Special Report - How the COVID-19 lockdown will take its own toll on health

Members of the Gutierrez family eat their lunch in their backyard as they stay on lockdown during the outbreak of the coronavirus disease (COVID-19) in Matawan, New Jersey, U.S., April 1, 2020. REUTERS/Eduardo Munoz

NEW YORK (Reuters) - It’s the most dramatic government intervention into our lives since World War II. To fight the coronavirus outbreak, governments across the globe have closed schools, travel and businesses big and small. Many observers have fretted about the economic costs of throwing millions of people out of work and millions of students out of school.

Now, three weeks after the United States and other countries took sweeping suppression steps that could last months or more, some public health specialists are exploring a different consequence of the mass shutdown: the thousands of deaths likely to arise unrelated to the disease itself.