Children Under Five Dying from Economic ‘Side Effects’ of COVID-19 Pandemic

“Economic downturns in 129 of the world’s low- and middle-income countries due to COVID-19-related lockdowns, border closings and more may have killed hundreds of thousands of children under the age of five in the first year of the pandemic.

The findings, published today in the journal PLOS One, shine light on a hidden COVID-19 death toll – young children who die not from the disease, but from the disruptions in food and medicine deliveries, closed health clinics and delays in childhood immunizations that have resulted from precautions taken to reduce the spread of the virus. Nearly half of the excess deaths of children are estimated to have occurred in sub-Saharan Africa…

The model created by the researchers looked at additional deaths in 2020 to be expected in children under 5 with a range of recession rates: a 5 percent, 10 percent and 15 percent reduction in a country’s gross domestic product (GDP). In the most conservative case, a GDP per capita reduction of 5 percent, the researchers estimated that between 279,000 and 286,000 additional lives of children under 5 were lost due to indirect effects of COVID-related recessions in 2020. That translates to an additional 43,000 deaths in India and an extra 22,000 deaths in Nigeria compared to an average year.

At 10 percent and 15 percent, recessions would lead to higher losses of lives in children under 5, increasing to 585,802 and 911,026 additional deaths, respectively…

The International Monetary Fund estimates that the global economy shrank by 4.4 percent in 2020 compared with a contraction of just 0.1 percent in 2009, during the financial crisis known as the Great Recession. The economic downturns of 2020 are projected to reverse a sustained trend of decline in global poverty, with an expected 42 to 66 million additional children falling into extreme poverty as a result.”