As COVID-19 began to spread from its epicenter in Wuhan, the Chinese authorities adopted a series of strict lockdown measures that were criticized all over the world as authoritarian. However, when Italy became the second country hit hard by the pandemic, they unexpectedly took a page out of China’s playbook when deciding what policy to put in place to mitigate further disaster impact. This decision revealed two routes policy makers may choose to take when dealing with a pandemic: embracing lockdowns, or foregoing them to avoid the repercussions that inevitably accompany these restrictive measures.
Neil Ferguson, head of the infectious disease department at Imperial College London, chose the former. As a prominent epidemiologist known for using computer models to derive estimates for diseases, Ferguson gave a press conference estimating the toll of COVID-19 on U.S. and British society if harsh actions were not taken. These estimates convinced the UK Prime minister at the time, Boris Johnson, to enact lockdowns within a week. Although then U.S. president Donald Trump did not embrace lockdowns, at the state level, many governors and public health officials did, leading to the “stay-at-home orders” of 2020.
The primary purpose of these stay-at-home orders was to prevent hospitals from exceeding operating capacity due to COVID-19. The term used at the time was to “flatten the curve” until a vaccine became available. However, over time, “flattening the curve” came to mean reducing COVID-19 cases in the population for an indefinite period of time. The adoption of this much stricter rationale led to the shuttering of businesses, banning social gatherings, and the detrimental shutting down of in-person classes for children.
Several years into the pandemic, we now have data to judge the efficacy of the decision many nations made to implement lockdowns. The evidence so far suggests that countries that adopted these lockdown measures fared no better. At times, these countries even had worse outcomes regarding overall deaths than countries that chose to remain open.
The consequences of the lockdowns were also not confined to those directly tied to COVID-19. Inequality became more prominent as blue-collar citizens were required to continue working while white-collar workers could perform their job remotely. Deaths due to alcohol and drug abuse rose. Disadvantaged school-aged children had no respite from turbulent conditions at home as schools stayed closed, despite a lack of evidence of increased COVID-19 spread in schools. These outcomes are still impacting individual lives today and should be taken into consideration in policy making in future pandemics.
By Sarah Ortega