Gaine
AgelessThrival™
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Article from Issue #59 (July 7, 2023)

The Pandemic Killed Almost 7 Million People World-Wide While Causing a Massive Collapse of Human Capital!

by Catherine Wylie

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Source: The World Bank Group

The COVID-19 pandemic caused the death of 6,945,714 million people world-wide with over 768,187,096 confirmed cases negatively impacting lives and livelihoods in multiple ways. Medical infrastructures were overwhelmed by medical staff and supply shortages. The lockdowns caused job losses, bankruptcy, food insecurity, economic contraction, physical and mental health issues, and increased poverty.

Covid-19 caused a massive collapse of human capital due to school closures and lock downs derailing childhood development in low to middle income countries.  Human capital is the knowledge, skill, and health people acquire over their lifetime allowing countries to create and sustain strong future growth and a higher standard of living.

Decades of work developing human capital was wiped out during the Pandemic which will have interesting economic consequences in the years to come.  This damage will be seen mostly with those under 25.  By 2050 the under 25 will comprise 90 percent of the global workforce.

• Millions of children faced reductions in health care—including missed critical vaccines. They also faced more stress in their care environments—orphanhood, domestic violence, suboptimal nutrition—which led to declines in school readiness and declines in social and emotional development.  
• Preschool-age children in multiple countries lost more than 34 percent of learning in early language and literacy and more than 29 percent of learning in math.  
• School closures and ineffective remote learning caused students to miss out on learning and to also forget what they had learned: on average, for every 30 days of school closures, students lost about 32 days of learning.  
• 40 million people who would have had a job in the absence of the pandemic, did not have one at the end of 2021, worsening youth unemployment trends. In multiple countries 25 percent of all young people were neither in education, employment nor training in 2021.  

Gaps will widen over time if not addressed. 

• The cognitive deficit in today’s toddlers could translate into a 25 percent decline in earnings at their prime working age. 
• Today’s students in low- and middle-income countries could lose up to 10 percent of their future average annual earnings due to the COVID-related education shocks. Globally, this generation of students risks losing $21 trillion in potential lifetime earnings.”  
• Losses of lifetime earnings at this scale can mean lower productivity, greater inequality, and possibly greater social unrest for decades to come.  

Recommendations

Countries can and should act urgently to recover these losses and invest better in their people. Human capital is a key driver of poverty reduction and inclusive growth. It is imperative for building resilience in the face of current and future crises and shocks. 

Immediate policy actions could include:

• Vaccinations and nutritional supplementation campaigns; increasing coverage of parenting programs; increasing access to pre-primary education, expanding coverage of cash transfers for vulnerable families.  
• Increasing instructional time; assessing learning and matching instruction to students’ learning level; and streamlining the curriculum to focus on foundational learning.  
• For youth, support for adapted training, job intermediation, entrepreneurship programs, and new workforce-oriented initiatives are crucial.  

In the longer term, countries need to build agile, resilient, and adaptive human development systems that can better prepare for and respond to current and future shocks.

Collapse and Recovery recognizes the need for countries to prioritize among the long list of potential crisis recovery policies and offers an approach for doing so that takes into account the extent of the collapse, complexity and cost of implementation, and political commitment.

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