Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows
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We know a lot about COVID now - who's most vulnerable, how likely people are to die, etc. What staggers me is that huge groups of people are clamoring for more lockdowns and reduced freedoms. It's like Stockholm syndrome writ large. There is so much fear being peddled by the media and others that people have lost all perspective.
"I'm right and you can't convince me otherwise" is the cause of a lot of suffering in the world.
"People are dying".
"People" isn't a useful cohort.
Age/sex/location/lifestyle/environment/pre-existing conditions all contribute to our individual risk.
Health/financial obligations/location/social patterns contribute to our individual risk tolerance.
The CDC recommendations are not granular enough.
It's pretty good for my mental health. Being on crowded public is bad for my mental health.
I mean, to abstract this a little bit...were we meant to spend 8+ hours a day, 5 days a week, making money for other people simply because they already had money?
Were we meant to live in densely populated cities in apartment buildings that house 10s to 100s of families on a city block?
Were we meant to spend most of our time with our young children and teach them about the world instead of handing them off for 8+ hours of childcare a day starting at age 5 or 6?
this begs the question: what way were we meant to live?
In the savanna in social groups of about fifty or less related individuals leading a hunger-gatherer lifestyle.
I doubt the OP is going to argue that we all head back to that state, though, so I’m going politely disregard their absolutist and ex cattedra remarks.
IMO using the word meant implies a purpose and I don't think there is one here.
I suppose a lot of the difference in how you view that period of "lockdown" could have to do with your living situation. If you're single living in an apartment without a yard then, yes, I could see that it could be pretty awful. If you live with family and pets in a house with a yard it was pretty nice and I suspect a lot of us in that situation will look back on that period positively as time goes by - as in we'll actually become nostalgic about it.
That’s exactly what this study is disproving.
At the very least, this data is showing something that is well-known in behavioural circles: that once the threshold of a radical change is overcome, people begin to habituate to it and regress towards the mean.
> we put people in prison as punishment
Lockdown with family in one’s dwelling isn’t prison. Imprisonments is about much more than a loss of mobility.
Unfortunately, overall life satisfaction questions were only introduced into the mood tracker in April 2020. So, to consider how the pandemic and lockdown affected people’s general wellbeing, we had to attribute scores to respondents for the period prior to April based on their mood data (we calculated the scores using a statistical technique called regression).
There's literally a punishment called "house arrest".
Nobody’s arguing that there’s no adverse consequences.
You seem to be forgetting about the sizable percentage of the population that lives alone in their small dwelling. I know a lot of these people and my own anecdata indicates a lot of them are having mental health issues.
>Imprisonments is about much more than a loss of mobility.
Well sure, but I think it would be hard to argue that confinement and the resulting lack of mobility isn't the primary role of a prison.
And even in prison, we let prisoners eat with friends, play sports with friends, work with their friends, visit with family, etc. These are all things most of us felt we couldn't do during the height of lockdown.
And why do we allow prisoners to do all those things? Because we recognize that it's inhumane to deprive people of social interaction for extended periods of time.
To further reinforce this, what do we do when someone's in prison, and we want to punish them more? We decrease their mobility and increase their isolation by putting them in a small room by themselves.
Please note, I'm not arguing that lockdown was the wrong move, or that we shouldn't continue to consider various lockdown measures.
I am saying that we shouldn't be dismissive of concerns about the toll long term isolation is having on people's mental health. And that consideration of various lockdown measures should be taking into account these mental health concerns and weighing them against public health concerns.
I’m from Italy, though I was in Malta during the time of the latter’s lockdown, so I had it easy while also being intimately exposed to the consequences of one of the West’s harshest and earliest clampdowns. It’s not an experience I would wish on anybody and it’s something I really really hope won’t happen again.
But by analogy to another famously exponential process, when the neutron flux gets frisky you have to damn the consequences to the the power grid and scram in the control rods into the reactor while you still have time to do so. People will suffer mentally, but at least they shall mostly live to tell the tale...
