The crisis hit El Salvador’s economy hard. In 2020, gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by 7.9% annually. The population will not equally share the consequences. Based on the latest international comparable estimations, in 2020 the poverty rate reached 36.4%, among the highest in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region (30.9%). It has increased six percentage points from a year earlier, compared to an increase of four percentage points in LAC. The extreme poverty rate has reached 8%, an increase of 2.4 percentage points, compared to 10.0% and 1.9 percentage points, respectively, in LAC. Public expenditures on health before the crisis stood at 7.2% of GDP, slightly higher than in LAC (6.8%) but lower than Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries (8.8%). The perceived quality of health services was negatively affected. In 2020, 54.8% of people declared being satisfied with health care, compared to 48.2% in LAC. People’s satisfaction was 11 percentage points lower than ten years before, a larger decrease than in LAC (8.7 percentage points). Between March 2020 and May 2021 schools were fully closed for 46 weeks, more than in LAC (26 weeks) and the OECD (15 weeks). In 2020, 41.4% of El Salvador citizens thought that the government was corrupt, a lower share than in LAC (72.4%) and the OECD (58.8%).