With more than 12,000 billion USD worth of losses for the world economy in 2020 and 2021 due to the coronavirus pandemic, the crisis is worse than expected and the recovery will be slower than initial hopes, the International Monetary Fund warned on Wednesday, according to AFP.

Gita Gopinath, chief economist of the Fund, announced a 4.9% recession forecast for this year.

It is above the 3% estimate in April, in the midst of the coronavirus crisis, when the IMF was already pointing out that this was the worst crisis since the Great Depression in the 1930s.

And for some European countries the contraction of gross domestic product is dizzying: -12.5% for France, -12.8% for Spain and Italy, according to Hotnews.ro.

“A high degree of uncertainty surrounds” these predictions, Gita Gopinath admits, given that the epidemic has not ended and outbreaks of infection reappear where the coronavirus was thought to have disappeared, in countries such as Germany, which announced a local quarantine on Tuesday.

For now, no country escapes the IMF’s pessimism, starting with China, where the virus originated, at the end of 2019.

The IMF now estimates an increase of only 1%, far from the figure of 6.1% in 2019 and which was already a historic low, due to the trade war with Washington.

The health crisis will hit the United States even harder, despite the government’s huge bailout plan (about USD 3,000 billion).

The GDP of the world’s largest economy would thus fall by 8% compared to the estimated 5.9% in April.