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How COVID-19 Changed Our Saving and Spending Habits

The pandemic led to a tale of two economies

As the U.S. economy begins to recover and reopen, many consumers are still scrambling to regain their financial footing. While the conventional wisdom is to sock away six to 12 months worth of savings, that became an impossibility for many during the COVID-19 pandemic, as millions of people lost their jobs, small businesses were forced to shutter, and day-to-day living expenses piled up . The stimulus checks helped, but not necessarily enough.

There is some good news on the horizon. As more Americans get vaccinated and infection rates ease, the U.S. economy is slowly reemerging. Businesses are reopening, hiring is on the rise, and that eventually should ease some of the financial strain felt by many.

In March 2021, the personal savings rate —which reflects the ratio of total personal savings minus disposable income —surged to 26.6%. While saving is up, that figure also indicates a short-term slowdown in consumer spending , as people hold onto more of their money. The last time the savings rate was this high was April 2020, when it hit 33%. While it has slowly eased during the past 12 months, it has remained above 12%, compared with pre-pandemic levels that were below 10%.

Nonetheless, an increase in savings doesn’t mean that everyone is sitting on piles of cash. “What someone should do with their personal savings is entirely circumstantial, however, as some industries have been hit harder than others,” says Ryan Detrick , vice president and market strategist with Cornerstone Wealth Management. “If you’ve been one of the lucky ones who hasn’t had a major disruption in life because of the pandemic, now can be a good idea to assess any outstanding debt and either refinance while interest rates are low or consider paying off some of this debt. For those who are barely making ends meet, it’s a complicated subject to provide advice to.”

Key Takeaways

• The COVID-19 pandemic created a tale of two economies: those who were able to save, and those who struggled to make ends meet.
• Financial advice remains the same, pre- and post-pandemic: It’s important to build up an emergency savings fund and create a financial plan.
• COVID-19 also highlighted the need to have a budget, however small it may be.
• Financial advisors are available to help. Ask for referrals, and take it one step at a time.
• Many racked up debt during the pandemic, while others were able to save.
• Savers are ready to spend, but advisors caution about reining in the urge to splurge.
• Sixty-four percent of Americans called themselves savers in 2020, and 80% said they planned to continue to save more than they spend in 2021.

The COVID-19 Financial Hit

While the longer-term outlook is looking a bit brighter, the near term remains unsettled. Consider this: Half of Americans in a recent survey by Investopedia sister site The Balance said they have less than $250 left over each month after expenses, and some 12% said they have nothing left over. Debt is also weighing people down, with 29% saying their credit card debt had increased during the pandemic. According to a Charles Schwab survey, 53% of Americans have been financially impacted by the pandemic.

A separate survey by T. Rowe Price painted an even bleaker picture, with nearly 70% of respondents saying their financial well-being had been negatively impacted by COVID-19, citing layoffs, reduced work hours/salary cuts, and overall less income as the top three reasons. Prior to the pandemic, 71% said they had a sufficient emergency fund . Now, 42% say they need to replenish their emergency fund, with 44% saying they need to increase the size of it.

“The pandemic has reminded us of the importance of having a budget,” says James Boyd, education coach at TD Ameritrade. “When you know where your money is going, it can make it easier to isolate needs and wants and shift more toward necessities.”

For some, that may be much easier said than done. “The pandemic impacted people very differently,” says Brian O’Leary , wealth advisor and senior analyst at Aline Wealth. “The key lesson is circumstances can change very rapidly.”

Only 33% surveyed by T. Rowe Price (and 30% surveyed by The Balance ) said their finances had improved during the pandemic, mostly due to less spending—a luxury that not everyone had.

While there was a lot more saving going on over the past year, “I have a concern that people will feel a sense of relief coming out of the pandemic and overspend to make up for lost time,” says Michael Resnick , senior wealth management advisor at GCG Financial. Nearly a quarter of Americans said they are ready to splurge for that exact reason, according to the Schwab survey, while 47% just want to get back to living and spending like they were pre-pandemic.

“We encourage it, as long as it’s done responsibly,” says O’Leary, adding that giving in to that urge should be done as part of a solid financial plan “that includes a buffer.” A recent survey from McKinsey & Company shows that more than 50% of U.S. consumers plan on splurging this year, with half of those respondents citing pandemic fatigue, while the other half said they’re willing to wait until the pandemic is over before breaking out their wallets.

Spending Makes a Comeback

As more people get vaccinated, the urge to get out and spend will likely continue to increase. “While COVID-19 upended nearly every corner of American life, many are starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel and are ready for a reset,” Jonathan Craig, Charles Schwab senior executive vice president and head of Investor Services, said in a statement. The Schwab survey showed that 64% of Americans called themselves savers in 2020, and 80% said they planned to continue to save more than they spend in 2021. More good news: According to the McKinsey survey, 86% of those who are vaccinated either expect their finances to return to normal by the end of the year (52%) or their finances are already back to normal (34%).

All the same, the National Retail Federation (NRF) expects a pickup in spending. The NRF is predicting that retail spending will top $4.3 trillion in 2021 as more people get vaccinated. That’s up from $4 trillion in 2020 and $3.9 trillion in 2019.

While all of those figures are good news for the economy, that doesn’t mean consumers should spend with abandon. “The basic tenet of financial planning, of thinking long term and spending less than you earn while keeping an emergency fund, has proven to be the saving grace for many of my clients throughout this past year,” says Resnick.

Detrick agrees: “The age-old rule of thumb to aim to have six to 12 months of expenses saved in the event that you lose your job still applies, but perhaps the pandemic caused many to reevaluate the importance of this buffer and the likelihood that they may need to use it at some point.” It seems some are heeding that advice. Nearly one-third of those surveyed by The Balance said they were saving more now than before the pandemic, and one-fifth even managed to invest more.   

Steps for Those Barely Getting By

Those in a more financially precarious position will need to proceed with more caution. “We expect the economy will rebound sharply—and it has so far—but it may not feel that way for everyone,” says Detrick. “While many types of debt received forbearance during the pandemic, it’s likely that these protections will eventually be lifted, so being prepared for any debt obligations will be critical as we begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel of the pandemic.”

Some of it comes down to planning, yet only about one-third of Americans actually have a financial plan in writing. Of those without a plan, 42% say it’s because they don’t have enough money to make it worthwhile. “From a fiscal standpoint, it’s going to require a massive intervention on their part,” says O’Leary.

Among the things to consider are:

• What are the prospects of your income returning? If the answer is “not good,” then you may be forced into thinking about a career change, which comes with its own set of challenges and stressors.
• If you can’t do anything to improve your income, then look at your expenses. Is there any wiggle room to negotiate payment plans or cut anything out?
• If you’ve received COVID-19 mortgage forbearance , rent relief , or student loan relief , then look carefully at the rules about when it ends and what happens next.

“There is a whole spectrum of actions you can take, and you have to be creative,” says O’Leary, adding that while some people may face some very hard choices, “it’s better than being forced into not having any choices later.”

