Ecuador’s economy has been hit hard by the COVID-19 pandemic. In 2020, gross domestic product (GDP) contracted by more than 7%, compared to a year earlier. In 2020, based on the latest international comparable estimations the poverty rate reached 33.5%, almost ten percentage points higher than in 2019. The extreme poverty rate was 12.8%, more than five percentage points higher than a year earlier. These rates are among the highest in the Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) region, where average poverty and extreme poverty rates were 30.9% and 10.0%, respectively, in 2020. Between March 2020 and May 2021, schools were fully closed for 39 weeks, more than the averages in LAC (26 weeks) and the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) (15 weeks). Given the overall low rate of Internet use (54.1%), school closures had a negative impact on both children’s education and families due to expanded care responsibility. Ecuador entered the pandemic with increasing public expenditures on health. In the last decade, they increased by 1.2 percentage points of GDP and had reached 8.3% of GDP before the crisis. This figure is higher than in LAC (6.8%) but lower than in the OECD (8.8%). However, people’s perceptions of the quality of health services are negative. In 2020, just 44.3% of people declared being satisfied with health care, compared to 48.2% in LAC and 70.7% in the OECD. In 2020, 86.0% of citizens thought that the government was corrupt. This proportion is high, both compared to LAC (72.4%) and the OECD (58.8%).