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Epidemics have long been one of the principal checks of population growth, along with famine and war. The Bible (2 Kings 19) tells how 85,000 Assyrian were struck down by disease in one

night before the walls of Jerusalem, giving the kingdom of Judah a stay of execution. In second-century Rome, the Antonine plague resulted in up to five million deaths and by some accounts

delivered a body blow to the Empire from which it never really recovered. The Black Death, which struck in the 1340s and 1350s, is believed to have killed around a third of Europe’s

population and in some places numbers did not recover until the eighteenth century. Famously, the Spanish flu a century ago killed about 40 million people, about one in fifty of those alive

at the time. Whatever the impact of Covid-19 on a range of measures, from GDP to mental health, it is no Spanish flu, at least as far as mortality is concerned. With the vaccine about to be

deployed and the end hopefully in sight, the current consensus is that something like 1.5 million people have died. That may be an undercount (how good exactly has the data gathering been

across the developing world, in particular?) and it is certain that more will die before it is over. But even if there were twice as many deaths in the end as to date, total mortality will

have been much less than a tenth of the toll of the Spanish flu. Taking into account a global population nearly four times larger than back in the early 1920s, in proportional terms the

impact will have been a fortieth as great, less than one in two thousand rather one in fifty. And even three million Covid deaths need to be seen in the context of more than fifty million

deaths in the world in any year under normal circumstances. From the point of view of life expectancy, even this overstates the impact of Covid-19. The Spanish flu infected in particular

those from their late teens to their early thirties. One of its most famous victims, Colonel Mark Sykes, held responsible with François George-Picot for inventing the boundaries of the

modern Middle East, was just 39. Walt Disney, a teenager, pulled through. By contrast, Covid-19 goes for the elderly. Half of those who had died of the disease in England by late October

were in their eighties or older and less than one per cent under forty. However much one values the lives of the elderly, it is a mathematical fact that this means that fewer years of

remaining life are lost and the impact on life expectancy is smaller.  It might be thought, therefore, that the biggest impact of the pandemic is not demographic but economic. Lockdowns and

restrictions would have been unimaginable in the days of the Spanish flu; there would have been no teleconferencing, precious little telephoning and a breakdown in supply chains would have

led to mass starvation. Instead the virus was let rip. This time we may have stayed at home and saved lives, but the economy has been sacrificed as jobs have been lost and debt (public and

private) has been racked up. In fact, the impact of the virus is probably, and surprisingly, going to be more on the birth side of the demographic equation than the death side. It is early

days – the first lockdown babies are only going to be born in the coming weeks and months – but it seems to be a tale of two worlds. The cliché of “locked down with nothing else to do” –

meaning more sex and more conception – simply does not apply in the rich countries of the world, where the automatic link between copulation and procreation has long been broken. Instead,

fear of having to go to hospital for check-ups or to give birth in the middle of a pandemic seems to have put people off having babies, at least for now. Apart from any nervousness at having

to confront the world of doctors’ surgeries and hospitals right now, the reduction of casual sexual encounters and the postponement of weddings – both triggers for a fair amount of

conceiving – will also have depressed the birth rate. So too will jobs and money worries. But in parts of the developing world, the picture is quite different. There the pandemic seems to

have disrupted provision of contraception and the expectation is a baby boom. In the Philippines they are expecting 200,00 extra births because of Covid-19. Globally, the UN expect up to

seven million unplanned pregnancies as a result of the pandemic. That’s in the order of a five per cent bump for the world as a whole. In years and decades to come, a cohort of people in

what is now the developing world will be noted for their numbers, while in countries like the UK, schools will struggle to fill their places and universities will wonder for a year or two

where the students are going to come from. Once the economic damage is undone and working lives adjust to the new normal – whatever that turns out to be – and the high streets and offices

have been repurposed, it is this which might be the longest-lasting legacy of the current pandemic.  A MESSAGE FROM THEARTICLE _We are the only publication that’s committed to covering every

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