Europe faces a demographic nightmare as the pandemic accelerates its population crunch, leaving nations grappling with shrinking workforces and rising numbers of elderly to support.
New projections from the United Nations show an already serious, decades-long slowdown in population growth – featuring falling fertility and a surge in deaths – has been worsened by Covid.
Birth rates have been hit by “a postponement of childbearing in the face of the uncertainty regarding the disease and its economic impacts, disruptions in marriage patterns and family formation, and disruptions in the availability and access to sexual and reproductive health-care services, including family planning”, the UN found.
We can tell what’s happening here. Demographic decline is bad. Access to family planning is good. Therefore the bad thing must be caused by too little of the good thing. The falling birthrate is to be blamed on the absence of family planning services – contraception and abortion.
Not because it’s actually true but because it ought to be – bad things are caused by the absence of good things.
If covid really was dangerous then the result would be the complete opposite though, elders would be dying like flies so would be fewer of them to support. Basically this statement is an implicit acknowledgement that the problem is not covid but our response to it
I’m here to categorically state that the vaccines have definitely not had any effect on fertility both male and female. Don’t even entertain the thought. As long as we don’t look, ‘there is no evidence’.
A shrinking population makes house prices fall and wages rise. Ideal conditions far starting a family. So why isn’t that happening? Oh yeah, government won’t let it.
It’s OK, we can import all the fungible people we need.
It sounds like they are getting their excuse in first.
We don’t know exactly what is responsible for the dramatic decline in European birth rates from the beginning of this year. Whether it is long-term wax-related infertility, fewer couplings and general shaggings due to lockdowns, reactivity to the prior year’s mini baby boom, my personal “not tonight darling” hypothesis (mild wax side-effects eliminating 1 or 2 months’ conception opportunity for couples) or something else.
It will be at least a year before we have data that can help us distinguish proximate causes.
The important thing is whatever the proximate cause, those bastards in the government did this to us. And lots of people went along with it.
‘Basically this statement is an implicit acknowledgement that the problem is not covid but our response to it’
Yes Emil!!!!!!
Aren’t these the same people who tell us there are too many people on Earth & we need to lower that number, like, quickly?
What “surge in deaths”?
Of the nubile?
BIFR 9 months before.. No Spring Courting, no Skirt Days, No Holidays/Tinder dates/Nightclubs/Festivals, etc. etc. etc. ad nauseam.
Forget accidents and opportunity fertilisations. In a lot of places peeps couldn’t even get married to do things the Official Way ( and there’s plenty of…conservative notions.. about that left..)
So no new couples, and the established couples never made the jump into investing in the future after the initial Blackout Effect passed.
Not really hard to analyse.
Grikath,
The timing is spot on.
The question is whether the trend lasts ~6 months and then reverses or lasts for >~6 months.
My money is on the former, as much as skeptics want to see this as the global sterilization program they think it is.
Possibly a non problem. We should concentrate on automation, use of AI and robots. I gather (from an interview with scientist) we’re 3-4 years away from cost equivalent machines to do fruit and other agricultural picking. How long before lorry drivers, taxi drivers are replaced by fully automated vehicles?
Perhaps this is happening at a useful time…
“we’re 3-4 years away from …”: if we really knew enough to know we were such-and-such years from …, we would in fact be there already.
rising numbers of elderly to support
Isn’t the whole point about the Covidrama that it’s thinning out the ranks of us wrinklies?
@asiaseen Could be me, but going by the numbers Covidrama isn’t terribly effective at getting rid of the wrinklies. except the category that can only be described as “geriatric”.
But those people tend to fall over from anything mildly serious, not WuFlu specifically.
If anything, the heat shock we’re expecting next week when the wind swings past South and pushes up those lovely mediterranean temperatures up North will probably be more lethal to the wrinklies than the whole WuFlu debacle.
Locally the week long heat dome that shot temperatures way up last year is said to be responsible for more deaths than half a years worth of Covid
And monthly overdose deaths (which hit record highs) were at their peak equivalent to the entire 1st year of Covid deaths locally. Surprisingly at one point last year locally the authorities produced chart with a split of over/under 50 cause of death and it made it very clear for under 50 Covid didn’t even register. Didn’t stop them pushing vaccination to even younger groups though.