I have not forgotten that house arrest exists and that it is a form of punishment. Restricting mobility most definitely is literally restrictive and the trade-off of public health and rights & freedoms should not be taken lightly. Governments literally ‘grounded’ their citizenry for months on end. It’s not quite as unprecedented as we think (the same policy was widely used during the Spanish Flu pandemic, once it was publicly admitted to be an issue after the War ended).
As for the "lockdown" and mental health, I have to agree with the article's findings. Myself and a lot of folks I've talked to have liked certain aspects of it - more sleep, less frenetic activity for activity sake, a slower pace. It seemed like the world was getting a long-deserved rest.
Or we'll see a lot of investment in patio propane heaters.
I doubt the answer can be found in anecdotes, nor will the true impact be fully felt or known for some time.
However claiming that wellbeing levels improved seems to me to be extremely misleading. The unemployment levels alone are overwhelming evidence that isn’t true. The secondary (non-COVID) public health impacts will ultimately be measured in millions of lives lost, due to mis-prioritizing COVID above all else.
However, a lot of those unemployed service workers were making more money on unemployment than they did in their previous jobs. Add in the $1200 check and that certainly helped in that April-July period.
> there is no question that certain personality types might even favor such an environment
Yes, for sure. Introvert here. Loved it. I guess that means I could have had a successful career in lighthouse keeping in a former age.
A wonder if a lot of people argue for lockdowns not just because they think it might be a worthy socioeconomic trade-off, but because they actually enjoy life better that way and aren’t personally being devastated by it. Similarly, people against lockdown could have just not been personally effected by COVID, or know anyone who has been.
Humans are particularly bad at balancing very large impact events (we tend to underestimate the big stuff and overestimate the small). I think it still very much remains to be seen which was the lesser evil — COVID or the response thereto.
Sure, but it looks like the Democratic House and even the President want them to continue at least till year end.
> I think it still very much remains to be seen which was the lesser evil — COVID or the response thereto.
As an epidemiologist said months back (paraphrasing): "success in dealing with a pandemic will always be seen as having been an over-reaction after the fact."
If the above is the logic someone is using to sell me on an idea, my suspicion level increases.
Of course there are things we have to weigh, physical health threat vs mental health pressures and national security, etc.
But you are absolutely right that the media want to paint narratives. I’ve come to the conclusion it’s not so much collusion but rather it’s their nature to do that. So both on the left or right we get narratives. They feel obliged to herd people one way or another. It’s like they’re on a mission to getting people to not think for themselves. That’s the main objective.
"The media", in so far as it's a monolithic group (it's not), needs to get us riled up, divided, and angry. Not for some nefarious shadow government pulling the strings reasons, but because they need to pay the bills.
What's fascinating is how well the media as a whole manages to do it. Some portion of the masses can accept a mainstream point of view (eg wearing masks), but it seems a certain percentage of people just really have to not. And to those people (who are all the same), "alternative outlets" sell them on being special and that they are the only thinkers out there. Not like the rest of the sheep wearing muzzles. It would be funnier if it weren't literally life-threatening right now.
Step back, consider your principles, and draw your own conclusions. But it has to be okay if those conclusions simply accept what the mainstream narrative is telling you. Which is wear a mask, especially when indoors with groups of people.
(1) eradication: we control the spread so effectively through testing, tracing, and isolation that no more new people are infected
(2) herd immunity: enough people get infected that the potential pool of new hosts causes the transmission rate to decline
(3) inoculation: we find a vaccine with high effectiveness and somehow deliver that widely enough to create the herd immunity situation
It seems lockdown can only help with #1 and I'd say the horses have already left the barn on that one. The only things lockdowns can do at this point are to prevent number of acute cases from overwhelming the hospital system.
I'm not against lockdowns in extraordinary public health emergencies, but let's not pretend they are getting us any closer to a finish line.
The idea is to seriously lock down / wear masks, etc. for ~6 weeks to get to a point where the case-load is so small that it's manageable with little effort (not back to 100% normal). Instead, the U.S. strategy has been to put in medium effort / inconvenience indefinitely.
No country I'm aware of believes that even the smallest outbreaks can be handled with little effort. Health officials across the globe have been consistently saying that the coronavirus will spread unless people stay very far from normal.
