Lockdowns, especially in low-income countries resulted in higher mortality among a group rarely considered in the international narrative on COVID-19– children, concludes a report by a prominent economic research organization.
“In lower-income countries, the economic contractions that accompany lockdowns to contain the spread of COVID-19 can increase child mortality, counteracting the mortality reductions achieved by the lockdown,” state the authors. The report, “Intergenerational Mortality Tradeoff of COVID-19 Lockdown Policies,” was published in June by the Massachusetts-based National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER). Four of the six authors of the study are employed by the World Bank, the other two are with the National University of Singapore and the University of Michigan, respectively.
To formulize and quantify the unprecedented lockdowns’ effect on child mortality, the researchers built what they call a “macro-susceptible-infected-recovered model” that featured heterogeneous agents and a country-group-specific relationship between economic downturns and child mortality and calculate it to data from 85 countries across all income levels.
The rise of the delta variant in India, Europe, Australia, Israel, and South America and the fact that COVID-19 appears to be bumping up against herd immunity in the U.S gave researchers an opportunity to calculate the human toll of lockdowns. Whether the benefits of such policies outweigh “the accompanying dramatic economic contractions” is what researchers were able to test out, and by extension, whether this path should ever be taken again in confronting future pandemics.
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