UN officials are deeply concerned that as the pandemic recedes in Europe, the impacts of the virus and of the global recession on the world’s poorest are already being forgotten.
The West’s shortsighted response to the impact of Covid-19 could result in 640 million people being infected and 1.7 million killed in the world’s poorest countries, the UN warned.
The direct medical costs of treating 2.2 million patients in hospital critical care beds could amount to an estimated $16.28bn, while the focus on coronavirus could also lead to a diversion of scarce health resources, leading to a further 1.7 million preventable deaths from HIV, TB and malaria.
The findings were prepared for the UN by the economics department at Oxford.
The UN emergency relief coordinator, Mark Lowcock, warned: “Covid-19 and the associated global recession are about to wreak havoc in fragile and low-income countries. My message is that unless the rich countries and the G20 are prepared to act now we must be prepared for a series of human tragedies more brutal and destructive than any direct impacts in the virus itself. If the virus is free to circle the globe it will undo decades of development work and create a generation’s worth of tragic and exportable problems.”
Lowcock’s warning came as he launched a third appeal for a coronavirus humanitarian response. He described the response by most wealthy countries as “grossly inadequate” and “dangerously short-sighted”. He said the overall long-term cost of protecting the poorest 32 countries was $90bn – less than 1% of the cost of the wealthy west’s various stimulus packages – and argued that if the world’s poorest countries were not protected the chances would increase of a second wave of the virus sweeping back into Europe.
Overall, he warned the virus might cause the first absolute rise in poverty since 1990, with 70-100 million people pushed into the extreme poverty category of less than $1.90 income a day and a possible doubling of those facing famine.
he economy of sub-Saharan Africa is predicted to contract by -3.2%; that of the Middle East and central Asia by -4.7%, Latin America and the Caribbean by -9.4% and low- and middle-income countries in Asia by -0.8%, largely off-set by China’s growth projection of 1%. The UN report said these projections reflected the broadest collapse in per-capita income since 1870.
“Nevertheless, these annualised GDP projections fail to capture the extent to which millions of people will experience transient poverty in response to Covid-19. In the absence of social security to smooth this shock, income losses of these magnitudes will have severe consequences for the livelihoods and well-being of people.”
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