1) Anyone in school has had their education upended. Schools will be closed March through June. That is 3 months of a child or teen's educational/social/psychological development. I'm not even talking about college (which you can argue can muddle along with distance education), or summer activities (which you can argue are optional), but those have been impacted too.
2) For those in college, I would guess the majority have lost internships. Many new grads have lost their jobs. Most new grads probably didn't even get a job by March, and now they likely won't get a job until the end of the year or next year. For the majority of people who don't go to college, many work in service jobs and have been wiped out.
Humans have recovered and prospered from far more dire circumstances, including many immigrants to the US and Europe.
You think of the '90s and the prosperity there, the end of major international rivalries, the birth of the Information Age, and imagine that time will just go on forever. Each generation is supposed to live better lives than the previous generation, right? We have the technology!
And yet the past couple of decades showed that no, income inequality and rising costs of living and the impossibility of buying housing in many markets have basically depressed American (and many other Western) youth, sort of like what's been happening in Japan all this time.
The hardscrabble Ellis Island immigrants were fleeing from clearly traumatic problems. Famine, war, disease. What afflicts modern day youth? High prices, bad numbers. It's an abstract foe with no clear solutions. It's not as if they can just move to Australia or New Zealand, another frontier of economic opportunity to start anew.
No, but millions have lost their jobs due to the shutdown, and it's very conceivable that many would put off children/marriage/partnership because of that.
(yes, for international folks, people in the US who've thought it through really do base their family planning in large part on when their annual insurance limits reset, because the difference in costs can be thousands of dollars even with pretty good insurance, if you accidentally land most of the prenatal care on one year and the birth itself on the next)
> yes, for international folks, people in the US
That's not the end of it. There's an "in network" deductible and "out of network" (OON) deductible.
Depending on the health plan you have and the state you live in, the hospitals can also "balance bill" if they are OON.
When giving birth, parents in the U.S. is very much expected to ask everyone involved, I repeat, everyone involved that they are not OON.
It's insane.
But yeah....I don't think anyone would willingly have a baby right now.
When you're in your mid 20s, delaying 6 months to 1 year of your career trajectory can have massive effects. If you already have your life established, you probably don't have the same concerns.
When I finished college, the 2008 recession had not happened yet, however there were definitely warning signs in the job market even after I graduated. Many of my friends from college were laid off before or during the downturn, I was stuck in a very dead end job just trying to make ends meet. I wound up not getting a job fully utilizing my degree until I had almost reached 30.
Lots of folks in this area were in similar boats; they aren't starting families until their mid or even later 30s because they had stumbling blocks due to the 2008 crisis.
They've already basically cancelled college in Canada for September through December. All large classes (so all freshman core classes) will be online and it's doubtful dorms will be open. So that's at least 9 months ruined for high school seniors and college students.
My state issued the stay-at-home advisory around March 15, and lifted it with precautions May 19. That's two months.
It's possible there will be some kind of compromise involving a longer phone/video-only period, earlier exclusivity, and public policy acceptance of having contact with a small number of people from outside the household. At least I can hope. But nevertheless, this is a uniquely awful time in history to be single.
I find this comment utterly mind boggling. The US's stay at home orders were issued when? Mid to end of March? That makes it what? About 1 month? Are we supposed to believe that "young people" suddenly get into a tail spin because they have to endure a whole month of not finding a partner, get to know each other, make life plans, and get pregnant?