The COVID-19 landscape has evolved dramatically in the past year – the World Health Organization announced the end of the public health emergency, reporting of cases and deaths declined, vaccine priorities shifted, and economies opened despite evidence the pandemic was ongoing. Moreover, four years into the pandemic, newly available data is shedding light on the pandemic’s longer-term impacts on poverty, education, and economic growth.
Building on prior landscape analyses, USAID has prepared this summative review of the evolution of the pandemic and its first- and second-order impacts as of mid-2023. The pandemic’s impacts have been widespread across development sectors and geographical regions, and the overlapping crises of COVID-19, geopolitical instability, and global fiscal tightening threaten to erode development progress. Weakened health systems, ballooning debt, widespread learning loss, and the most significant setback in poverty alleviation during the last two decades are a few examples of the public health crisis’ rippling disruptions across the globe.
This analysis is not exhaustive nor does it offer policy or program recommendations; instead it intends to provide a high-level synthesis of major storylines throughout the course of the pandemic, leveraging the best available data to understand the pandemic’s most significant global impacts.
The data used in this analysis were derived from a range of public sources, including real time metrics, weekly updates on caseloads, modeled forecasts, quantitative estimates of underlying risks and vulnerabilities, surveys, and qualitative research and reports from third-party institutions.
