The ongoing fight against the coronavirus pandemic in the United Kingdom will cost students an average of 40,000 pounds ($55,000) in lost earnings during their careers, according to a new study conducted by the British research body the Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS).

That figure was based on the children missing half a year of face-to-face schooling, which could potentially cost them 4 percent of their lifetime earnings—based on current estimates of educational returns across the world’s high-income countries.

“All learning is dynamic and builds on skills and knowledge gained at previous stages,” wrote IFS research fellow Luke Sibieta, who authored the report.

“Without sufficient catchup, children will leave school with less knowledge and skills that can be applied in their job or a lower ability to gain further skills,” Sibieta noted.

Based on an individual earning 1 million pounds over their lifetime, Sibieta revealed that this equated to a total of 350 billion pounds in lost lifetime income across the nearly nine million schoolchildren in the United Kingdom.

He further contended that the 1.5 billion pounds the government has pledged to assist children catch up in the classroom is too small to make a positive impact.

“The necessary responses are likely to be complex, hard, and expensive,” he said.

“But the risks of spending too much time or resources on this issue are far smaller than the risks of spending too little and letting lower skills and wider inequalities take root for generations to come.” 

The United Kingdom is currently mired in a third coronavirus lockdown that has closed all nonessential shops, schools, and universities for at least six weeks. While it is still unclear when the restrictions will end, British Prime Minister Boris Johnson has suggested that schools could start reopening early next month. 

The country recently surpassed the grim figure of one hundred thousand deaths due to the coronavirus, the fifth highest in the world, according to the latest data compiled by Johns Hopkins University.

Here in the United States, a recent study conducted by researchers at the University of Southern California showed that the yearlong pandemic could result in net losses of between $3.2 trillion and $4.8 trillion in real gross domestic product (GDP) in the United States over the course of two years.

Real GDP is a measure, adjusted for inflation, that reflects the value and the quantity of final goods and services produced by a particular country’s economy in any given year.

The research, published in the journal Economics of Disasters and Climate Change, further revealed that mandatory closures and partial re-openings alone could result in a 22 percent loss of U.S. GDP in just one year.

Compared to China, which suffered smaller economic damage due to aggressive virus containment measures and a shorter lockdown period, the U.S. GDP loss could be more than four times greater.

Ethen Kim Lieser is a Minneapolis-based Science and Tech Editor who has held posts at Google, The Korea Herald, Lincoln Journal Star, AsianWeek, and Arirang TV. Follow or contact him on LinkedIn.  

Image: Reuters