Are Lockdown Measures Effective Against COVID-19? Essay Example

Governments are always faced with situations where the outcome of choices are not as obvious as one may think. Any changes to existing policies will not only affect the population within a country’s borders but also beyond. Since the world now is more connected than ever before, governments must be even more careful before enacting policies restricting freedoms. During the pandemic, such policies were put into place for the sake of protecting the country’s population against the Covid infection. Data and hindsight now clearly show that the lockdowns were not worth it.

One of the reasons why it’s not worth the lockdown is that it’s devastating the world's economy.Nowadays, the world's manufacturing industries are all connected. Therefore, if one industry shuts down, it will affect multiple industries that are connected and the logistics behind it. Since suppliers often provide goods to each other, if one supplier has a problem, its supply chain participants will also be impacted. For example, transportation is very important for the supply chain since one country needs to sell wheat, as a result, the other country won’t be able to make money, so people in that country won’t be able to survive. Another example would be that if Iceland doesn’t have this kind of food domestically, they will be forced to import it from other places and be vulnerable as well as dependent on international imports. Due to COVID, the restriction measures taken by various places will cause all the shipping and ports to stop. This directly affects their food imports and the jobs related to anything in connection with it. According to the BBC’s website, the unemployment rate is high due to the fact that companies didn't make any profit during COVID, so they were unable to pay the workers. Logically, workers need money to survive, therefore, they need to rely on the government for money when they cannot get any from work. If companies don't make any profit and money and workers don't get paid, they also don't have any money to spend, this leads to a recession. As mentioned in thebalance.com: "The COVID-19 pandemic created a devastating recession as the economy shrank a record 31.4% in the second quarter of 2020." A direct result of this recession is that food prices increased due to the supply of agricultural products in the market being in short supply, so prices rose. It is also tedious to import food to a certain place since shipping is mostly closed, as a result, it's becoming increasingly scarce and expensive, according to the International Food Policy Research Institute’s website and statistics.

Lockdowns have a huge impact on the freedom of movement. Many policies put in place at the moment of the pandemic restricted the flow and travel of a country’s entire population. Freedom of movement is directly tied to a person’s personal freedom to not be entrapped or isolated from their peers. By restricting the freedom of movement or limiting it for the majority of people, it affected their daily lives, from trying to get to work to seeing their family. Traveling from point A to point B is usually taken for granted within a country’s borders, however, during the pandemic, many confusing policies made it more difficult to travel to usual destinations. Lockdowns also made it incredibly difficult to go see the last moments of their relatives and affected many people’s lives. It is estimated that as many as a million people died directly from COVID, many without being able to see their families in their dying moments. This was utterly unnecessary, and no one deserves to pass away without their loved ones. People could no longer travel around due to lockdowns or meet outside in a safe space if they couldn’t be home, " The impact of the COVID-19 crisis removed more than 1 billion passengers for the whole year 2020 compared to the projected baseline (pre-COVID-19 forecast for 2020), representing a decline of 64.6% of global passenger traffic (see Table 1). Compared to the 2019 level, the decline is recorded at 63.3%. " This statistic given by census.gov represents travellers regardless of their motive, for business, leisure, emergency, seeing family, going back home, fleeing from home, etc. People often associate travel with leisure, which should not be the case, therefore, the lockdowns prevented people from going to places they needed to go unnecessarily. The volatility of the lockdowns and procedures further caused chaos amongst travellers and negatively impacted them and their families on many levels.

Every day, there are people who have been affected by COVID not only physically, but there are also people who have been affected by mental health issues from it. KFF.org recorded that "During the pandemic, about 4 in 10 adults in the U.S. have reported symptoms of anxiety or depressive disorder, a share that has been largely consistent, up from one in ten adults who reported these symptoms from January to June 2019 (Figure 1 below)."Since the outbreak of COVID around the world, the economies of all countries have been severely damaged. Many companies have cut wages, fired employees, gone bankrupt, closed down, etc. Public places have closed and schools have stopped teaching offline, which really impacts a person's mental health since humans need to socialize with each other to be able to stay healthy and happy mentally. It was impossible to socialize offline due to lockdowns and curfews. These series of changes in life and work have left many people in a low mood, unable to stay positive and suffering from COVID, which causes depression and mental problems. Even after recovering from COVID, post-COVID symptoms are still lingering and hit patients hard. According to the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine: "After recovering from the coronavirus, some people are left with lingering anxiety, depression, and other post-COVID mental health issues." These may be caused by the fact that they were hospitalized, or it may be because of the initial lack of understanding of the COVID that some patients with COVID have no friends or lose many even after they recover because others are afraid of infection. Given the fact that the coronavirus is contagious, many people will obviously refuse to interact with people that have been infected by it. They will stay far away from the people who got infected and be reluctant to communicate with them, which can cause these people, even after they recover, to suffer from PTSD, and they can’t engage in normal social communication. The virus exacerbates our fear of death, making us more anxious. Many people will stress about it every day, worrying about whether they are infected, which might also cause a mental health problem. We can see from the image below that the number is increasing rapidly, which might include some of the reasons, for example, the death of a friend or family member, fear of getting COVID, post-COVID symptoms, lockdown, curfew, no socializing, fear of death, unable to travel, etc. Lockdowns were only worsening the effects of isolation, depression, and guilt in people’s minds.

Last but not least, many things are all interconnected such as the economy, freedom of movement, and people’s mental health. During the pandemic, some people couldn’t afford to live, but they still needed to have a place to eat or live. Being confined during lockdowns threatened these interconnected aspects of their lives and shattered any security they thought they may have had. As a dreadful result, a lot of people committed suicide during COVID time and many others have had various problems since then. A majority of these negative effects could have been mitigated instead of worsened from the lockdowns. Lockdowns undermine our rights, and if the majority of us do not want a lockdown because it has taken away our liberty, harmed the economy, and so on, why did we have them in the first place?

Bibliography

Amadeo, K. (n.d.). How covid-19 has affected the U.S. economy. The Balance. Retrieved June 24, 2022, from https://www.thebalance.com/how-covid-19-has-affected-the-us-economy-5092445

Bureau, U. S. C. (2022, March 25). Tourism and related industries declined sharply in northeastern states in Spring 2020, women and young workers more affected nationwide. Census.gov. Retrieved June 24, 2022, from https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2021/06/initial-impact-of-covid-19-on-travel-tourism-outdoor-recreation- varied-widely-across-states.html

Ifpri.org. (n.d.). Retrieved June 24, 2022, from https://www.ifpri.org/blog/covid-19-and-rising-global-food-prices-whats-really-happening

Long covid: Long-term effects of COVID-19. Johns Hopkins Medicine. (2022, June 14). Retrieved June 24, 2022,from https://www.hopkinsmedicine.org/health/conditions-and-diseases/coronavirus/covid-long-haulers-long-term-effe cts-of-covid19?amp=true

Lora Jones, D. P. & D. B. (2021, January 24). Coronavirus: How the pandemic has changed the World Economy. BBC News. Retrieved June 24, 2022, from https://www.bbc.com/news/business-51706225

Nirmita Panchal, R. K., & 2021, F. (2022, April 28). The implications of COVID-19 for mental health and substance use. KFF. Retrieved June 24, 2022, from https://www.kff.org/coronavirus-covid-19/issue-brief/the-implications-of-covid-19-for-mental-health-and-substa nce-use/