Zero-COVID Policies: Melbourne’s 112-Day Hard Lockdown Experiment Harmed Mostly Mothers

  1. Stefanie Schurer
  2. Kadir Atalay
  3. Nick Glozier
  4. Esperanza Vera-Toscano
  5. Mark Wooden

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Abstract

Lockdowns were used worldwide to mitigate the spread of SARS-CoV-2. We demonstrate that the 112-day hard lockdown in Melbourne, Australia, the longest among OECD jurisdictions, exclusively penalized families with young children. To identify the causal impact of lockdown, we interrogated nationally-representative longitudinal survey data and exploited quasi- experimental variation in Melbourne’s lockdown, one that left other jurisdictions unaffected. Using difference-in-differences estimation, we found that, surprisingly, most vulnerable groups (the young, poor, lonely and those with previous mental health conditions) were left unscathed. However, we found mothers experienced significant, sizable declines in health and work hours, and increases in loneliness, despite feeling safer and being more active. Zero-COVID policies are not as harmful as may have been expected but came at high cost to mothers in society.

One-Sentence Summary:

Melbourne’s hard lockdown left most vulnerable groups unscathed but led to greater ill- health and loneliness in mothers.

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  1. ScreenIT

    SciScore for 10.1101/2022.01.30.22270130: (What is this?)

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

    Table 1: Rigor

    NIH rigor criteria are not applicable to paper type.

    Table 2: Resources

    No key resources detected.

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    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.

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    • No protocol registration statement was detected.

    Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

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  2. Version published to 10.1101/2022.01.30.22270130 on medRxiv