Dr Paul Mills writes from London, UK. He is an economist who specialises in government debt management and financial stability, and has worked for both the UK Treasury and the International Monetary Fund.
Lockdowns … must rank as one of the greatest peacetime policy disasters of all time.
Douglas W. Allen[1]
Numerous international studies have now concluded that the imposition of ‘lockdowns’ and other non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) in Spring 2020 was not only ineffective in preventing deaths from the spread of SARS-Cov-2 but have proven enormously costly. Critics point to the mounting death toll from missed diagnoses, suicides and alcoholism; the devastating impact on mental health, especially of the young; the damage to educational prospects and IQs; the sharp rise in households in poverty and wealth inequality; the destruction of many small businesses; and the sharpest economic recession in centuries, resulting in a step-shift up in government debt.[2]
However, the harms that are mentioned relatively rarely are those to interpersonal relationships – be they within families, between friends and neighbours or across communities and countries.[3]These resulted from the NPIs alighted on (‘social distancing’, mask-wearing, prohibitions on social gathering, travel bans etc.) being tailored specifically to disrupt relational connections in the largely futile quest to reduce the spread of an airborne virus. Policymakers unquestioningly elevated their (flawed) prescriptions for reducing the spread of a virus above considerations of relational connection, warmth and compassion. Perhaps the worst examples of relational torture inflicted were the solitary confinement of the dying in hospital wards, the grieving in funeral services and the lonely aged in ‘care’ homes. An Australian public health official even urged friends not to converse if they met in the street.
How did such a relational dystopia come about? The general absence of cost:benefit analysis (CBA) by policymakers meant that disproportionately damaging measures were, and are still, being taken. But even then, relational harms would not have weighed heavily in a standard CBA as they are difficult to distil in monetary or life expectancy terms. Perhaps more fundamental is that policymakers’ priorities are focussed on the measurable quantity of life rather than its more intangible quality, of which relational quality is paramount.
How can we avoid a repetition of such policy failure? One possibility would be to attempt to calculate relational costings for NPIs to place on the scales to set against supposed benefits. Notwithstanding the difficulty and reductionism of putting a price tag on relational quality and interactions, this approach would still have failed in the current health emergency as even the vast, known costs of NPIs had little traction on policy decisions. This suggests that relational health needs to have a high-level voice within government independent of physical health advocates and providers to provide a counter-balance to the pressure to impose relational harm. Unless we come to realize the crucial value of the relational framework of society, we risk policymakers repeating their tragic mistakes.
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References
| ￪1 | Allen, D.W., 2021, ‘Covid-19 Lockdown Cost/Benefits: A Critical Assessment of the Literature’, International Journal of the Economics of Business, p.1-32 (21). https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/epub/10.1080/13571516.2021.1976051?needAccess=true& |
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| ￪2 | It is unlikely that the entirely novel policy of prolonged lockdowns would have been attempted without the safety net of central bank purchases of the additional government bonds issued to fund rescue packages. |
| ￪3 | This is not to say that lockdowns were entirely relationally detrimental – there were some benefits through the forced mutual support of neighbours and extended families. |