The pandemic has been a scary wake-up call about how lives can be overturned with very little warning. “For many, this will be an experience they don’t want to relive,” says O’Leary.

As the economy regains its footing, having to dig out of debt makes it even more crucial to start thinking about the future and set manageable short- and long-term goals. “What we really need to do is be honest about your debt and desire to address those issues,” O’Leary says. He acknowledges that it may seem like a lofty goal for those who are barely making ends meet, but there is help out there.

Among the things you can do are:

• Talk to your friends and find out what works (or doesn’t work) for them.
• Ask friends to recommend a financial advisor . Many will give a free initial consultation, while some, such as the Foundation for Financial Planning, offer pro bono services.
• Most important: Take it one step at a time.

The ultimate goal is to work toward building an emergency fund. That advice has been true pre- and post-pandemic. How that is achieved will vary depending on your circumstances.

“A lot of people learned some tough lessons,” says O’Leary, but what’s important is to “start somewhere.”

Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, FRED. “ Personal Saving Rate .”

Congressional Research Service. “ Introduction to U.S. Economy: Personal Saving ,” Page 1.

U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis. “ National Data: GDP and Personal Income .”

Charles Schwab. “ Charles Schwab Modern Wealth Survey 2021 ,” Page 7.

Charles Schwab. “ Charles Schwab Modern Wealth Survey 2021 ,” Page 10.

T. Rowe Price. “ 13th Annual Parents, Kids and Money Survey ,” Pages 6–8.

T. Rowe Price. “ 13th Annual Parents, Kids and Money Survey ,” Page 5.

Charles Schwab. “ Charles Schwab Modern Wealth Survey 2021 ,” Page 5.

McKinsey & Company. “ Survey: U.S. Consumer Sentiment During the Coronavirus Crisis .”

McKinsey & Company. “ McKinsey Survey: U.S. Consumer Sentiment During the Coronavirus Crisis ,” Page 16.

Charles Schwab. “ Ready to Reset the ’20s: Economic Optimism, Celebratory Splurges and Healthy Money Habits on the Horizon as Americans Emerge From the Pandemic .”

McKinsey & Company. “ McKinsey Survey: U.S. Consumer Sentiment During the Coronavirus Crisis ,” Page 13.

National Retail Federation. “ NRF Forecasts Retail Sales to Exceed $4.33T in 2021 as Vaccine Rollout Expands .”

Charles Schwab. “ Charles Schwab Modern Wealth Survey 2021 ,” Pages 15,18.

Foundation for Financial Planning. “ FFP Corporate Advisory Council: Joint Statement on Pro Bono .”

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How We’re Saving Money During the Pandemic

From fuel to clothing, lifestyle changes in COVID-19 present opportunities to cut spending

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When Lori Levy looks back at the past year, she’s painfully aware of what she’s missed out on because of the pandemic. Her son didn’t have an in-person high school graduation, and she’s gone nearly two years without seeing her daughter, who lives in California. 

“It’s just nice to know that you have that money when you need it,” said Levy, a nurse educator in the Clinical Education and Professional Development Department.

Throughout the pandemic, most Duke employees have seen their spending habits altered, resulting in opportunities to save money.

According to the  Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis , Americans’ personal saving rate – the percentage of disposable income that’s saved – went from 8.3 percent in February of 2020 to 33.7 percent in April of 2020. In January of 2021, it remained high at 20.5 percent.

“On one hand, we have murky waters ahead, but on the other hand, people are finding themselves with extra cash,” said Benjamen Parker, a retirement planner with Fidelity, the primary record keeper for  Duke’s Faculty and Staff Retirement Plan . “So now, they want to know what they should do with this extra money?”

As you ponder how the pandemic has shaped your financial situation, consider how some colleagues have found ways to save money.

Be Smart with Extra Savings

When he speaks to Duke employees seeking financial advice, Parker often starts with recommending people  build a household budget .

If you haven’t done so already, a budget is the easiest way to see where your money goes and make sure that it covers important expenses and priorities, such as retirement and emergency savings. 

Fidelity recommends using  the 50/15/5 approach , where 50 percent of your income goes to essentials, 15 to retirement savings and five for emergency savings. The ideal amount of emergency savings would be enough to cover three-to-six months of expenses.

After a year-long suspension of contributions to the faculty and staff retirement plan due to the financial pressures of the COVID-19 pandemic, contributions will return  as scheduled on July 1, 2021.

Casual Savings on Clothing

With a whiteboard, multiple computer monitors and constellations of sticky notes on her wall, Emily Jackson has built a home workspace that has plenty of the touches of her on-campus office in Erwin Square.

Prior to the pandemic, Jackson spent around $30 to $50 per week on dry cleaning.

“That’s definitely a savings for me,” said Jackson, a senior regulatory coordinator for the Duke School of Medicine’s Pediatrics Department.

According to consumer spending data compiled by the  U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis , Americans spent $23.9 billion less on clothing and footwear in the fourth quarter of 2020 than they did in the fourth quarter of 2019.

Jackson also said she’s appreciated not having to buy as many clothes, and if she ends up working on-site again, she hopes to keep her savings momentum going.

“When I look at my clothes, I just think, why did I need so much stuff?” Jackson said. “I think I’ll be more frugal once we go back.”

Fewer Trips to Gas Stations

When the COVID-19 pandemic struck, John Owens’ position as a senior IT analyst with Duke’s Office of Information Technology, went remote, meaning he no longer had to make the roughly 70-minute round trip commute from his home in Mebane to his office in the American Tobacco Campus.

Data from the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis shows that in the fourth quarter of 2020, Americans spent $88.2 billion less on gasoline and other energy goods than they did in the fourth quarter of 2019. 

The savings are just one of the positive developments Owens has experienced due to working remotely during the pandemic. Owens also appreciates having more time to get outdoors and walk and having the opportunity to eat healthier homemade meals instead of restaurant lunches at work, and 

“Obviously, all of us were scared at first because we didn’t know how this was going to go and how it would affect us individually,” Owens said. “But finding positives anywhere has definitely been good.”

Family Finances

Since the start of the pandemic, Kate Davies has worked from home in Wake County alongside her two children, who are doing school work online.

So in addition to saving about $150 per month on gas and another $20 per month for her campus parking permit, Davies doesn’t have to pay $100 per month for the before-school care. She’s been able to use those savings to take care of some debt and increase her contributions to her retirement account.

But for Davies, an administrative assistant with Duke Counseling & Psychological Services (CAPS), the money is not nearly a valuable as the gift of time with her kids.

“It’s lovely, actually,” Davies said. “I really enjoy it. I feel like I get to be a parent for the first time because I’m not shipping them off to somebody else to look after them. It’s been nice to see them learn, share meals together and take them to soccer practice, which was something I wasn’t able to do before.”

Fewer Lunches Out

Prior to the pandemic, Emily James, a regional development director for Duke University Development, would spend around half of her workdays on the road, strengthening Duke’s connections to alumni, parents and friends in places such as Chicago, Pittsburgh, Indiana, Iowa and South Carolina. The rest of the time, she’d be at her downtown Durham workspace.

