Diverting Child Healthcare Moneys To Coronavirus Could Result In 1.2 Million Deaths By Year's End

Alan: Yes, Trump is as wacky as this cartoon portrays him.

A sick man.

An intrinsically deranged person.

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By James Hohmann with Mariana Alfaro  Email

Billions are out of work and millions of kids could die from coronavirus’s economic fallout

The U.N. Children’s Fund has issued a warning that the diversion of health-care resources from existing health programs in order to combat the novel coronavirus could lead to as many as 1.2 million extra deaths among kids under 5 over the next six months. That would average out to 6,000 kids dying every day of preventable causes.

This staggering number is the worst-case scenario in a study published in the Lancet Global Health journal this week by researchers from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. These deaths are in addition to the 2.5 million children who already die every six months before their fifth birthdays across the 118 countries analyzed in the study. Experts fear this could be the first time in decades that the number of children dying before their fifth birthday will increase.

A malnourished boy lies in a bed waiting to receive treatment at a feeding center at Al-Sabeen hospital in Sanaa, Yemen. (Hani Mohammed/AP)

Covid-19, the disease caused by the coronavirus, has mostly spared young people, with some alarming exceptions that the medical establishment is scrambling to better understand. But that does not mean that kids are safe or insulated from grave suffering as a result of the worst public health crisis since the 1910s and the worst economic crisis since the 1930s.

The study suggests that up to 56,700 more maternal deaths could also occur in the next six months, in addition to the 144,000 moms who already normally die over a six-month period in those 118 countries. “We must not let mothers and children become collateral damage in the fight against the virus,” said Henrietta Fore, the executive director of UNICEF. “And we must not let decades of progress on reducing preventable child and maternal deaths be lost.”

There have now been 302,658 reported deaths from the coronavirus worldwide, with 4.4 million infections. The United States has reported more than 85,000 coronavirus deaths, with at least 1.4 million confirmed cases, and these are probably significant undercounts.

In addition to the body counts, and daily dispatches from hot spots about loved ones who have succumbed, this week has brought a deluge of stomach-churning numbers that illustrate the cascading economic and humanitarian fallout from the contagion. In many cases, shutdown orders are spawning unintended consequences that are causing the world’s poorest communities to careen deeper into deprivation.

The International Labour Organization calculates nearly half the people in the global workforce have already lost their jobs, including 1.6 billion of the world’s 2 billion informal workers.

The World Bank estimates that the loss of income for people already living close to the margins of survival will propel up to 50 million people into abject poverty this year.

The United Nations says 580 million could become impoverished as a result of the crisis. 

“And as incomes are lost, a ‘hunger pandemic’ could eclipse the coronavirus, the World Food Program has warned; 130 million people are expected to join the ranks of the 135 million who were expected to suffer from acute hunger this year, the agency says, bringing to 265 million the number of those at risk of starvation,” Liz Sly reports from Beirut.

Alessandra Said, 45, a physician, sighs in Manaus, Brazil, after attending to her mother, Maria da Consolação Said, 77, who is infected with covid-19 and is a cancer patient. The doctor got special authorization to check on her mother, and she felt bad that she had to pierce her mother with a needle more than once to find a proper vein for the serum. (Raphael Alves for The Washington Post)