By: Staff Writer
April 19, 2022
The World Bank acknowledges that the COVID-19 pandemic is fading away, but there is much work that needs to be done to turn the corner on the virus and get the global economy back on a path to growth.
The bank in its Semiannual Report for Latin America and the Caribbean: “Consolidating the recovery,” said that: “The Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region is on track to recover from the COVID-19 pandemic. Despite record-high new cases in late 2021 and early 2022 due to the highly virulent Omicron variant (figure 1.1, panel a), the case fatality ratio has been at the lowest level in the region since the beginning of the pandemic. While the pandemic cannot be said to be definitively over given that emergence of the Omicron BA.2 variant and that China is entering a new phase of lock downs, the steady fall in the case fatality ratios around the world suggests that health systems are developing tools and protocols that may eventually reduce the disease to an endemic but manageable problem.”
It continued, “The most critical human milestone during this pandemic has been the rapid scientific development and deployment of more than 10bn vaccinations around the world in less than two years. In fact, taken as a whole, the region has achieved high vaccination progress. Almost 60 percent of its population is fully vaccinated and about 67 percent have received at least one dosed.
The bank noted that Central America and the Caribbean compared to the other parts of South America has the lowest vaccination rates. They warned, “The danger is precisely that these countries will lack resilience to any new variants that may emerge, again paralyzing important sectors, particularly tourism. An illustrative example is offered in the cases of New Zealand and Hong Kong SAR, China, by the beginning of March 2022. The former had 90 percent vaccination rates against the Delta and previous strains and has experienced negligible Omicron-related deaths, while Hong Kong SAR, China, despite similar infection rates, had low vaccination rates among older people and suffers very high Omicron death rates. The case for vaccination is clear at this point. The low vaccination rates are, in some cases, due to issues of availability, but in other cases, vaccine resistance has also impeded progress.”
In Costa Rica for example, employment fell to 20 percent between the first and second quarter of 2020, “It slowly increased to nearly recover its pre-pandemic levels by the end of 2021. However, this recovery obscures a longer-term decline in the quality of employment, and the unevenness of the recovery across demographic groups.”
The report also said: “The decline in quality is visible in the fact that much of the recovery of employment has been in informal and small enterprises. The share of formal employment has fallen by almost 5 percentage points on average, with countries such as Panama, Peru, and Nicaragua experiencing a decrease of more than 10 percentage points. By contrast, the share of self-employed workers has risen on average by 5 percentage points in LAC, with increases greatest in Haiti, Panama, Peru, and Costa Rica.
“While employment in small, medium, and large enterprises has declined, on average, employment in microenterprises has increased by 7.4 percentage points. In addition, the average number of hours has fallen and income has not recovered. Nearly 50 percent of all households in the region have seen their total income drop back to pre-pandemic levels.”