“Our office was in One City Center, which was great because it gave us access to a million restaurants,” she said. 

Now that she’s working from home, James estimates that she’s saving around $30 to $50 per week by not eating out during the day. The U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis reported that in the fourth quarter of 2020, Americans spent $194.9 billion less on food service and accommodations than they did in the fourth quarter of 2019.

James has been putting that savings to good use as it helped cover the cost of a tutor who would visit her house a few times a week to help her children who – until they returned to in-person learning in February – were completing their kindergarten and second grade schooling online.

“I was grateful to have her,” James said of the tutor. “She was a huge help.”

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• A Year Into the Pandemic, Long-Term Financial Impact Weighs Heavily on Many Americans

Roughly half of non-retired adults say the economic consequences of the coronavirus outbreak will make it harder for them to achieve their financial goals

Table of contents.

• Acknowledgments
• The American Trends Panel survey methodology

Pew Research Center conducted this study to better understand Americans’ financial outlooks and how their personal financial situations have changed amid the coronavirus outbreak. For this analysis, we surveyed 10,334 U.S. adults in January 2021. Everyone who took part is a member of the Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way, nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories. Read more about the  ATP’s methodology .

Here are the  questions  used for this report, along with responses, and its  methodology . 

References to those who have experienced job or wage loss include those who say they or someone in their household has been laid off (including temporarily) or furloughed or taken a pay cut since the coronavirus outbreak began in February 2020.

References to White, Black and Asian adults include only those who are not Hispanic and identify as only one race. Hispanics are of any race.

All references to party affiliation include those who lean toward that party. Republicans include those who identify as Republicans and those who say they lean toward the Republican Party. Democrats include those who identify as Democrats and those who say they lean toward the Democratic Party.

References to college graduates or people with a college degree comprise those with a bachelor’s degree or more. “Some college” includes those with an associate degree and those who attended college but did not obtain a degree.

“Middle income” is defined here as two-thirds to double the median annual family income for panelists on the American Trends Panel. “Lower income” falls below that range; “upper income” falls above it. See the  methodology  for more details.

References to disabled adults include those who say a disability or handicap keeps them from fully participating in work, school, housework or other activities. 

About a year since the  coronavirus recession  began, there are some  signs of improvement  in the U.S. labor market, and Americans are feeling somewhat better about their personal finances than they were early in the pandemic. Still, about half of non-retired adults say the economic impact of the  coronavirus outbreak  will make it harder for them to achieve their long-term financial goals, according to a new Pew Research Center survey. Among those who say their financial situation has gotten worse during the pandemic, 44% think it will take them three years or more to get back to where they were a year ago – including about one-in-ten who don’t think their finances will ever recover.  

The  economic fallout from COVID-19  continues to hit some segments of the population harder than others. Lower-income adults, as well as Hispanic and Asian Americans and adults younger than 30, are among the most likely to say they or someone in their household has lost a job or taken a pay cut since the outbreak began in February 2020. 1 Among those who’ve had these experiences, lower-income and Black adults are particularly likely to say they have taken on debt or put off paying their bills in order to cover lost wages or salary. 

Related:   Unemployed Americans are feeling the emotional strain of job loss; most have considered changing occupations

Adults with upper incomes have fared better. About four-in-ten (39%) say their family’s financial situation has improved compared with a year ago; 32% of those with middle incomes and just 22% of lower-income adults say the same. Upper-income adults are also more likely than those with middle or lower incomes to say they have been spending less and saving more money since the coronavirus outbreak began. (Family incomes are based on 2019 earnings.)

Overall, 53% of U.S. adults now rate their personal financial situation as excellent or good, up from  47% in April 2020 , when the U.S. economy was in a virtual freefall. More than eight-in-ten upper-income adults (86%) and 58% of those with middle incomes say their finances are in excellent or good shape, as do about six-in-ten or more adults with at least a four-year college degree, White and Asian adults, men, and adults ages 65 and older. In contrast, about three-quarters of lower-income adults (74%) and majorities of Black and Hispanic adults and those with a high school diploma or less education say their personal finances are in only fair or poor shape.  

Upper-income and middle-income adults, who saw declines in their personal financial ratings from  August 2019 to April 2020 , are now about as likely as they were before the coronavirus outbreak to say their personal finances are in excellent or good shape. Personal financial ratings have been more stable among lower-income adults. 

Looking ahead, about half of non-retired adults (51%) say the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak will make achieving their long-term financial goals harder. Just 7% say the economic impact of the pandemic will make it easier and 41% say it’ll be neither easier nor harder for them to achieve their financial goals in the long run. Among those in households that experienced job or wage loss since the outbreak began, 62% say the economic impact of the pandemic will make it harder for them to achieve their financial goals, compared with four-in-ten of those who haven’t had these experiences. 

The nationally representative survey of 10,334 U.S. adults was conducted Jan. 19-24, 2021, using the Center’s  American Trends Panel . 2 Among the other key findings:

The way Americans are planning to use payments from the coronavirus aid package varies considerably by income.  Among those who have received or expect to receive a payment from the federal government as part of the aid package, 66% of lower-income adults say they are most likely to use the majority of the money to pay bills or for something essential they or their family need; smaller shares of those with middle (49%) and upper (30%) incomes plan to use the money this way. About a third of those with upper incomes (35%) say they will likely put the money into savings.

There’s no clear consensus among Americans on who should be responsible for making sure people can meet their basic economic needs during the pandemic.  Some 45% say the federal government should have the greatest responsibility, while a third point to people themselves or their families. Smaller shares say state or local governments (12%), charitable organizations (2%) or another source (6%) should have the greatest responsibility to do this. These views vary widely across party lines. About six-in-ten Democrats and Democratic leaners (61%) say the federal government should be mostly responsible for making sure people can meet their basic economic needs during the coronavirus outbreak, compared with 28% of Republicans and those who lean to the GOP. In turn, 51% of Republicans (vs. 18% of Democrats) say people themselves or their families should have this responsibility. 

Financial concerns are less pressing than earlier in the pandemic, but many Americans remain worried about meeting some basic needs.  About three-in-ten U.S. adults say they worry every day or almost every day about the amount of debt they have (30%) and their ability to save for retirement (29%). Roughly a quarter say they frequently worry about paying their bills (27%) and the cost of health care for them and their family (27%), and about one-in-five say they worry at least almost every day about paying their rent or mortgage (19%) or being able to buy enough food (18%). These concerns are felt more acutely by lower-income adults, as well as by those in households that have experienced job loss or pay cuts during the pandemic. Black and Hispanic adults are more likely than White adults to say they worry about each of these every day or almost every day.   

About four-in-ten Americans (42%) say they have been spending less money than usual since the pandemic began, and that is especially the case among upper-income adults.  Some 53% of Americans with upper incomes say they’ve been spending less money, compared with 43% of those with middle incomes and 34% of those with lower incomes. Among those who say they have been spending less money, majorities with upper and middle incomes say this is mainly because their daily activities have changed due to coronavirus-related restrictions (86% and 70%, respectively). Among those with lower incomes, more say they’re spending less because they are worried about personal finances (55%) than because their daily activities have changed (44%).

