Lower birthrates have also vastly outweighed whatever effect could have resulted from existing couples being kept indoors and in each other’s company. In one outlier of fertility, six women in a single street in the English city of Bristol became concurrently pregnant in 2020, according to the BBC.

Dour Demography
Even if vaccine drives are successful in taming the virus’s spread, the economic fallout, such as joblessness, is likely to last past the point where the health crisis abates, with a corresponding brake on births.

Things might not necessarily improve when the economic data show a recovery, however, considering that fertility across major economies has steadily declined for decades.

The crisis has been most damaging for people in the prime childbearing ages of their 20s and 30s. Research by the Guttmacher Institute found the pandemic led more than 40% of women in the U.S. to change plans about when to have children or how many to have.

A study published by Germany’s IZA–Institute of Labor Economics projected that the drop in U.S. births will be 50% larger than during the 2008-09 crisis. Consultancy PWC predicts a “dramatic decline” in U.K. newborns this year.

Lockdowns have also physically prevented and hindered people from forming relationships that could ultimately lead to pregnancy.

“Almost nonexistent,” is how Sierra Reed, a 34-year-old Californian, describes her experience of dating last year once the pandemic hit. Even when lockdowns loosened, she stayed wary.

“There was a big part of me that was still super uncomfortable with being in spaces of people, without masks, and doing typical date activities like dining together,” she said.

Golden State Baby Bust
As evidence of how the pandemic is delaying family formation, the number of marriages in Singapore sank about 10% in 2020. The government has boosted cash payments on offer to encourage citizens to have children despite the coronavirus.

What’s more worrisome for some countries now is that lower fertility will be hard to reverse in line with other economic healing.