The indirect health impacts of COVID19 restrictions: a strong debate informed by weak evidence

This article has been Reviewed by the following groups

Read the full article See related articles

Discuss this preprint

Start a discussion What are Sciety discussions?

Abstract

KEY MESSAGES

  • There has been concern, and much heated debate, on the possible negative effects of restrictions, stay-at-home orders and lockdowns during the COVID-19 pandemic.

  • Most published studies on health impacts of restrictions and lockdowns are low quality and often severely biased.

  • Focusing on the few studies that approximate a change in restrictions alone (i.e. not the impact of the pandemic per se), we see clear adverse impacts of lockdowns on intimate partner violence and physical activity. Regarding diseases, road traffic crashes decrease, and anxiety increases.

  • A discussion driven by science (not politics) is urgently needed on what lockdowns can deliver, their limitations and how to optimally deploy them – along other public health strategies – in the fight against COVID-19.

Article activity feed

  1. SciScore for 10.1101/2021.03.16.21253759: (What is this?)

    Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

    Table 1: Rigor

    Institutional Review Board Statementnot detected.
    Randomizationnot detected.
    Blindingnot detected.
    Power Analysisnot detected.
    Sex as a biological variablenot detected.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.


    Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).


    Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

    Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.


    Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.


    Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.


    Results from rtransparent:
    • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    About SciScore

    SciScore is an automated tool that is designed to assist expert reviewers by finding and presenting formulaic information scattered throughout a paper in a standard, easy to digest format. SciScore checks for the presence and correctness of RRIDs (research resource identifiers), and for rigor criteria such as sex and investigator blinding. For details on the theoretical underpinning of rigor criteria and the tools shown here, including references cited, please follow this link.