write an easy on “socio economic impact of covid19"
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The COVID-19 pandemic is casting a long shadow in countries across the world and has quickly moved beyond a health crisis alone. As the UN Secretary General stated in The Impact of COVID-19 on Children: “Children are not the face of this pandemic. But they risk being among its biggest victims.” To understand the complex socio-economic impact of COVID19 on children and their families, we must look at three different streams.
The first stream is that of the virus itself. Despite low infection rates in children, the impacts can be deeply felt. Stories of children like 5-year-old Yuanyuan, whose family all tested positive for COVID-19, are sadly not a rare occurrence.
The second stream is the containment measures, such as school closures and confinement. While these interventions reduce the speed of the infection rates, they have severe impacts on children in terms of loss of education, lost incomes and psychological trauma.
The third stream – and the main focus of this article - is the larger economic crisis generated by the containment measures, a crisis that will push millions of children and their families back into poverty; a crisis that will affect countries far into the future, even after the end of the lockdowns. This will have the worst impact on children when we look at the number of affected children, its duration and its severity.
Without the right vision, the right planning, and the right investments, the future could be bleak for millions of children. But there is hope and a resolve from UNICEF to rise from this pandemic building a stronger future for all children, and their countries.As the world’s attempt was to flatten the curve of the virus, it is now equally important to flatten the curve of the socio-economic impact on children and their families, a curve with a higher deadly potential for children and their families.
Shutdowns cause a daisy chain of lost incomes. If a factory worker loses their job, they will not buy food from a street vendor, who will then be unable to afford to buy their ingredients from the market, and the market seller will have little or no money to buy produce from the farmer. They will all struggle to provide for their children. The result is an expected dramatic, fast and prolonged increase in child poverty in the region.
For children who were already poor and vulnerable, the situation is worsening. Those who had managed to emerge from poverty are falling back. There will be children who never experienced poverty before, now falling into poverty. Most of these families are not covered by any existing social welfare support, and in many cases do not have any kind of job and salary protection.
This is likely to be the biggest and most dangerous COVID-19-related impact for children. While infection rates of children in the region were in the thousands, it is estimated that the number of children falling into poverty will be in the millions.
To flatten this curve of the socio-economic impact on children and their families, there is a blueprint for action that can help children survive today, and also allow them to thrive and shape a better future for themselves and their countries.