About half of workers who personally lost wages during the pandemic (49%) are still earning less money than before the coronavirus outbreak started.  This is particularly the case among older workers: 58% of employed adults ages 50 and older who experienced a pay cut since the outbreak began say they’re earning less money than before, compared with 45% of those younger than 50. One-in-five in the younger group (vs. 6% of those 50 and older) say they are now earning more than they did before the pandemic began, while about a third in each group say they are earning about the same as before.

Personal financial ratings vary widely across racial, ethnic and socioeconomic groups

A narrow majority of U.S. adults (53%) now describe their personal financial situation as excellent or good, up from 47% in  April 2020 . The share saying their finances are in only fair or poor shape now stands at 46%, compared with 52% earlier in the pandemic. 

About six-in-ten White (60%) and Asian adults (58%) currently say their personal financial situation is in excellent or good shape. In contrast, a majority of Black (66%) and Hispanic (59%) Americans say their finances are in only fair or poor shape. 

Personal financial ratings also vary considerably by gender, educational attainment and income levels, as was the case early in the pandemic. A majority of men (58%) rate their personal financial situation as excellent or good; 49% of women do so. About seven-in-ten adults with at least a bachelor’s degree (72%) say their personal finances are in excellent or good shape, compared with 48% of those with some college and 41% of adults with a high school diploma or less education. 

Income differences are particularly pronounced, with a gap of 60 percentage points between the shares of upper-income (86%) and lower-income (26%) adults who rate their financial situation as excellent or good. About six-in-ten adults with middle incomes (58%) say their finances are in excellent or good shape. Family incomes are based on 2019 earnings. 

People who report having a disability (63%) are more likely than those who do not have a disability (42%) to describe their personal financial situation as only fair or poor. This difference remains after taking into account that disabled adults are more likely to have lower incomes than those who are not disabled (82% of lower-income adults with a disability vs. 69% of those who don’t have a disability offer negative assessments of their personal finances). 

More Americans say their personal financial situation has improved in the last year than say it has gotten worse

Despite the  economic downturn  caused by the coronavirus outbreak, about half of U.S. adults (49%) say their family’s financial situation is about the same as it was a year ago; three-in-ten say it has improved, and 21% say it is now worse than it was a year ago. 

Upper-income adults are more likely than other income groups to have seen an improvement in their finances: 39% say their family’s financial situation is now better, compared with 32% of those with middle incomes and an even smaller share of lower-income adults (22%). About three-in-ten adults with lower incomes (31%) say their family’s situation has worsened (vs. 18% of adults with middle incomes and 11% of those with upper incomes). 

These assessments vary by educational attainment and other demographic characteristics. Some 36% of adults with a bachelor’s degree or more education say their family’s financial situation is now better than it was a year ago; 29% of those with some college and a quarter of those with a high school diploma or less education say the same. 

About a third of men (35%) say their family’s financial situation has improved, while a smaller share of women (25%) say the same. In turn, women are more likely than men to say their family’s financial situation is about the same as it was last year (53% vs. 46%). 

About a quarter of Black (25%), Hispanic (27%) and Asian (24%) adults say their family’s situation is worse now than it was a year ago; a smaller share of White adults (17%) say this. White adults are more likely than those from other groups to say their financial situation is largely unchanged. (Differences in the shares across racial and ethnic groups saying their financial situation is now better are not statistically significant.) 

More than half of Americans who say their family’s financial situation is worse than it was a year ago (55%) expect their finances to recover within two years, with 12% saying they expect it will take less than a year for their financial situation to get back to where it was a year ago. About a quarter (26%) think it will take three to five years and 6% say it will be between six and ten years before their family’s financial situation is back to where it was a year ago. About one-in-ten adults who say their family’s financial situation has worsened (12%) say it will never get back to where it was. These answers vary little, if at all, across demographic groups. 

A plurality of lower-income adults are saving less during the pandemic

Many Americans were already struggling to save money before the coronavirus outbreak hit. Some 29% of adults overall say they are not usually able to put any money in savings. This is far more common among lower-income adults, 47% of whom say they are usually not able to save (vs. 25% of middle-income adults and just 8% of upper-income adults). About four-in-ten Black adults (38%) say they are usually not able to save, compared with 31% of Hispanic, 27% of White and 19% of Asian adults.

Among those who  are  typically able to put some money into savings, 45% say they are still saving about the same amount as they were before the pandemic, while 31% say they are saving less than usual and 23% say they are saving more.

Lower-income adults who usually put money into savings are far more likely than those in other income tiers to say they are now saving less than usual: 47% of lower-income adults say this, compared with 31% of those with middle incomes and 17% of those with upper incomes. By comparison, most middle-income and upper-income adults say they are saving about the same or even more than they were before the pandemic. Among those with middle incomes, 46% say they are saving the same and 22% are saving more than before. Even higher shares of those with upper incomes say this: half are saving about the same and 32% are saving more than before the pandemic.  

Among those who are usually able to put money into savings, 44% of Black adults and 42% of Hispanics say they are saving less than they were before the pandemic, compared with 30% of Asian Americans and 26% of White adults. About half of White adults (49%) have continued putting the same amount into savings – higher than the share of Black (33%) and Hispanic (35%) adults who say the same.

Spending is down compared with before the pandemic for many Americans, but mostly because of a change in daily activities rather than concern about finances

About four-in-ten Americans (42%) say they have been spending less money than usual since the coronavirus outbreak began, and a similar share (39%) say they have been spending about the same; 19% say their spending has increased.

Upper-income adults (53%) are more likely than those with middle (43%) or lower incomes (34%) to say they have been spending less money since the pandemic began. About a quarter of those with lower incomes (26%) say they have been spending more, compared with 17% of middle-income adults and 11% of upper-income adults.

Two-thirds of those who are spending less say this is due to their daily activities changing because of coronavirus-related restrictions rather than worries about their personal finances (32%). 

This is overwhelmingly the case among upper-income adults who are spending less, 86% of whom say it’s because of their activities changing. Seven-in-ten middle-income adults in this situation say the same. But among lower-income adults who have reduced their spending, more say it’s because they are worried about their personal finances (55%) rather than their daily activities changing (44%).

A majority of lower-income adults who are not retired say the pandemic will make it harder for them to achieve their long-term financial goals

Aside from how long they think it will take them to get back to where they were a year ago, many Americans say the economic impact of the coronavirus will have long-term repercussions for their financial future. About half of U.S. adults who are not retired (51%) say that, in the long run, the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak will make it at least somewhat harder for them to achieve their financial goals, with 16% saying it will make it a lot harder; 7% say the economic impact of the pandemic will make it a lot or somewhat easier for them to achieve their financial goals and 41% say it will be neither easier nor harder. 

