Youth suffers again as coronavirus crisis bites

Coronavirus’s rapid spread has already taken a very heavy toll in terms of human life, as the total loss has moved beyond the 100,000 mark and the number of people infected approaches 2 million. Most of those who have succumbed to the virus were elderly or already sick. There have been cases of the young also falling prey to the virus, but they are far fewer and farther between.

Though the youth may have so far emerged relatively unscathed from the crisis healthwise, the pandemic has hit them hardest in some other ways. The impact on them could ultimately be catastrophic, especially in the longer term.

The impact of the pandemic on young people is multifold. Firstly, educational institutions around the world were the first to be closed down following the outbreak. Hundreds of millions of students are now facing an uncertain future, as there is little clarity over whether they can attend their examinations or what will happen to their academic year in case the exams are canceled. Reports from around the world say that millions of jobs have already been lost due to the outbreak, with some projecting the final figure could be as high as 25 million. Most of these losses have come from a handful of rich nations in Europe and the US, where the unemployment rate has jumped in the past couple of weeks. Unfortunately, the businesses at greatest risk of collapse are those that employ the young. Researchers point out that young people are set to be disproportionately affected by virus-related layoffs.

The unemployment caused by the pandemic is likely to be much higher than the current predictions, as the crisis is yet to reach its full extent in the developing world. One can get an idea of the severity of the pandemic’s impact on the youth in poor countries from the initial data coming from India, where unemployment has already surged to almost 9 percent — a 43-year high.

For many, the layoffs and economic crises being experienced by dozens of nations will bring a sense of deja vu. Just over a decade ago, practically the entire world was in the grip of the biggest economic crisis since the Great Depression of the 1930s. The crisis that began with defaults at large financial services companies in the US soon spread across the entire economy and indeed the world, just as the coronavirus pandemic has done. At its peak, the global financial crisis caused unemployment rates in many EU nations to shoot up to nearly 30 percent, with the youth rate as high as 54 percent in Greece.

During this time, millions of young people suffered unprecedented hardship and uncertainty about what fate had in store for them. This is mainly because, even though all politicians sing paeans to the youth, hardly anyone paid attention to them or brought in realistic policies to ensure that their future was secure. Instead, governments announced hundreds of billions of dollars in generous bailouts for banks — the original culprits in the tragedy — and other large companies, while tightly controlling the purse strings as far as any aid to the youth was concerned.

Unfortunate as it may be, fate has presented another opportunity for the world’s political leaders to do the right thing by young people. As the details of bailout packages are announced, it is crucial that they keep the future of the human race at the center of their plans.