Hello and welcome to the COVID Generation Revisited from the BBC World Service with me,
Ruth Alexander.
Over the next hour,
I'll be catching up with school leavers and graduates we first spoke to five years ago
as they found their plans thwarted by the coronavirus pandemic.
It's worrying.
It's very difficult and frustrating.
I'm scared I'm going to be like that generation that have a little asterisk next to their name.
If you had told me
that you my third year would consist of me taking a poorly organized evacuation flight and then having to quarantine,
I would have really told you.
What is this dystopian novel that you're reading?
At that time,
experts were warning these young people and their peers were trying to join the jobs market during the longest and deepest recession in living memory.
What we're going to see here is.
That the disease itself impacts everybody and.
Then the macroeconomics are going to impact everybody.
There's a real,
very real danger that the young person will become permanently excluded from the labour market.
Right now we face a risk of lost generation here,