CDC Study Finds Anxiety and Depression Surged After COVID Lockdowns; COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. A Key Lesson of the Pandemic, and other C-Virus related stories

AP Photo/Morgan Lee

CDC study finds anxiety and depression surged after COVID lockdowns:

U.S. adults experienced a “significant increase” in mental health complaints after the COVID-19 pandemic restricted social interaction, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reported Thursday.

The CDC’s National Center for Health Statistics estimated that anxiety symptoms increased from 15.6% of all adults responding to a nationwide survey in 2019 to 18.2% in 2022. Depression symptoms rose from 18.5% to 21.4% of adults over the same period.

“This report provides a snapshot of two time periods, one before the COVID-19 pandemic and the other during the pandemic, although closer to the declared end to the pandemic than the peak,” said Emily Terlizzi, a CDC statistician and co-author of the report. “Although it is not possible to attribute increases seen in the prevalence of anxiety and depression symptoms directly to the pandemic, previous studies have found the pandemic contributed to increased stress levels as well as social isolation and loneliness, particularly at its onset.”

Ms. Terlizzi added that “measuring the prevalence of anxiety and depression symptoms … helps gauge the adequacy of available services and interventions.”

Increases in symptoms of anxiety and depression occurred among all racial and demographic groups, including adults aged 18 to 44 and those with high education levels.

The CDC found the surges were worst among young adults aged 18 to 29, women, high school dropouts, rural residents and people living at or below the federal poverty line.

Researchers also noted that Asian Americans were less likely than Hispanic, Black and White adults to report experiencing anxiety and depression during the last two weeks before they finished the surveys.

The findings come as public health officials have flagged increased screen time since the pandemic as a public health crisis threatening the academic performance, mental health and decision-making skills of teens and young adults. --->READ MORE HERE

Photo: JOHN TAGGART/The New York Times/REDUX

COVID Lockdowns Were a Giant Experiment. It Was a Failure. A key lesson of the pandemic:

On April 8, 2020, the Chinese government lifted its lockdown of Wuhan. It had lasted 76 days — two and a half months during which no one was allowed to leave this industrial city of 11 million people, or even leave their homes. Until the Chinese government deployed this tactic, a strict batten-down-the-hatches approach had never been used before to combat a pandemic. Yes, for centuries infected people had been quarantined in their homes, where they would either recover or die. But that was very different from locking down an entire city; the World Health Organization called it “unprecedented in public health history.”

The word the citizens of Wuhan used to describe their situation was fengcheng — “sealed city.” But the English-language media was soon using the word lockdown instead — and reacting with horror. “That the Chinese government can lock millions of people into cities with almost no advance notice should not be considered anything other than terrifying,” a China human rights expert told The Guardian. Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor of global health law at Georgetown University, told the Washington Post that “these kinds of lockdowns are very rare and never effective.”

The Chinese government, however, was committed to this “zero-COVID” strategy, as it was called. In mid-March 2020, by which time some 50 million people had been forced into lockdowns, China recorded its first day since January with no domestic transmissions — which it offered as proof that its approach was working. For their part, Chinese citizens viewed being confined to their homes as their patriotic duty.

For the next two years, harsh lockdowns remained China’s default response whenever there was an outbreak anywhere in the country. But by March 2022, when the government decided to lock down much of Shanghai after a rise in cases in that city, there was no more talk of patriotism. People reacted with fury, screaming from their balconies, writing bitter denunciations on social media, and, in some cases, committing suicide. When a fire broke out in an apartment building, residents died because the police had locked their doors from the outside. And when the Chinese government finally abandoned lockdowns — an implicit admission that they had not been successful in eliminating the pandemic — there was a wave of COVID-19 cases as bad as anywhere in the world. (To be fair, this was partly because China did such a poor job of vaccinating its citizens.)

One of the great mysteries of the pandemic is why so many countries followed China’s example. In the U.S. and the U.K. especially, lockdowns went from being regarded as something that only an authoritarian government would attempt to an example of “following the science.” But there was never any science behind lockdowns — not a single study had ever been undertaken to measure their efficacy in stopping a pandemic. When you got right down to it, lockdowns were little more than a giant experiment. --->READ MORE HERE

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