COVID-19 is the worst crisis the United Nations Children’s Agency (UNICEF) has seen in its 75 years history, the agency said in a report released Thursday.
UNICEF said COVID-19 was challenging decades of progress on key childhood challenges including poverty, access to education, nutrition and mental well-being.
According to Henrietta Fore, UNICEF executive director, the widespread impact of COVID-19 continues to deepen, increasing poverty, entrenching inequality and threatening the rights of children.
“While the number of children who are hungry, out of school, abused, living in poverty or forced into marriage is going up, the number of children with access to health care, vaccines, sufficient food and essential services is going down.
“In a year in which we should be looking forward, we are going backward,” Fore said.
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The report said 100 million additional children were estimated to now be living in multidimensional poverty because of the pandemic, a 10 percent increase since 2019.
In 2020, over 23 million children missed out on essential vaccines, an increase of nearly 4 million from 2019 and the highest number in 11 years, the report said.
Fore said in an era of a global pandemic, growing conflicts, and worsening climate change, never has a child-first approach been more critical than today.
“We are at a crossroads, as we work with governments, donors and other organisations to begin charting our collective path for the next 75 years. We must keep children first in line for investment and last in line for cuts. The promise of our future is set in the priorities we make in our present,” Fore noted.
Meanwhile, the Omicron variant is reaching more nations in Africa, while weekly COVID-19 cases in the continent surged by 93 percent, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said on Thursday.
It noted that signs of hope as preliminary data indicate that hospitalisations across South Africa remain low.
10 different African nation, including South Africa, currently account for 46 percent of the nearly 1,000 Omicron cases reported by 57 nations across the world.
According to WHO, emerging data from South Africa indicate that Omicron may cause less severe illnesses.
It said the ICU occupancy in South Africa between November 14 and December 4 was only 6.3 percent, which is very low compared with the time when the country was facing the peak linked to the Delta variant in July.
In spite of the widespread global presence of Omicron, more than 60 nations have imposed travel bans that are mainly targeting southern African nations, some of which have yet to report any Omicron case.
Matshidiso Moeti, WHO’s regional director for Africa, said with Omicron now present in 60 nations globally, travel bans that mainly target African countries are hard to justify.
“We call for science-based public health measures to counter the spread of COVID-19. Travel restrictions, which come at the height of the end-of-year tourist season is ravaging Africa’s economies, with a knock-on impact that is potentially devastating to the health of Africans,” Moeti said.
To ramp up the response to the Omicron variant and the rise in cases, WHO is supporting nations to improve genomic surveillance to track the virus and detect other potential variants of concern.
According to WHO, Africa has so far received more than 372 million COVID-19 vaccine doses and administered 248 million.
Although the pace of vaccination has increased in recent months, only 7.8 percent of Africa’s population is fully vaccinated.
“What we do know is that uneven distribution of COVID-19 vaccines globally is creating an ideal environment for COVID-19 variants to emerge and spread explosively, and regions with the least access to vaccines seem likely to suffer the most.
“With the end-of-year travel and festivities upon us, limited vaccination, rising COVID-19 cases and the new variant paint an ominous picture for our region,” Moeti said.
