The coronavirus recession is over, if you ask the billionaires of the world. According to a report released Monday by Oxfam, the top 1,000 billionaires collectively lost about 30% of their wealth when COVID-19 restrictions stalled global economies in March. By the end of November, theyd made it all back.

For the worlds richest, it took less than 10 months to recover the financial losses caused by the pandemic. For the worlds poorest, the report estimated, it will take more than 10 years.

While a wealthy minority have amassed vast fortunes before and during the pandemic, the majority of the worlds population have been struggling to survive on poverty wages and without access to decent health care or education, Paul OBrien, vice president of Oxfam America, told HuffPost. Todays levels of extreme wealth concentration are not sustainable. Billionaires are a sign of economic sickness, not health. They are the symptom of a broken economy.

The pandemic threatens to undo the progress of more than two decades of declining global poverty . The World Bank has estimated that more than 200 million people may sink into poverty as a result of COVID-19s economic effects in low-income countries and in rich ones, including the United States. Startlingly, the Oxfam report found that the cost to prevent people from falling into a life lived on less than $5.50 a day would be far less than the profits made by the worlds wealthiest during the coronavirus crisis.

According to Oxfams calculation based on poverty data from the World Bank and wealth data from Credit Suisse and the Forbes Billionaires list the worlds 10 richest people, including Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos and Tesla founder Elon Musk, added $540 billion to their collective net worth in the last three quarters of 2020. If they handed over around $80 billion, they could keep those imperiled millions above the poverty line for a year while economies rebuild.

With the remainder of their 2020 profits, these 10 billionaires could pay for both rounds of the COVID-19 vaccine for every person on Earth and still come out ahead. (Oxfam used World Health Organization data to estimate a cost of around $9 per dose, a total expenditure of $141.2 billion for the worlds 7.8 billion inhabitants.)

Oxfam timed the release of the report to coincide with the start of the annual World Economic Forums Davos meeting (virtual this year), where industry and government leaders convene to address critical issues.

The report paints a stark portrait of the divide between CEOs at the top and laborers at the bottom, many of whom have continued to work in dangerous circumstances, without the option to stay home to avoid the virus.

Raj Sisodia, a business professor at Babson College and co-founder of the Conscious Capitalism movement, likened standard corporate structure to Indias caste system. At the top: generously paid professional, college-educated people with benefits and stock options, supported by the chew them up and spit them out workforce people locked into low-paying hourly jobs, without health care, paid leave or retirement benefits.

That needs to change, Sisodia said. There has to be a modest ratio between pay at the top and pay the bottom.

Thats not currently the case. In the last 40 years, executive pay has increased by 1,000% while worker pay has budged less than 12%.