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Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

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Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#31

Post by qubex »

JoshuaDavid wrote: post #27
qubex wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 abo…

> Lockdown with family in one’s dwelling isn’t prison There's literally a punishment called "house arrest".

Yeah, and it’s very mild compared to prison, and quite literally isn’t the same thing (which is why they have different names).

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#32

Post by Implicated »

eric_b wrote: post #9

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…

> I don't care what these people read in to the data - lockdowns are hurting everyone's mental health and making people act strangely.

Ahem, "everyone"?

I, and the people I went into 'lockdown' with quite enjoyed ourselves. I'd argue that this period has been the most productive for my mental health in decades.

You aren't everyone.

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#33

Post by the_gastropod »

eric_b wrote: post #9

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…

> We know a lot about COVID now - who's most vulnerable, how likely people are to die

I find this sentiment as funny as I do frustrating. This thing has been around ~8 months. We know some about this virus. We are still completely ignorant about the long-term effects. And we're continuously finding troubling signs about it. It's looking like even mild cases can result in long-term brain, heart, and lung damage [1].

The US has handled this absolutely horribly. Our "lock down" was so mild, even in NYC, so as to be the tiniest of inconveniences, hardly the prison sentence you imply. And yet, our "freedom"-loving compatriots bitch and complain nonstop about it, and ultimately just extend the time we have to live this way. If we'd taken it seriously earlier like virtually every other modern civilization, we'd be living in much more normal circumstances today.

[1] https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2020/07/brain-fog-heart-dama...

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#34

Post by qubex »

jimmaswell wrote: post #28
qubex wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 abo…

The rebound didn't go all the way back up to how it was before.

Considering the attendant economic devastation and ongoing uncertainty about the health situation, would you expect it to?

Nobody’s arguing that there’s no adverse consequences.

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#35

Post by adventured »

aminozuur wrote: post #8

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...

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).

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#36

Post by vorpalhex »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #19
eric_b wrote: post #9

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…

Calling what we did in most of the US a "lockdown" seems like a misnomer. Wuhan did an actual lockdown where people sometimes had their apartment door welded shut and police were arresting people who went outside - that's a lockdown. In the US it was more of a shelter-in-place order. Now that we know more about how the virus spreads we can make those more targeted - forbidding people from going outside at all, for ex…

> though come winter this will be less of an option

Or we'll see a lot of investment in patio propane heaters.

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#37

Post by tdfx »

cirgue wrote: post #29
eric_b wrote: post #9

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…

I am 100% ok grunting through a lockdown if it shortens the duration of this awful fucking pandemic. The current soft restrictions with no clear endgame is 1000 times more shitty than having to hole up in your apartment knowing that it will end all the other restrictions sooner.

I've heard this many times but I don't understand the thinking behind it. How could a lockdown shorten the duration of a pandemic? AFAIK there's only three ways a pandemic ends:

(1) eradication: we control the spread so effectively through testing, tracing, and isolation that no more new people are infected

(2) herd immunity: enough people get infected that the potential pool of new hosts causes the transmission rate to decline

(3) inoculation: we find a vaccine with high effectiveness and somehow deliver that widely enough to create the herd immunity situation

It seems lockdown can only help with #1 and I'd say the horses have already left the barn on that one. The only things lockdowns can do at this point are to prevent number of acute cases from overwhelming the hospital system.

I'm not against lockdowns in extraordinary public health emergencies, but let's not pretend they are getting us any closer to a finish line.

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#38

Post by the_gastropod »

cirgue wrote: post #29
eric_b wrote: post #9

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…

I am 100% ok grunting through a lockdown if it shortens the duration of this awful fucking pandemic. The current soft restrictions with no clear endgame is 1000 times more shitty than having to hole up in your apartment knowing that it will end all the other restrictions sooner.

+1 million. I find it so frustrating the myopic nature of how so many people look at this. We could (and should) have treated this with some respect, worn masks, and stayed mostly inside for ~6 weeks. If we'd done that, we'd still have to practice some precaution, but it would likely be a significantly better reality than we're in today, and will be for the foreseeable future thanks to that fantastic individualism the U.S. does so well.

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#39

Post by zaroth »

UncleOxidant wrote: post #19
eric_b wrote: post #9

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…

Calling what we did in most of the US a "lockdown" seems like a misnomer. Wuhan did an actual lockdown where people sometimes had their apartment door welded shut and police were arresting people who went outside - that's a lockdown. In the US it was more of a shelter-in-place order. Now that we know more about how the virus spreads we can make those more targeted - forbidding people from going outside at all, for ex…

This is No true Scotsman applied to “lockdowns”. Semantics aside, there is no question that certain personality types might even favor such an environment, while it’s also inarguably true that other personality types find it highly detrimental.

I doubt the answer can be found in anecdotes, nor will the true impact be fully felt or known for some time.

However claiming that wellbeing levels improved seems to me to be extremely misleading. The unemployment levels alone are overwhelming evidence that isn’t true. The secondary (non-COVID) public health impacts will ultimately be measured in millions of lives lost, due to mis-prioritizing COVID above all else.

Re: Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

#40

Post by captainbland »

Implicated wrote: post #32
eric_b wrote: post #9

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…

> I don't care what these people read in to the data - lockdowns are hurting everyone's mental health and making people act strangely. Ahem, "everyone"? I, and the people I went into 'lockdown' with quite enjoyed ourselves. I'd argue that this period has been the most productive for my mental health in decades. You aren't everyone.

It's almost as though traveling to work, going out and seeing loads of people is great for some and horrible for others. Like humans aren't a homogenous blob that all prefer to live one way or the other. But even though under 'business as usual' we act like people have a lot of choice, in reality because of fiscal and social constraints we really, really don't. So the question should be: how do we enable people to choose? To really choose, not to be given some false choice where one has obvious horrible social and economic consequences and risks attached to it; and the other is the good 'preferred' way to live - but to really choose freely.
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