A cost-benefit analysis has defined the debate over the coronavirus lockdown from the very beginning. And now, just as critics of the lockdown predicted, we’re starting to see serious costs emerge that weren’t fully considered by shutdown proponents, both in the form of deaths from economic despair and in the societal mental health impact of long-term isolation.
Some proponents of the shut-everything-down approach falsely framed the issue as a question of lives versus GDP, profits, or stock prices. In reality, the economy is itself a matter of life and death — and a new study supports this.
A blockbuster report from the Well Being Trust and the Robert Graham Center for Policy Studies in Family Medicine and Primary Care projects that a massive number of people could die from alcohol- or drug-related deaths and suicide due to the lockdown. Under a variety of different scenarios as to how long it takes the economy to recover, the authors estimate that the number of deaths of despair could range from 28,000 to 154,000, with 68,000 as the midrange outcome.
The study says these deaths will result from three factors: “unprecedented economic failure paired with massive unemployment, mandated social isolation for months and possible residual isolation for years, and uncertainty caused by the sudden emergence of a novel, previously unknown microbe.”
Clearly, we could have prevented some, if not all, of these deaths by not locking down in the first place. That doesn’t necessarily mean the lockdown was a mistake, but it does show that we must weigh the number of lives saved from reducing the spread of the coronavirus against the deaths and despair caused by the shutdown itself.
We must also include in that cost-benefit calculation the impact the lockdown has had on mental health.
A new study from San Diego State University psychology professor Jean Twenge attempted to estimate this impact, and the preliminary findings are astounding. The professor surveyed more than 2,000 people in late-April, amid the lockdown, using a standard mental health survey, and then compared the results with the findings from a similar survey from 2018. The difference Twenge found was massive.
“2020 participants were eight times as likely to screen positive for serious mental illness – 28%, compared to 3.4% in the 2018 survey,” the study concluded. “The vast majority of the 2020 participants, 70%, met criteria for moderate to serious mental illness, compared with 22% in 2018.”
Things are likely only going to get worse. Much worse.
“The psychological damage — not counting the physical toll — caused by this deeply unnatural way of life is going to intensify,” Andrew Sullivan wrote in New York Magazine. “We remain human beings, a quintessentially social mammal, and we orient ourselves in time, looking forward to the future. When that future has been suspended, humans come undone.”
Policymakers must consider the unintended consequences of this shutdown as we debate whether it’s really feasible for much longer. Otherwise, their constituents will keep to “coming undone” — and their suffering will keep being overlooked and ignored.