Lower-income adults are particularly likely to see the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak as a potential impediment to reaching their long-term financial goals. About six-in-ten non-retired adults in this group (58%) say that, in the long run, the pandemic will make it harder for them to achieve these goals, including a quarter who say it will make it a lot harder. Half of those with middle incomes and 41% with upper incomes say the pandemic will make it harder for them to reach their financial goals in the long run. 

Long-term assessments are especially grim among those who say their finances have taken a hit in the last year. Fully three-quarters of non-retired adults who say their financial situation is now worse than it was a year ago believe the economic impact of the coronavirus outbreak will make it harder for them to achieve their financial goals in the long run. That’s in contrast to 35% of those who say their financial situation is better compared with a year ago and 50% of those who say it is about the same. 

Many older Americans whose employment was affected during the coronavirus outbreak say they have or may have to delay their retirement

About a quarter of U.S. adults ages 50 and older who have not yet retired (24%) expect the coronavirus outbreak to affect their ability to retire. This includes 7% who say they have already delayed their retirement and an additional 17% think they might have to delay it.

Those who have personally been laid off or taken a pay cut since the pandemic began in February 2020 (27% of all adults 50 and older who are not retired) are much more likely to say they expect their retirement to be affected. More than four-in-ten (46%) say they either have already delayed or think they may have to delay their retirement because of the coronavirus outbreak, compared with just 16% who have not experienced a job loss or pay cut.

The shares of non-retired adults ages 50 and older who have delayed or expect to delay their retirement because of the coronavirus outbreak do not vary considerably across income levels or other demographic groups, including gender and educational attainment. 

More than four-in-ten U.S. adults say they or someone in their household has lost a job or wages since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak

A third of U.S. adults say they or someone in their household has been laid off or lost a job (including being furloughed and temporarily laid off) since the coronavirus outbreak began in February 2020, and 31% say they or someone in their household has taken a cut in pay due to reduced hours or demand for their work during this period. Overall, 44% say their household has experienced at least one of these since the pandemic began. 

Experiences with job and wage loss during the pandemic have not been felt equally across demographic groups. Hispanic (58%) and Asian (54%) adults are more likely than White (40%) or Black (41%) adults to say they or someone in their household has either lost a job or taken a pay cut or both since the outbreak began in February 2020. And while a majority of adults younger than 30 (61%) say they or someone in their household has had these experiences, about half of adults ages 30 to 49 (51%) and smaller shares of those ages 50 to 64 (41%) and 65 and older (21%) say the same. 

About half of lower-income adults (49%) say their household has experienced job or wage loss since the coronavirus outbreak began in February 2020, as do 45% of middle-income adults. A far smaller – though substantial – share of upper-income adults (33%) say their household has had one or both of these experiences. 

Many workers who lost wages during the pandemic are still earning less than they were before the coronavirus outbreak started. Among those who were working before the pandemic started and who personally experienced a pay cut since February 2020, about half (49%) say they are now earning less money than they did before the pandemic; 16% are now earning more money and 34% say they are earning about the same as before. This is consistent across most demographic groups, but employed adults ages 50 and older who experienced a pay cut since the outbreak began are more likely than those younger than 50 to say they’re earning less money than they did before (58% vs. 45%), while those in the younger group are more likely to say they’re earning more than they did before the pandemic (20% vs. 6%). 

Lower-income workers are more likely than those with middle or upper incomes to have taken unpaid time off

In addition to being more likely than those with higher incomes to have experienced job or wage loss since February 2020, lower-income adults are also more likely to have taken unpaid time off from work for personal, family or medical reasons during this time. About a third of lower-income workers (32%) say they’ve had to do this during this period, compared with 19% of middle-income workers and 10% of those with upper incomes. According to previous research, workers on the lower ends of the wage distribution are less likely than those at the upper ends to have  access to paid sick leave . 

Three-in-ten lower-income workers say they have earned more money by working more overtime or longer hours since the coronavirus outbreak began; 24% of middle-income workers and 15% of those with upper incomes say this has happened. And about three-in-ten workers across income tiers say they have gotten a pay raise or a higher-paying job during this time. 

Workers younger than 30 are far more likely than older workers to say they have gotten a pay raise or a higher-paying job since the coronavirus outbreak began (47% vs. 30% of workers ages 30 to 49, 21% of those ages 50 to 64 and 16% of those ages 65 and older). Younger workers are also more likely than older adults to say they have earned more money by working more overtime or longer hours and to say they have taken unpaid time off work for personal, family or medical reasons. 

The survey also finds that, among employed adults, men are somewhat more likely than women to say they have gotten a pay raise or a higher-paying job since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak (32% vs. 28%). In turn, a larger share of employed women than men say they have taken unpaid time off work for personal, family or medical reasons since the beginning of the pandemic (23% vs. 16%).

About three-in-ten Americans often worry about their debt and saving for retirement, but these concerns were higher in April

Roughly three-in-ten adults say they worry every day or almost every day about the amount of debt they have (30%) and being able to save enough for their retirement (29%). About a quarter worry about paying their bills and the cost of health care for them and their family (27% each). About one-in-five often worry about paying their rent or mortgage (19%) or being able to buy enough food for them and their family (18%). Some 16% of workers say they frequently worry that they will lose their job or take a pay cut due to reduced hours or demand for their work. About four-in-ten or more adults say they worry about each of these at least sometimes. 

These concerns were more pressing earlier in the coronavirus outbreak than they are now. Higher shares in  April 2020 said that they frequently worried about saving enough for retirement (38%), paying their bills (38%) or debt (36%), the cost of health care for them and their family (35%), taking a pay cut (29% of employed adults) and losing their job (23% of employed adults). (The items on paying rent or a mortgage and being able to buy enough food were not asked in April.) The decrease in concern since April was evident across income levels.

Lower-income adults are far more likely to worry often about each of these than middle- and upper-income adults. For example, 44% of those with lower incomes say they worry about paying their bills daily or almost daily, compared with 23% of middle-income adults and only 9% of those with upper incomes. And while about a third of lower-income adults say they worry about paying their rent or mortgage (34%) or being able to buy enough food (32%) daily or almost daily, 15% or less among middle-income and upper-income adults express similar concerns. 

Adults living in households that have experienced job loss or a pay cut during the pandemic are more likely than those in households that have not to say they often worry about each of these concerns. For example, those who had their household’s job or pay affected are about twice as likely to say they worry daily or almost daily about being able to buy enough food for them and their families as those who were not affected (25% vs. 12%).

Black and Hispanic Americans (who have lower incomes on average than White Americans) are more likely than White adults to frequently have these worries. Meanwhile, Asian Americans are about equally as likely as White adults to say they often worry about their debt, saving for their retirement, the cost of health care, paying their bills and losing their job. However, they are more likely than White adults to say they worry about paying their rent or mortgage, being able to buy enough food and taking a cut in pay.

Adults 65 and older tend to be less worried about each of these concerns than their younger counterparts. In fact, the burden of some of these worries falls most heavily on those in the 30- to 49-year-old age group. For example, 25% of this group says they worry frequently about paying their rent or mortgage, compared with 20% of those ages 18 to 29, 19% of those 50 to 64 and 8% of those 65 and older.

