The knock-on effects of the coronavirus pandemic have halted and reversed global health progress, setting it back 25 years and exposing millions to the risk of deadly disease and poverty, a report by the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation warned on Tuesday.

People walk on a street in central London, Britain, on Sept. 12, 2020. Almost 8 million Britons will be subjected to tighter lockdown restrictions next week after fresh measures were imposed in the West Midlands and Scotland, local media reported Saturday. A study by Imperial College London found that coronavirus cases in England were doubling every seven to eight days at the beginning of September. Photo: Xinhua

Because of COVID-19, extreme poverty has increased by 7 percent, and routine vaccine coverage - a good proxy measure for how health systems are functioning - is dropping to levels last seen in the 1990s, the report said. 

"It's a huge setback," Bill Gates, cochair of the Foundation and a leading philanthropic funder of global health and development, told a media briefing on the report's findings. The Foundation's Goalkeepers report, which tracks progress on the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals of reducing poverty and improving health, found that in the past year, by nearly every indicator, the world has regressed.

Alongside dropping rates of routine immunization, which the report described as "setting the world back about 25 years in 25 weeks," rising levels of poverty and economic damage from the pandemic are reinforcing inequalities, it said. 

It found that the pandemic has had a disproportionate impact on women, racial and ethnic minority communities and people living in extreme poverty. 

The global economy will lose at least $12 trillion by the end of 2021.
Newspaper headline: Virus has set global health progress back