If a vaccine is only partially effective, and their tolerance for cases is literally lockdown at the first case, then they will never re-open.
Different vaccines will have different efficacy. None will be perfect.
(“Argument by analogy is very powerful and entirely fallacious”, so make of my words what you may.)
My point was that in this case, people are expecting lockdown to stop the reaction entirely, when in fact the control rods are only intended to slow it down. The post I replied to seemed to believe that lockdown was intended to shorten the duration of the pandemic, when in fact it has the opposite effect (for the purpose of getting good side effects like keeping ICU beds available).
Some amount of lengthening is essential to keep hospitals from being overwhelmed, of course. In many lockdown environments, the target case numbers are much lower than necessary for that goal, if not zero.
Ahem, "everyone"?
I, and the people I went into 'lockdown' with quite enjoyed ourselves. I'd argue that this period has been the most productive for my mental health in decades.
You aren't everyone.
I find this sentiment as funny as I do frustrating. This thing has been around ~8 months. We know some about this virus. We are still completely ignorant about the long-term effects. And we're continuously finding troubling signs about it. It's looking like even mild cases can result in long-term brain, heart, and lung damage [1].
The US has handled this absolutely horribly. Our "lock down" was so mild, even in NYC, so as to be the tiniest of inconveniences, hardly the prison sentence you imply. And yet, our "freedom"-loving compatriots bitch and complain nonstop about it, and ultimately just extend the time we have to live this way. If we'd taken it seriously earlier like virtually every other modern civilization, we'd be living in much more normal circumstances today.
[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/brain-fog-heart-dama...
That's a line I hear repeated but it doesn't seem to align to reality. Even places that have taken this deadly seriously have seen reoccurent outbreaks including Hong Kong[^1] and Tokyo[^2]. Likewise some areas that had very loose restrictions initially.. never had it that bad.
The reality is that the lockdowns and shelter in place orders did very little, and factors such as airports and borders are much stronger indicators of whether we'll see more virus spread. Masks, including homemade masks, do seem to be very effective and pushing people to use them seems to make meaningful differences - but it's not by itself sufficient (at least not homemade masks).
> And yet, our "freedom"-loving compatriots bitch and complain nonstop about it,
Part of freedom means the freedom to disagree. Sure, you can disagree with them as well and they may be entirely wrong - and that's still OK. That isn't a failure of freedom, it's a success story and I'd much rather have some idiots shouting loudly than black bag them by secret police or have "Winnie the Pooh" start getting censored in private messages.
[^1]: They're past the worst of their resurgence from the current looks, but https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/other/hong-kong-sees-fewest-... has a nice graph showing their second spike
[^2]: https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2020/08/04/national/japan-...
also, use a mask when distancing (indoors with strangers) isn't possible, but understand that masks are inferior to distancing for a host of reasons, including the non-transivity of controlled tests to the wider world and its astonishing variety. masks also add little marginal benefit on top of distancing for most folks, particularly if not meticulously adhering to a long list of proper usage rules.
distance, it does a body good (in these covid times).
Japan has had ~1,000 covid deaths. And Hong Kong has had something like 25 deaths. The US is about to hit 170,000.
> Part of freedom means the freedom to disagree. Sure, you can disagree with them as well and they may be entirely wrong - and that's still OK. That isn't a failure of freedom, it's a success story and I'd much rather have some idiots shouting loudly than black bag them by secret police or have "Winnie the Pooh" start getting censored in private messages.
There's a middle between these poles you've created. This is the ol' libertarian dilemma: when one person's freedom encroaches on another. People's "freedom" to not wear a mask encroaches on my freedom to not get sick. Freedom requires some modicum of social responsibility. Without it, freedom can't exist.
news media likes to harp on this now that the initial novelty has worn off, with stories about extreme cases of serious complications to keep the fear train going and the ad bucks rolling in.
but bodies are complex. every ailment has a long tail of odd residuals. in fact, just living has a long tail of odd residuals. there's little evidence so far that this ailment has any special long-term effect.
If you didn't find the article I posted above compelling, I'd love to hear why. Here's another [1] BBC article suggesting approximately 50% of covid cases result in brain damage. Why should we not take this seriously?
