The United Nations warns that hundreds of thousands of children worldwide may die because of governments’ overreaction to the COVID-19 virus:
Hundreds of thousands of children could die this year due to the global economic downturn sparked by the coronavirus pandemic and tens of millions more could fall into extreme poverty as a result of the crisis, the United Nations warned on Thursday.
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Compared with adults, children infected with the coronavirus are less likely to have symptoms and more likely to have a mild illness, U.S. and Chinese studies have found.But the U.N. report warned that “economic hardship experienced by families as a result of the global economic downturn could result in an hundreds of thousands of additional child deaths in 2020, reversing the last 2 to 3 years of progress in reducing infant mortality within a single year.”
With businesses shut down and more than a billion people told to stay home to avoid spreading the virus, the International Monetary Fund has predicted the world would this year suffer its steepest downturn since the Great Depression of the 1930s.
The United Nations said an estimated 42 million to 66 million children could fall into extreme poverty as a result of the coronavirus crisis this year, adding to the estimated 386 million children already in extreme poverty in 2019.
It is not the virus that has caused economic collapse. The virus, so far, has killed somewhere between thirty and forty percent as many people, worldwide, as the average annual seasonal flu bug. But the annual flu bug doesn’t decimate the global economy. It is shutdown orders that have done that. Bear in mind that even in developing countries that have barely been hit by COVID-19, the shutdowns of advanced economies have devastating impact. This is due in part to declining orders for the raw materials on which most developing economies depend.
So: end the shutdown orders now. Do it for the children. If it saves just one life, it will be worth it. Remember?
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