The Socio-economic Impact of COVID-19 on the Economy

Abstract

The World has been gripped by a pandemic over the first half of 2020. It was identified as a new coronavirus (severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2), and later named as Coronavirus Disease-19 or COVID-19. While COVID-19 originated in the city of Wuhan in the Hubei province of China, it has spread rapidly across the world, resulting in a human tragedy and tremendous economic damage. Given the rapid spread of COVID-19, countries across the World have adopted several public health measures intended to prevent its spread. However, these public health measures, has huge socio-economic impacts on vulnerable families in a developing country like Sierra Leone. For instance, lost income due to an outbreak can translate to spikes in poverty, missed meals for children, and reduced access to healthcare far beyond COVID-19. Therefore, policymakers should should implement both macro and micro economic policies with or without the severity of the outbreak to aid economic planning and avoid spillover shocks.