Gates: Coronavirus pandemic has set the world back by decades

Gates: Coronavirus pandemic has set the world back by decades

PanARMENIAN.Net - The Covid-19 pandemic has stopped, and in many cases reversed, progress towards achieving the United Nations' sustainable development goals, according to the fourth annual Goalkeepers Report, published Monday, September 14 from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

“The first three years, we were able to report the steady and gradual progress towards those goals,” Bill Gates, Microsoft founder and co-chair of the foundation, told reporters. “Every single one of the goals was moving in the right direction,” he added.

“Of course, this year is different. It’s unique. The Covid-19 pandemic not only stopped progress, but it pushed us backwards, and that varied quite a bit by different areas,” he said.

The 2020 Goalkeepers report analyzes the damage that the pandemic has done and is doing to health, economies “and virtually everything else,” and argues the world must work together to overcome it.

Setback in vaccinations: Vaccinations reached over 80% of the world’s children and prevented more than 2 million deaths in 2019. Because of Covid-19, vaccine coverage in 2020 is dropping to levels last seen in the 1990s, the report says.

“In other words, we’ve been set back about 25 years in about 25 weeks,” it says.

Plunged into poverty: The pandemic has pushed almost 37 million people below the extreme poverty line in 2020, with the extreme poverty rate going up by 7% in just a few months, according to the report. Some 68 million people have fallen below the poverty line in lower-middle-income countries, the report says.

Photo: Alex Wong/Getty Images
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