A recent study, Zero-COVID Policies: Melbourne’s 112-Day Hard Lockdown Experiment Harmed Mostly Mothers looked at what population group is most affected by the 112-day lockdown in Melbourne.
Melbourne is the second-largest city in Australia and the capital of Victoria state. The lockdown is part of the Zero-COVID strategy to achieve zero infections.
The stay-at-home orders and closure of international and state borders were imposed on July 2, 2020. On August 2, the Victorian Government declared a state of disaster and imposed an 8 pm to 5 am curfew in Melbourne. The stay-at-home orders finally ended on October 28, 2020.
Cities outside Melbourne that were not in lockdown served as the control group. “High-quality, nationally representative longitudinal surveys” and difference-in-differences estimation models were done to know the effects after the lockdowns were initiated.
The difference-in-differences method is a statistical tool used by economists and sociologists to know the effects of new policies in a community. A recent study about lockdowns published by the Johns Hopkins Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Global Enterprise used the difference-in-difference method and discussed in The effects of lockdowns on COVID-19 deaths.
Results:
Mothers (especially women with children younger than age 15) experienced significant, sizable declines in health and work hours, and increases in loneliness, despite feeling safer and being more active.”
The reasons are many. The closures of schools and child care centers meant children had to be cared for at home. Mothers also did more of the homeschooling and they have to supervise the children even while they were attending schools online. (They have to make sure they are not playing video games on the internet.)
Mothers may also have been affected by the regular presence of their partners. We showed that fathers increased the frequency at which they drank alcohol during the lockdown, a risky health behavior.
This combined presence of drinking partners in combination with social isolation may have increased family discord or exposed women to more violence in the home.
Men
Fathers did not have the same significant lockdown impacts but the frequency of alcohol consumption was increased moderately (0.35sd [standard deviation] P=0.002). Fathers also had a small decrease in mental health and increased feelings of loneliness.
Men who lived in apartments or semi-detached houses experienced a significant reduction in work hours, weekly income, and perceptions of being part of their community. This group also increased the frequency of alcohol consumption (0.206sd) although the effect was not statistically significant.
Lockdown effects on other groups
Using difference-in-differences estimation, we found that, surprisingly, the most vulnerable groups (the young, poor, lonely, and those with previous mental health conditions) were left unscathed.
Did the Zero COVID-19 policy worked?
The authors had this to say after doing the analysis.
Even during the lockdown, the maximum number of new daily infections peaked at 725 and the deaths that did subsequently occur during lockdown were among those aged 70 years or older, with 75% occurring in residential care.
Thus, the cases did not cause a health burden of disease among youths, the working age or younger retiree populations that were most affected in their daily activities by lockdown.
Melbourne’s hard lockdown left most vulnerable groups unscathed but led to greater illhealth and loneliness in mothers.
The study is a preprint and has not been peer-reviewed.
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