
Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows - samgilb
https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2020/08/wellbeing-levels-pandemicr-lockdown-analysis/
======
eric_b
Lockdowns are terrible for human mental health. We're not meant to live that
way. I mean, we put people in prison as _punishment_ because it sucks. I don't
care what these people read in to the data - lockdowns are hurting everyone's
mental health and making people act strangely.

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.

~~~
qubex
> _lockdowns are terrible for human mental health_

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.

~~~
refurb
The data looks like crap? They used search terms (!) and then had to estimate
some data because they didn’t start collecting until _after_ Covid hit.

 _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)._

~~~
qubex
The data may look like crap (to you) but it’s better than absolutist remarks
and anecdotal allusions... and as this thread so aptly shows, there’s been a
range of reactions, some even favourable.

~~~
isoskeles
There are absolutist remarks because people know whether or not their own
well-being has improved, much better than a study that attempts to declare
what their reality is. More than ever, I’m suspicious that social scientists
might have an agenda. And their methods are, as usual, not even close to
physical sciences.

------
aminozuur
In Denmark, prematurely born babies went down 90% due to lockdowns (source
below).

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...](https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/health/coronavirus-premature-
birth.html)

~~~
adventured
That happened elsewhere also. It's because they stopped doing as many early /
preventative C-sections, not primarily due to reduced stress. It points to the
developed world likely doing too many unnecessary C-sections (for example they
may do 9 that are unnecessary for every 1 that actually turns out to be
required to save a life, however they'll take that trade-off in non-Covid
times rather than risk additional deaths).

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).

~~~
UncleOxidant
Cause or effect, though? Were there less C-Sections because pregnant women had
less stress?

------
bencollier49
I'm convinced this is too high-level to draw any meaningful conclusions.
Personally, as I have a family, staying at home with them while I work, and
having no commute, is wonderful and has significantly improved my health and
wellbeing. Someone stuck in a one-person flat will have a different
experience.

~~~
devalgo
>Someone stuck in a one-person flat will have a different experience.

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.

~~~
bencollier49
I can sympathise. A lot of the time you don't even spot loneliness. Years
later you realise it was eating away at your mental health.

I think cultures which move their children directly from the family household
into a marriage may be on to something.

~~~
occamschainsaw
Also cultures where multiple generations living under the same roof is the
norm. I left home at 18 for university and had given up any expectations of
living with my family for meaningful amounts of time (a couple of weeks a year
is not the same, felt like a guest in my own home). Because of covid, I have
been at home since a couple of months. My mental health has improved
drastically. I didn't even realize the ways in which I was in a dark place
when I lived by myself. I am really debating if achieving 100% of my
professional goals is worth it, or if I could be satisfied with 80% but living
with/close to family.

~~~
bencollier49
Hopefully cultural changes as a result of lockdown will mean you don't have to
make that choice.

------
tboyd47
Headline is not complete.

"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.

~~~
rossdavidh
"Deaths of despair have already claimed more lives than COVID..." is a pretty
strong statement. I mostly agree that the headline seems highly questionable,
but I'm wondering if you have a source for the "deaths of despair" totals?

~~~
tboyd47
I said this because I heard it referenced on one of my favorite morning shows.
I looked for the source and found the CDC director's webinar.

"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...](https://www.buckinstitute.org/covid-webinar-series-transcript-
robert-redfield-md/)

------
zhoujianfu
I wonder if this can be treated as a little bit of an unscientific UBI study?
Can we conclude from this that well-being levels would overall improve with a
UBI as well?

~~~
throwaway0a5e
You can treat it that way you want but it's not going to wind up with UBI
looking good.

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.

------
rossdavidh
Wow, my initial thought was, either this is a deeply flawed analysis, or I am
just totally wired differently than other people. Lockdown was _awful_, and we
didn't even do it as long in Texas as in many places. Many friends of mine
have expressed a lot of feelings of rage, despair, etc. during the lockdown.
Whoever the people are that felt better, I don't know them, or at least they
don't talk to me about how they're feeling.

------
Taylor_OD
This data is questionable at best but great headline for those who want to
hope that we have solved COVID.

~~~
throwaway0a5e
I would argue that this headline is greater for the people who want to hope we
_haven 't_ solved COVID than those who want to hope we have.

------
bmitc
Speak for yourselves. For anyone whose wellbeing improved, they likely have
everything in place already. They have stable jobs, stable families, stable
savings and income sources, people they are either able to see in their homes
or regularly elsewhere, and are not affected by travel bans and other effects
of the viral outbreak.

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.

------
tempsy
Also reports of far fewer premature babies under lockdown...likely a result of
_less_ stress on the working mother.

------
SpicyLemonZest
I think this is less informative than the authors are thinking. Their
methodology doesn't seem sufficient to distinguish concrete effects of
lockdown from general hedonic adaptation. (The fact that suicidal ideation is
significantly down is pretty surprising, though.)

~~~
waheoo
I dunno, it looks like they cover the differences between groups in enough
detail.

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.

------
jariel
Was it lockdowns?

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'.

