This paper reconstructs the full welfare distributions from household surveys of 160 countries, covering 96.5 percent of the global population, to estimate the pandemic-induced increases in global poverty and provide information on the potential short-term effects of income-support programmes on mitigating such increases. Crucially, the analysis performs a large-scale simulation by combining the welfare distributions with the database of social protection measures of Gentilini et al. (2021) and estimates such effects from 72 actual income-support programmes planned or implemented across 41 countries. The paper reports three findings: First, the projection of additional extreme poverty, in the absence of income support, ranges between 117 million people under a distributive-neutral projection and 168 million people under a distributive-regressive projection —which may better reflect how the shock impacted poor and vulnerable households. Second, a simulation of the hypothetical effects of a temporary basic income with an investment of 0.5 percent of developing countries’ GDP, spread over six months, finds that this amount would mitigate to a large extent, at least temporarily, the increase in global poverty at both the $1.90- and $3.20-a-day thresholds, although poverty would still increase significantly in the poorest regions of the world. Third, the analysis of income-support programmes in 41 countries suggests that they may have mitigated, at least temporarily, the overall increase in poverty in upper-middle income countries but may have been insufficient to mitigate the increase in poverty at any poverty line in low-income countries. Income support likely mitigated 60 percent of the increase in poverty at the $3.20-a-day threshold and 20 percent at the $5.50-a-day threshold among lower-middle-income countries. This pattern is correlated with the amount of social assistance and social insurance per capita payments made in each country.