We take a conservative approach, in the sense that our methodological choices are designed to provide an upper-bound to the number of lost-years and a lower-bound to the number of poverty-years. The number of lost-years caused by a given death is taken to be the country-specic residual life-expectancy at the age at which this death takes place.<sup>9</sup> The number of poverty-years generated in a given country is taken to be the variation in the country's population living under the poverty threshold, caused by the Covid-induced drop in GDP currently forecast by Central Banks and the World Bank's Global Economics Prospect. This variation corresponds to the number of poverty-years because we assume that these individuals only remain poor for a single year. Making this assumption is conservative because we ignore any long-term eects of additional poverty, such as insults to child development from worse nutrition in early childhood; learning costs from school closures; possible hysteresis eects of unemployment, and so on. In our baseline scenario, we also assume that the economic contraction is distribution neutral, i.e. that there is no change in inequality. This is conservative since most available evidence so far suggests that the economic costs of the pandemic disproportionately burden poorer people (Bonavida Foschiatti and Gasparini, 2020).<sup>10</sup> To the best of our knowledge, we provide the rst welfare analysis of the current consequences of the pandemic. Yet, our analysis is related to a number of recent papers. First, we borrow the time-units metric for a normative evaluation of the relative welfare costs of mortality and poverty from Baland et al. (2020). These authors employ that metric for an assessment of deprivation, whereas we use it for assessing welfare. Also, they apply their indicators to global deprivation before the outbreak of the pandemic. Second, Sumner et al. (2020), Laborde et al. (2020) and Lakner et al. (2020) estimate the Covid-induced increase in global poverty. We base our poverty estimates on the methodology developed by Lakner et al. (2020). Third, based on a social welfare analysis which resorts to a price for a human life, Hall et al. (2020) compute the fraction of GDP that the United States would be willing to give up in order to avoid all potential Covid-induced deaths. Fourth, Bethune and Korinek (2020) show that social welfare in the United States is not maximized under a no-intervention scenario. Fifth, Alon et al. (2020) independently investigate the dierential mortality risks between developed and developing countries. In line with our ndings, they nd that Covid-induced mortality plays a larger role in the welfare consequences of lockdowns in developed countries than in developing countries.

Also relevant for our work, though perhaps less closely related, is the analysis by Bargain and Ulugbek (2020) on how poverty is associated with dierential impacts of the pandemic on human mobility to work and, through that channel, on the spread of the

> 9This is conservative to the extent that individuals already having health issues such as diabetes or heart problems are more susceptible to die than healthy individuals.

> 10For instance, Montenovo et al. (2020) show that already disadvantaged groups are disproportionately aected by Covid-induced job losses in the United States.

4