Americans with disabilities – that is, those who say a disability or handicap keeps them from fully participating in work, school, housework or other activities – are also more likely than those without disabilities to say they often worry about each concern. For example, 36% of disabled Americans (who tend to have lower incomes than those without disabilities) say they often worry about the cost of health care for them and their family, while 25% of those without disabilities say the same.

About half of lower-income adults in households that have lost income during the pandemic have taken on debt to help make ends meet

The survey also asked those who are in a household in which someone has been laid off or taken a pay cut since the pandemic began how they covered those lost wages or salaries. Cutting back on spending topped the list, with 71% saying they did this to help make up for their lost wages. Using savings was another common strategy, with about half of those who experienced a loss of wages saying they did this (52% say they used savings they had set aside for something else, and the same share say they used emergency savings). Smaller shares said they took on debt (38%), did side jobs or temporary work outside of their regular job (37%), received unemployment benefits (32%), borrowed money from family or friends (30%), put off paying bills (30%) or went on public assistance other than unemployment benefits (15%).

Lower-income adults whose households have experienced job or wage loss since the pandemic began are more likely than upper-income adults to say they have taken each of these steps. In fact, many in this group have taken consequential measures, such as borrowing money from family or friends (50%), taking on debt (48%) and putting off paying bills (42%).

Among upper-income adults whose household experienced a loss of income, 55% say they cut back on spending as a way to compensate. Much smaller shares (about a third or less) say they have taken each of the other measures asked about in the survey. Few said they have had to take the types of consequential measures that many lower-income adults rely on, such as taking on debt (17% of upper-income adults), putting off paying bills (13%) or borrowing from friends or family (7%).

Among households experiencing loss of income, reports of using unemployment benefits are more common among those who say they or someone in their household lost a job (permanently or temporarily). 3 Overall, 39% of those who lost a job or had someone in their household who did say they received unemployment benefits, compared with 11% of those in households that experienced a pay cut but no job loss (even while many people who had their hours cut  during the pandemic are eligible ). Lower-, middle- and upper-income adults who experienced job loss are about equally likely to say they received this type of benefit.

About two-in-ten of those from households that experienced a job loss (19%) say they went on public assistance other than unemployment benefits, compared with 5% of those who experienced a pay cut but no job loss. Among the households who experienced job loss, 33% of lower-income adults say they went on this kind of public assistance, compared with 13% of middle-income adults and just 2% of upper-income adults.

Most lower-income adults who expect a stimulus payment say they will use it to pay for bills or essentials

As the economic effects of the coronavirus pandemic continued in late 2020, Congress passed a  second stimulus bill  to help ease the financial hardships many Americans have faced. About half of U.S. adults who have received or expect to receive a payment from the federal government as part of the stimulus package (52%) say they will use a majority of these funds to pay bills or for something essential they or their family needs. Another 22% say they will save it; 16% say they will use it to pay off debt; and 10% say they will use it for something else, including for something non-essential they or their family wants, charitable donations, helping friends and family, supporting local businesses, or some combination. 

The way Americans are planning to use payments from the second coronavirus aid package parallel what those who received or expected to receive a payment early in the pandemic said about  how they planned to use those funds . 

Lower-income adults are the most likely to say they will use a majority of the money to pay for bills or for something essential among those expecting a payment in each income group; 66% say this, compared with 49% of middle-income adults and 30% of those with upper incomes. About a third of adults with upper incomes (35%) say they expect to save most of it; 24% of those with middle incomes and 12% of lower-income adults say the same.

Plans for the stimulus payments vary across racial and ethnic groups and educational attainment. About six-in-ten Black and Hispanic adults (61% each) say they will use a majority of the money to pay for bills or essentials, compared with 48% of White adults and 51% of Asian adults. White and Asian adults are more likely than Black and Hispanic adults to say they will save it (24% and 28% vs. 16% and 15% respectively). Six-in-ten adults with a high school diploma or less education say they will use a majority of the money to pay for bills or essentials; 53% of those with some college, and 40% with a bachelor’s degree or more education say the same.  

About four-in-ten Americans say the federal government’s aid package will help them and their household at least a fair amount

Overall, about four-in-ten adults (41%) say the aid package passed by the federal government in December 2020 would help them and their household a great deal or a fair amount. Majorities say the aid package will help small businesses (54%), large businesses (57%), and unemployed people (61%) at least a fair amount. This is a notable shift in confidence from  early in the pandemic  when about seven-in-ten or more Americans said the aid package passed in March would help large and small businesses and unemployed people; 46% said the earlier aid package would help them and their household.

A majority of adults with lower incomes (56%) say the aid package will help them and their household at least a fair amount, with 28% saying it would help them  a great deal . This compares to 41% of middle-income adults and 17% of those with upper incomes who say it will help them at least a fair amount. 

Among other key demographic groups, adults under age 30, Black and Hispanic adults, and those without a college degree are among the most likely to say the aid package will help them and their household at least a fair amount. Over half of Black and Hispanic adults say the aid package will help them and their households (58% and 56% respectively) at least a fair amount, with significant shares saying it will help them  a great deal  (31% and 28% respectively). Smaller shares of White (35%) and Asian adults (43%) say it will help them a great deal or a fair amount. 

Half of adults under age 30 say the federal aid package will help them and their households at least a fair amount; 43% of those ages 30 to 49, 39% of those ages 50 to 64, and 33% of adults ages 65 and older say the same. Adults with a high school diploma or less education are more likely to say the federal aid package will help them and their households at least a fair amount (50%) than those with some college experience (42%) and those with a bachelor’s degree or more education (31%). 

No clear consensus on who should have the greatest responsibility for making sure people can meet their basic economic needs during the coronavirus outbreak

When asked who should have the greatest responsibility for making sure people can meet their basic economic needs during the coronavirus outbreak, 45% point to the federal government, while a third say people themselves or their families should have the greatest responsibility. Smaller shares say state or local governments (12%), charitable organizations (2%), or another source (6%), most often a combination of all of these, should be most responsible. 

There is a sharp partisan divide on this issue. About six-in-ten Democrats and those who lean toward the Democratic party (61%) say the federal government should have the greatest responsibility, and just 18% say it should be people themselves or their families. Among Republicans and Republican leaners, 28% point to the federal government, while a larger share (51%) say people themselves or their families should have the greatest responsibility for making sure they can meet their basic economic needs during the pandemic. 

Liberal Democrats are the most likely to point to the federal government as having the greatest responsibility to ensure people can meet their basic economic needs during the coronavirus outbreak. About seven-in-ten liberal Democrats (72%) say this, compared with 52% of conservative or moderate Democrats, 36% of moderate or liberal Republicans, and an even smaller share of conservative Republicans (23%). In turn, conservative Republicans are the most likely to say it is people themselves or their families who have this responsibility; 57% say this compared with 41% of moderate or liberal Republicans, 25% of moderate or conservative Democrats and just 11% of liberal Democrats.

