UNICEF: Children Will Need Almost a Decade to Recover from Lockdowns

Children from low-income families worldwide will need “seven to eight years to recover and return to pre-COVID-19 [Chinese coronavirus] child poverty levels” according to a recently published report by the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), the Latin American news site Infobae reported Monday.

The ongoing Chinese coronavirus pandemic, which began in March 2020, has been “the worst crisis for children in UNICEF’s 75-year history” according to the organization’s report entitled Preventing a Lost Decade.

“In less than two years, 100 million more children have fallen into poverty, a 10 percent increase since 2019,” UNICEF, a U.N. agency that provides humanitarian and developmental aid to poor children globally, wrote on December 9.

The report included a call to “resume in-person learning” for school-aged children, millions of whom have been affected by ongoing coronavirus lockdowns that either shut down local schools or prohibit in-person classes.

“By September 2021, schoolchildren around the world have lost an estimated 1.8 trillion hours of in-person learning due to COVID-related school closures, which will have profound long-term, unequal social and economic effects,” UNICEF revealed.

Jean Gough, UNICEF regional director for Latin America and the Caribbean, warned in March 2021 that “children and adolescents [in Latin America] have been out of the classroom longer than any other boy, girl or adolescent in the world” due to coronavirus lockdowns.

UNICEF collected health data from​ 191 countries by May 2021 indicating that “reopening schools does not represent a health risk,” Infobae reported at the time.

A series of health studies out of England published in July 2021 demonstrated children under the age of 18 are at a “very low” risk of death or severe illness from “COVID-19,” which is the disease caused by a type of coronavirus called SARS-CoV-2. “COVID-19” is also known as the Chinese coronavirus.

“In a series of preprints published on medRxiv1–3, a team of researchers picked through all hospital admissions and deaths reported for people younger than 18 in England. The studies found that COVID-19 caused 25 deaths in that age group between March 2020 and February 2021,” Nature reported on July 15, 2021.

“About half of those deaths were in individuals with an underlying complex disability with high health-care needs, such as tube feeding or assistance with breathing,” the British scientific journal noted.

“Of 3,105 deaths from all causes among the 12 million or so people under 18 in England between March 2020 and February 2021, 25 were attributable to COVID-19 — a rate of about 2 for every million people in this age range,” Nature revealed.

“None had asthma or type-1 diabetes, the authors note, and about half had conditions that put them at a higher risk than healthy children of dying from any cause,” the journal relayed.

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