concern for those most in need. This dark winter is off to a brutally early start.

SASHA ABRAMSKY writes regularly for The Nation.