• Family incomes are based on 2019 earnings and adjusted for differences in purchasing power by geographic region and for household sizes. Middle income is defined here as two-thirds to double the median annual family income for all panelists on the  American Trends Panel . Lower income falls below that range; upper income falls above it. Throughout this report, references to adults who have lost a job or been laid off include those who say they were furloughed or temporarily laid off.  ↩
• For more details, see the  Methodology  section of the report. ↩
• This includes households that experienced both a job loss and a pay cut, as well as those that experienced only a job loss. ↩

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Consumer Behavior

Health vs. wealth: how the pandemic changed our priorities, shopping, sharing, and savoring: balancing health and wealth..

Posted June 6, 2022 | Reviewed by Michelle Quirk

• The COVID-19 pandemic has uniquely impacted the value we place on both money and materialism.
• The pandemic produced materialistic values, such as consuming media, anxiety, stress, loneliness, and depressed mood.
• Contrary to expectations, focus on money actually decreased during the course of the pandemic.

During the early months of 2020, many people were reminded through both personal experience and global news reports of the critical importance of maintaining good health. As the pandemic progressed, we began to ask: but at what cost? We recognized that all the money in the world cannot buy good health, although good insurance helps. Flash forward several years, and we have clarified our priorities through our evolving practices of saving, sharing, and spending. As many people suspected, the COVID-19 pandemic has uniquely impacted the value we place on both money and materialism .

Shopping, Sharing, and Savoring

Olaya Moldes et al. (2022) examined how people changed their priorities over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic. 1 Focusing largely on money and materialism, they made some interesting observations that demonstrate how privately evolving priorities can impact public spending behavior.

Balancing Health and Wealth

Moldes et al. note that the pandemic produced an increase in the types of factors that usually accompany an endorsement of materialistic values, such as consuming more media, anxiety , stress , loneliness , and depressed mood. Although they found that increases in media consumption, anxiety, and stress predicted levels of materialism to an extent, they found such effects to be limited. Contrary to expectations, they found that our focus on money actually decreased during the course of the pandemic.

Moldes et al. recognized a research-based definition of materialism as “individual differences in people's long-term endorsement of values, goals , and associated beliefs that center on the importance of acquiring money and possessions that convey status” (Dittmar et al., 2014). They note that wealth and consumption are thought to be tied to personal achievement and happiness —even though materialism has been linked to lower well-being and higher degrees of compulsive buying. They also note that research shows that advocating materialistic values is influenced by a higher amount of media consumption as well as social and personal insecurities and negative emotions.

But, overall, Moldes et al. explained that their observed decrease in the importance people placed on money might be due to the COVID-19–triggered alterations in the values people held—which were in the opposite direction than were predicted. They also found that, contrary to expectations, people decreased the level of importance they placed on economic resources during the outbreak, despite experiencing more factors that facilitate and promote materialism. They note that these results may be due to prioritizing personal health and well-being, or emerging “collective social identities that promote social solidarity and cooperation ,” that have previously been observed in times of emergencies and environmental disasters—thus decreasing our focus on material and economic resources.

Resignation and Revival

Moldes et al. note that the COVID-19 pandemic has changed the ways in which people think about money. Commenting on what has been dubbed “The Great Resignation” observed in the United States and the United Kingdom, they note that exiting the workforce has been likely fueled by reflecting on life priorities during the pandemic.

One interesting point, however, was that, apparently, during the pandemic, people found money to be less important, despite an increase in factors that endorse materialism. Moldes et al. observed an overall decrease in reported pandemic shopping behaviors, but a higher instance of purchasing as a coping mechanism to deal with negative emotions and in pursuit of well-being.

As we move forward seeking to prioritize both health and wealth, we have gained a greater appreciation of the ageless adage that the most precious things in life are free.

1. Moldes, Olaya, Denitsa Dineva, and Lisbeth Ku. 2022. “Has the Covid‐19 Pandemic Made Us More Materialistic? The Effect of Covid‐19 and Lockdown Restrictions on the Endorsement of Materialism.” Psychology & Marketing, January. doi:10.1002/mar.21627.

Wendy L. Patrick, J.D., Ph.D., is a career trial attorney, behavioral analyst, author of Red Flags , and co-author of Reading People .

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Financial life during the COVID-19 pandemic—an update

The COVID-19 pandemic has taken root in nearly every country on the globe, upending personal and economic lives. Six months into the crisis, some countries have managed to control new cases, while in others the spread remains rampant. While many countries have reopened their economies, allowing a cautious return to work, play, and economic life, the pandemic seems likely to remain a fact of life for the foreseeable future.

Since the end of March 2020, McKinsey has undertaken Financial Insights Pulse Surveys of household financial decision makers across the globe to understand the impact of COVID-19 on financial well-being, and on stated changes in financial services preferences. Surveys are conducted on-line in local languages and are repeated bi-weekly or monthly, depending on the region. Results are sampled on a country basis for a representative balance of financial decision makers, based on variables including age and socioeconomic status. Survey size is between 500 and 1,000 for each country in each month.

This article is an update on the surveys McKinsey conducted in April and May 2020 to assess the immediate effects of COVID-19 on financial sentiment, behaviors, needs, and expectations among household financial decision makers around the globe. The survey covers 30 countries, together accounting for 70 percent of the global population, and 83 percent of all COVID-19 cases reported as of June 30 (see sidebar).

As of mid-June, across the globe, decision makers’ assessments of the health of their national economies were negative, but for most countries they had improved from mid-May. More notably, reported future expectations for the next three months improved meaningfully from May to June across almost all countries.

More concrete markers of financial health remain tenuous. Household financial decision makers across the globe continue to report decreases in income and savings ranging from 30 percent to 80 percent. And in most countries, between 20 percent and 60 percent of decision makers say they fear for their jobs.

In other areas, customer views of banks’ service quality and how they will engage with banks changed little since the May survey. In this stressed environment, what customers continue to want most from their banks is tangible support on credit terms—waiving late fees, reducing minimum payments, or permission to skip a loan payment. At the same time, use of cash is decreasing and digital forms of payment are increasing, perhaps as people quarantine or avoid those interactions more likely to transmit disease. Against this backdrop, in most countries consumers indicate that banks are meeting their expectations—but generally not exceeding them, at least on a net basis.

Following are 10 survey observations focused on a subset of 16 countries, selected for their global and regional economic significance, and the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic on their populations.

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1. financial decision makers feel their country economies and personal finances are weak, but sentiment has risen since may.

Measures of economic sentiment improved somewhat in the June survey, but household financial decision makers around the world continue to report that their countries’ current economies are weak (Exhibit 1). Net sentiment improved by 7 percentage points or more in Brazil, the U.S., Italy, Spain, and Turkey.

Household financial decision makers also tended to rate their personal financial situations as weak, with very little change from May. However, in China, the US, and the UK, respondents see their personal finances, on a net basis, as slightly positive.

Notably, in all countries, respondents assessed the current state of their economies more negatively than they viewed their own financial situations. This difference was most extreme in the UK, followed by Brazil, Italy, and the US. Ratings of personal financial situations were most in line with views of the economy in China, India, and Indonesia.