[1] https://www.bbc.com/future/article/20200622-the-long-term-ef...
The limbic system floods the brain with chemicals and we react with the most accessible form of motor agency given the context.
Turn the media off. Avoid the emotional hive mind which is built on making you feel exactly as you’re reacting. Impulsive, anxious, the slippery slope that ends it all is around the corner.
Because if it ends up being the case it will be a self fulfilling prophecy thanks to anxious, paranoid idiots pushing buttons they shouldn’t.
I live outside the burbs and work remote. My daily habit hasn’t changed much.
Your bubble isn’t everyone’s
I’m pretty convinced the anxiety is from the reality of the virus itself and the anxiety is misattributed to “lockdown” thanks to propaganda.
Propaganda 101: use emotional moment to insert talking point. Pandemic is a nice organic anxiety to use to nudge people towards fear of economic collapse.
You’re doing this to yourself.
I really didn't expect this to be the top take on HackerNews. This reads like anti-masker rhetoric.
But if they were not here? Being alone all the time sucks
I'm not sure what you think this means. Are you arguing that we're "meant to live" by commuting to work and gathering in cafes and restaurants?
Humans are extraordinarily adaptive. We live anywhere that food can be grown, and oxygen is readily available. We aren't "meant" to do anything. All you are announcing is that you, personally, don't like to adapt.
We just stopped going to the office, restaurants, close quarters public spaces.
What staggers me is that huge groups of people see countries that didn't take this seriously vs countries that did, and the difference in deaths, and yet still don't want to take this seriously.
This sounds like partisan pseudoscience.
Researchers said the most plausible reason was due to reduced stress levels in pregnant women.
https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/health/coronavirus-premat...
The C-sections spike the premature counts without any evidence that they're all required (it's strictly loose guesswork by the doctors in most cases, rather than being literally urgent; they have minimal fear of a C-section procedure today and liberally do them). This isn't uncommon, the developed world is frequently guilty of overdoing preventative & early detection medicine (we did it with mammograms, we did it with prostate cancer, and so on).
As someone in this position I can say that the lack of a commute has been amazing, I'm sleeping much better and less stressed overall but the lack of social contact is definitely weighing down.
I think cultures which move their children directly from the family household into a marriage may be on to something.
Given that, it could be a gap from family to 20s single life may cause a shock to the system to be better understood.
Is there such a thing as too harsh an emotional break to self reliance and does it have an epigenetic or other measurable response?
And consider elites almost always have a big family watching their back, so to speak. Often nurturing and supportive in ways the hip youth find stifling and cowardly.
"After a rise in negative emotions at the start of the pandemic, wellbeing improved once lockdowns began – but not for everyone."
That's the understatement of the year. Suicides, drug abuse, child sexual abuse, domestic violence, and food insecurity have risen sharply since the lockdown. Deaths of despair have already claimed more lives than COVID, even with the bogus death tallies.
Yet we're all supposed to be okay with this because of some Google Trends data? I want to be far, far away from anyone who thinks like this. Like, catch me on the other side of the planet far.
"We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from COVID. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose that are above excess that we had as background than we are seeing the deaths from COVID." [0]
I can't tell from his wording whether he's talking about just young people or all age groups, but the context suggests he's talking about young people.
Unfortunately, neither the CDC nor any other agency has published the nationwide suicide totals for 2020 yet so I can't cross-reference the CDC director's statement.
Searching for anything related to "deaths" on Google or DuckDuckGo within the past month (which I am increasingly seeing as a front for Google) only returns COVID-19 death information.
---------------
[0] https://www.buckinstitute.org/covid-webinar-series-transcrip...
On the economic side:
Huge sectors of the economy being shut down or running at reduced efficiency for possibly a year or more are basically the apocalypse for UBI because any UBI that is more than temporary fundamentally relies on the surplus generated by the working to support the non-working. UBI needs money going in to balance the money going out and the pandemic severely constrained the in-flow.
