In addition to killing a lot of people, COVID-19 has apparently caused a dramatic reduction in European folks having babies.
FT:
France's national statistics institute was one of the first to publish figures for the number of children born in January — nine months after the country was stuck in its first Covid-19 lockdown — and the provisional data show a startling decline: there were 53,900 births in the month, 13 per cent down on the figure for January 2020.
For France, a country that has traditionally had the highest fertility rate in the 27-member EU, it marked the biggest fall in births since the abrupt end of the baby boom in the 1970s.
Births had also fallen 7 per cent in the previous month compared with the same period a year earlier, leaving the total number of babies born in France last year, 735,000, at the lowest level since the end of the second world war.
"There are a lot of fantasies that when couples find themselves at home they will have more children. But that is something of an idyllic vision," said Anne Solaz of Ined, France's National Institute of Demographic Studies. "In fact there are some who find it hard being together all the time."
