By Drew Holden
As the winter has deepened, the pandemic has surged. In the United States, case counts and hospitalizations are hitting and exceeding their highest points since the pandemic began. Countries across Europe have reinstated lockdowns and there are rumblings that states across the country could soon follow suit — some parts of California, for instance, have instituted new stay-at-home orders.
Renewed lockdowns may be necessary, but they would be no panacea for public health, and we should not put them in place without carefully considering the human costs, which are broad and deep. It is imperative that we learn from and apply the lessons of the initial lockdowns.
Extended social isolation can have serious health implications, from heart disease and dementia to depression and death. During the pandemic, our diets and lifestyles got worse, increasing our vulnerability to the very disease that isolation is meant to help address.
Our mental health suffers, too. The psychological effects of loneliness are a health risk comparable with risk obesity or smoking. Anxiety and depression have spiked since lockdown orders went into effect. The weeks immediately following them saw nearly an 18 percent jump in overdose deaths and, as of last month, more than 40 states had reported increases. One in four young adults age 18 to 25 reported seriously considering suicide within the 30-day window of a recent study. Experts fear that suicides may increase; for young Americans, these concerns are even more acute. Calls to domestic violence hotlines have soared. America’s elderly are dying from the isolation that was meant to keep them safe.
To be sure, the increasing prevalence of mental health challenges is not all due to the lockdowns. The attendant health risks of a global pandemic to an individual or their loved ones must certainly be a contributing factor, too. But our understanding that social isolation can seriously damage physical and mental health predates the pandemic.
Some researchers worry that the social isolation has inflicted damage to mental health that will outlast even the worst of the pandemic. We may not have a full accounting of the consequences for years to come.
There will be significant longterm consequences from school closures as well. About half of the country’s school districts held remote classes, either exclusively or partially, at the start of the year. This approach has meaningfully reduced educational quality, particularly for children of color.
These losses don’t even take into account the direct effects of the lockdowns on the economy. Small businesses have closed their doors at very high rates as the American economy sputtered in response to stay-at-home orders. One study estimates that 60 percent of the millions of jobs lost between January and April were a result of the lockdowns, not the virus itself. The economic uncertainty caused by unemployment comes with its own health risks.
While the potential consequences of locking down states and cities were an important part of the debate in late March when the idea seemed far-fetched, they’ve since fallen from the discussion.
Even suggesting that the negative effects of lockdowns can be measured on the same scale as those of the virus itself has been consigned to the fringes of public opinion.
Part of the problem is that the weight of the lockdown has not been evenly borne. For millions of Americans, these restrictions have been merely an inconvenient drain on the joys of everyday life. For many, lockdown has even been financially beneficial; some people are paying off debt and avoiding big purchases. It can be easy to assume that everyone else is experiencing these circumstances the same way.
It’s also hard to tally the indirect fallout of lockdowns. A death certificate can tell us that someone died of Covid-19. It cannot tell us that the social isolation of lockdown was a factor in someone’s drug overdose. There is no nightly ovation for survivors of domestic violence.
These tragedies have become an ambient backdrop to everyday life: present but forgotten, real but ignored. Perhaps America has simply gotten comfortable ignoring the quiet suffering of others.
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Shut downs served an initial purpose; to allow facilities to prepare for an onslaught of cases, for us to build up stocks of PPE (that had been depleted and NOT replenished) and to produce the ventilators expected to be needed. All this was a resounding success.
Of course the Democrats, once they realized the stupidity of their initial position to oppose any and all things Trump was doing to prepare and to downplay the seriousness of the approaching epidemic, exploited the crisis for their political gain. Though it was the “science” that promoted the shutdowns, Democrats blamed the resulting economic downturn on Trump. Even as they accused Trump of wrecking the economy, they clung to the idea of MORE shutdowns. Where they were in control, they became drunk with unconstitutional power.
Not true. Trillions of dollars were dedicated to trying to relieve the hardships created by shutdowns. Pelosi and the Democrats, though, wanted the pain and suffering to reach a peak at the proper moment, so they began blocking needed aid as the 2020 elections approached. Oh, Nancy was all for more spending, as long as it went mostly to liberal interests, but she would load proposals with so many poison pills that she was certain no agreements could be met.
In the midst of the shutdowns and when the economy began reopening, the left began their terror offences against liberal cities; not because they had issues with the liberal cities but because that was the only locations they could get away with their reign of terror. Night after night, massive demonstrations, riots and looting happened, terrorizing citizens and destroying businesses, most of them shut down and undefended. But the left never complained about THOSE “gatherings”. They were antiseptic, incapable of spreading the virus. Certainly not a super-spreading event like 6 people gathering at an outdoor table for a meal.
And shutdowns posed little or no hardships on liberal leadership, who simply ignored and violated their own rules. That tells you how critical to community health they actually BELIEVED their rules are. They simply don’t care.