Child deaths, mental illness will increase amid Coronavirus, U.N. Warns

The coronavirus is wreaking havoc on people’s health in ways that at first glance would seem to have little connection to the virus’s devastating primary effects.

The United Nations is warning of new risks to children and a subsequent plague of mental illness. And national governments are noting the unintended consequences of lockdowns and other restrictions, including a rise in domestic violence. In Mexico, a decision to ban alcohol sales was followed by scores of deaths after people drank tainted homemade alcohol.

Millions of children are at risk of dying, the United Nations said on Wednesday, not of Covid-19, but of preventable causes. Unable to get care at hospitals that are straining to fight the virus, more than a million children aged 5 or younger will die every six months, UNICEF said in a report.

Young children are also at risk of a serious and potentially deadly inflammatory condition, a new study of which provided the strongest evidence yet that the syndrome is linked to the coronavirus. The condition, called pediatric multisystem inflammatory syndrome, has been reported in about 100 children in New York, and scores more elsewhere in the United States and in Europe.