The bad, the ugly, and the good about lockdowns

Lockdowns come with huge socio-economic costs. Hence, it’s important to understand whether they also offer any benefit and, if so, when their use is justified, if ever.

Before we continue, a clarification: the article refers to lockdowns only limiting indoor activities. Limiting outdoor activities mostly doesn’t make sense, and implementing such measures was mostly a mistake.

The economic costs of lockdowns

Lockdowns obviously come with huge economic costs. Plenty of industries, such as restaurants, tourism, and entertainment had to close their businesses or faced a large decrease in customers. Not only the owners and employees of these businesses suffered, but also their suppliers and taxpayers in general (after all, someone must pay the subsidies to distressed businesses).

However, even countries that did not lockdown also saw an economic contraction (for example, Sweden’s GDP declined by 8.6 percent in the second quarter of 2020[1]). Hence, it is important to distinguish the economic costs due to the lockdowns from those that happened with the lockdowns.

The social costs of lockdowns

Lockdowns also had enormous social costs – among others, it was harder, if not at moments impossible, to meet friends and family, indoor sports were suspended, and schools moved to less effective remote learning.

The mental health costs of lockdown

Despite the intuition that financial stress and reduced socialization might decrease mental health, suicides decreased during lockdowns. In 2020, suicides decreased by 3% in the US[2] and decreased by 8% in the UK.[3] Moreover, it has been observed that COVID-related school closures reduced youth suicides.[4] This seems to indicate that, while lockdowns had a negative effect on the mental health of some, they also had a positive effect on the mental health of others, and the net effect might not have been negative after all.

The physical health costs of lockdowns

Lockdowns also came with health costs, as they led to people leading a more sedentary lifestyle and prevented them from accessing some health-related services, such as gyms and other sports venues.

During lockdowns, many people suffered from lower access to healthcare services. However, this is more likely to have happened with the lockdowns than due to the lockdowns. This topic is examined in the article “Were hospitals overwhelmed during the pandemic?” but consider that places that locked down with low viral spread, such as Singapore in 2020 and Sicily during the first wave, saw negative excess deaths – in other words, fewer people died than usual: a strong indicator that lockdowns have a positive net effect on population physical health.

The health benefits of lockdowns

Lockdowns come with health costs but also have health benefits. 

Lockdowns help reduce the spread of COVID and other viruses such as the flu (see the article “Did the flu really disappear in 2020?” and “Do lockdowns work?” ).

This is relevant even if “we’re all going to get it eventually” because it helps to spread infections over time – both to prevent hospital overwhelm and to give people a chance to get vaccinated before they catch the virus for the first time.

Do the health benefits of lockdowns exceed their health costs?

It depends on how severe the virus causing the pandemic is.

Compare two scenarios, A and B. In scenario A, we lock down because of a relatively mild virus. In scenario B, we lock down because of a severe virus. The costs of locking down are similar in both scenarios, whereas the costs of not locking down are higher in scenario B. Hence, it might be that locking down might be a bad idea in scenario B and a good idea in scenario A.

So, should we have locked down during the COVID pandemic?

Instead of locking down, we should have looked for other ways to reduce the spread.

The best option would have been to close long-range travel early. If we had closed flights out of China on the day the first COVID outbreak became public, we might have avoided the pandemic. Perhaps the virus was already in our country, but we would have had fewer people infected to begin with, which would have resulted in fewer infections, hence lower hospital overwhelm, hence lower need to lockdown.

The second-best option would have been to use measures to lower the spread that are less costly than lockdowns, such as wearing good masks, improving ventilation, and avoiding most large indoor gatherings. However, that didn’t happen.

The failure to curb the spread of the virus in other ways caused many countries to find themselves in a lose-lose situation, where both choices are bad: lockdown and incur huge socio-economic costs, or not lockdown and incur a higher death toll.

So, should we lock down during an eventual next pandemic?

Given the huge costs of lockdowns, we should first and foremost do whatever possible to avoid locking down. This means being faster in reacting to eventual outbreaks of novel viruses, improving indoor ventilation, distributing good masks and wearing them when necessary, and so on.

If, despite that, hospitals were to find themselves overwhelmed again (a sign of a virus more severe than we can handle), then lockdowns would be an effective last resort to prevent an even higher death toll.

Sources