WASHINGTON, October 6. /TASS/. The pandemic of a new type of coronavirus will lead to a setback in improvement of living standards in almost all countries of the world, Kristalina Georgieva, IMF Managing Director, said on Tuesday. She was speaking at an online event hosted by the London School of Economics (LSE) ahead of the IMF-World Bank annual meeting on October 12-18.
"We expect global output to remain well below our pre-pandemic projections over the medium term. For almost all countries, this will be a setback to the improvement of living standards."
According to the IMF forecast, this year the global economy will decline by almost 5%, but it will recover and grow by 5.4% next year.
In late December 2019, Chinese officials informed the World Health Organization (WHO) about the outbreak of a previously unknown pneumonia in the city of Wuhan, in central China. Since then, cases of the novel coronavirus - named COVID-19 by the WHO - have been reported in every corner of the globe, including Russia. On March 11, 2020, the WHO declared the coronavirus outbreak a pandemic. According to the latest statistics, over 35,732,000 people have been infected worldwide and more than 1,046,000 deaths have been reported. In addition, so far, over 26,891,410 individuals have recovered from the illness across the globe.