Baby Bust: Births fall in Brazilian major cities during the Covid-19 pandemic

Since the beginning of the pandemic of the new coronavirus, Brazil is a country that has been heavily affected by this new disease, and from March 2020 this country saw its death records increased as the number of Covid-19 infected got out of control. Consequently, many studies tried to explain the influence of this illness in the number of deaths and possible reductions in life expectancy. Until now, there were few empirical attempts to comprehend the effects of pandemic on birth reductions. In this work, we sought to analyze the influence of the pandemic Covid-19 on birth numbers of six major cities of Brazil. Using data from the Ministry of Health, we compared the number of monthly births from October-December 2020 and January-March 2021 with the amount of newborns in similar months and in years previous to the pandemic. Our results show a strong decline in the number of births in all cities analyzed, and most of the reductions occurred at mothers' age of 30 years old. Because of the uncertain scenario that the pandemic brought us, women are postponing their fertility intentions, causing a perhaps temporary baby bust in major cities of Brazil.