On the social side:
Almost nobody is going back to school, pursing the arts or any of the other good things they're supposed to start doing at scale when relieved (in full or part) of the need to work because of the pandemic. What they are doing more is drinking silver bullets after an exhausting day of setting off fireworks (a form of recreation I fully endorse). That's not exactly the vision of what people will do in their free time most UBI proponents seem to have.
Normal times with the occasional financial panic or bust in select industry are a much better argument for UBI than the current pandemic.
You could even go so far as to say that people would be happier under socialism than capitalism :)
My wellbeing is at an all-time low and has continued to deteriorate since January. My family is split across the world due to unnecessary travel bans. Everyone in this thread is saying how the lockdowns were unnecessary long term but then everyone is seemingly okay with the government killing people's jobs and splitting up families with travel bans that don't take anything into consideration. There's no reason why travel for family members and H1B workers and immigrants, especially those in extraneous situations, is still blocked when hotel quarantines could be put in place, just like they are for inter-country travel. Just in my circle alone, the U.S. has lost a dozen or so Chinese citizens who hold advanced degrees or who are doctors who were either forced back to China, wanted to go back (and get out of the U.S.), or can't come back to the U.S. Good luck with the brain drain since these people were working for U.S. hospitals and companies. Not only are we losing people who were already here and wanted to be here, we're going to lose countless more who would have come to the U.S. in the future. This will have consequences.
My fiancée is locked out of the country. We can't sell her car because she's not here and there are policies in place that protect against the situation. Online car selling websites have auto-locked our account since she logs in China, and I log in from the U.S., and they won't re-open it as "you can't sell your car while on vacation" (direct quote). The title transfer process is difficult if not impossible while she's out of the country, and we need help, but the RMV is not responsive. If you can even find a phone number for the RMV, you call and then it states they have high call volume and then says to call back tomorrow and then automatically hangs up on you. We're paying for a car, including insurance, that just sits around and can't legally sell it without embarking on a process that could take months and capital to simply secure the title before even attempting to sell. People always support insurance companies as if they decide your premium based upon statistics and probability. So what's the probability that our car that just sits parked and is driven once every week or two gets damaged and why haven't our rates gone down to reflect this greatly reduced probability? Yet, if I got a ticket tomorrow, they'd have no problem raising the rates.
My rent actually was increased in March, and rent everywhere seems as high or higher than before as I try to move due to noise issues with my neighbors. Our marriage is getting delayed by years due to this. We can't get through the travel bans or anything else because we're not officially married (we had planned on doing it immediately after coming back from China), and we can't get married unless we're together, yet you can enter into all sorts of other legal agreements remotely.
Policies are not updating with the situations, if anything they're regressing, and everything is moving in molasses. Everything is taking at least twice as long as it did before. Prices are actually increasing for things. All the predatory behavior on people has increased and now people have a new excuse (COVID) on why everything doesn't work or is slow.
If your wellbeing has improved during this time, good for you. For those of us where it hasn't, it has deteriorated exponentially. And my family is in the best of the worst cases. We still have our jobs, have places to stay, and have supportive families. I truly feel for those struggling. The narcissism of people to think that they're happier because their commute is gone is mindboggling, when people are dying or living as death on a daily basis due to everything going on.
I was wondering if, for instance the well-being of some people lowered during pandemic, but then the many who's life improved once they received pay to stay home and chill just outweighed all those who were diminished by the pandemic earlier.
Or the beginning of the realisation that this is not the black plague come to wipe us out, and that it's going to affect mostly specific groups?
Edit: what they should map is probably a 'fear index'. Watching NYC / Gov. Cuomo on CNN every day, talk about 'hospitals overflowing' in NY, thinking 'OMG that is what is going to happen where I live soon' - literally Army Medical ships being sent in for civilian purposes, daily news clips of increasing numbers of deaths, all of the unknown - that was scary. We're no longer 'living in fear', rather, come to accept the uncomfortable terms of social distancing, not going to work etc.. The tone in the daily news is completely different. Also, we are now over the first wave of 'cognisance' of the situation. 3 months ago what happened was utterly unimaginable to all of us. Literally all businesses closing their doors, sports cancelled, we were in 'shock'. We're not in 'shock' anymore, we're dealing with 'the new normal'.