2. Each month, more consumers expect the impact of COVID-19 on the economy will last a year or longer

We also asked decision makers to look ahead and call the duration of the downturn (Exhibit 2). In April, more than 60 percent of respondents in most of the 16 countries expected the impact of COVID-19 to last at least a year or so (India and Indonesia were the exceptions). By May, the proportion had risen to over 80 percent for many economies, including Western Europe and the UK. And in June, over 90 percent of respondents within many European countries expected the downturn to last at least a year. Outlooks deteriorated most in South Africa, Mexico, and Indonesia. Countries in Asia-Pacific, including China, India, and Indonesia, are generally more optimistic.

3. Respondents in most countries expect the economy to improve in three months, with more mixed personal financial outlooks

When asked to project the state of the economy and of their personal financial situations three months into the future, in April respondents in most countries thought both would grow worse (Exhibit 3). Decision makers in India, the US, South Africa, and China were more optimistic, and thought that at least their own personal financial situations would improve.

In May, decision makers in many countries had grown more optimistic. Respondents in just four countries—France, Germany, Russia and the UK—continued to think that both the economy and their own financial situations would get worse.

Expectations continued to improve through June, when only financial decision makers in France expected deterioration in both the economy and personal financial situations over the next three months. Decision makers in all examined countries outside of Western Europe and Chile expected that both the economy and their own personal financial situations would improve.

4. Job security concerns remain high—and over half of people concerned about their jobs also have less than four months of savings

To examine the direct impact of the pandemic on consumers, our surveys explore concerns over employment, reported financial behaviors, and use of financial services products.

Job security concerns remained roughly constant from May to June, although they varied widely by country (Exhibit 4). In Germany, 9 percent of household financial decision makers expressed concerns over job security, while in India, Chile, and South Africa that fraction was over 50 percent. Furthermore, in most countries more than half of people with job security concerns held savings to cover less than four months’ worth of expenses.

5. Respondents continue to report reduced income, savings, and spending

We also surveyed decision makers on their household income, savings, and spending over the preceding month (Exhibit 5). In June, respondents across all countries reported decreased income and savings on a net basis. The most drastic reductions were found in South Africa and Indonesia, where over 70 percent of respondents reported declines in both income and savings.

Household spending presents a more mixed picture. In wealthier countries such as the US, Canada, and the UK, more decision makers reported reducing spending than increasing spending. For example, in Canada, 51 percent of respondents have reduced household spending while only 19 percent have said they increased spending. On the other hand, in countries in Asia-Pacific and South America such as Indonesia and Brazil, more consumers claimed to have increased spending than decreased. In fact, 46 percent of respondents in Indonesia actually increased spending while only 25 percent claimed to have decreased spending.

6. Cash use has decreased while remote payments have increased

We also asked about changes in decision makers’ banking patterns during the COVID-19 crisis, and found that reliance on cash payments has decreased substantially in most countries examined (Exhibit 6). From May to June, indicated forms of payment changed little from the April survey. However, in some countries where economies began to reopen in May—most notably Italy, Spain and the US—the use of cash increased. In contrast, in Mexico, consumers reported a decrease of 8 percent in the use of cash.

7. Missed loan payments and plans to change asset allocation vary widely by country, with some patterns in high-income economies

We also probed a broad range of additional financial behaviors, including, for example, missed past loan payments, and plans for asset allocation (Exhibit 7). Rates of missed mortgage payments over the past month vary by country and region, but across high-income countries, the proportion of survey participants that noted having missed a mortgage payment grows roughly proportionally with the share of people reporting weak personal financial situations.

Intent to change asset allocation over the coming three months also varies widely across countries. Decision makers in emerging markets were more likely to make changes than those in Europe, the US, and Canada. Across high-income countries, the fraction of people reporting plans to change asset allocation is roughly proportional to the fraction who deemed the economy to be weak.

8. In most countries, respondents indicated banks were at least meeting expectations—with several exceptions

The survey also explored decision makers’ current relationships with their banks (Exhibit 8). In June, in most countries most respondents indicated that their banks were at least meeting expectations during the COVID-19 crisis. Performance above expectations was highest in Turkey and India, and lowest in Chile and Russia. Sentiment in most countries was largely unchanged from May. However, the US and Turkey both saw a significant gains in satisfaction with bank performance, with respective net increases of 9 percent and 8 percent.

Financial decision-maker sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic: A global perspective

9. in this stressed environment, what customers continue to want most from their banks is tangible support on credit terms.

When asked how their banks could provide support during this period of uncertainty, consumers indicated a wide range of needs—creating service and support opportunities (Exhibit 9). Again, opinions varied little between May and June. Customers were nearly unanimous in desiring waivers on late fees, and in a number of countries expressed a desire for reduced minimum payments, as well as forbearance on loans and mortgages. Higher limits on contactless payments were also in demand in Western European countries. In June, we also found an increase in the number of countries in which decision makers rank “improved website that enable seamless transactions across all banking services” in the top three considerations.

In China, where mobile and digital banking are highly evolved, consumers instead requested education on their banks’ mobile and online tools, and 50 percent called for improvements to banks’ web sites.

10. Consumers indicate they will use digital banking more once the crisis is over, but with significant variation by country

Looking ahead to a potential next normal, consumers expect to increase their reliance on remote banking, but with significant variation across countries (Exhibit 10). The preference was especially pronounced in South Africa, Brazil, and India as a net gain of over 30 percent of consumers indicated they will increase their use of online and mobile banking once “normal life” resumes. Even in countries with mature digital banking such as China, roughly 40 percent of respondents said they would make greater use of online and mobile services. In the US and Europe, the expected shift to online and mobile banking services is more muted.

In addition to the dozen countries summarized above, we have developed detailed surveys on an additional 14 countries, which will also be regularly updated. In coming months, we will conduct further surveys on the evolution of economic and financial expectations, perceptions, and behaviors of financial decision makers in all these countries.

Or click directly to see one of these countries in our survey: Australia , Brazil , Canada , Chile , China , Egypt , France , Germany , Greece , India , Indonesia , Italy , Japan , Kenya , Malaysia , Mexico , Morocco , Nigeria , Pakistan , Romania , Russia , Saudi Arabia , Singapore , South Africa , Spain , Sweden , Turkey , United Arab Emirates , the United Kingdom , or the United States .

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Research essay: should we save lives — or save the economy.

The COVID-19 crisis puts all policymakers in a difficult position. In addition to the great uncertainty about the parameters of the pandemic and about the short-term and long-term consequences of the economic slump, there is an ethical dilemma: how to balance the value of saving human lives against the value of preserving people’s livelihoods. In the United States, the debate has been raging between those who say “the cure cannot be worse than the disease,” and those who say “we are not going to put a dollar figure on human life.”

Whether they like it or not, policymakers must address this difficult trade-off. In theory, separating every person from everyone else for two or three weeks would immediately stop the infection spread at little economic cost. This is totally impractical, but less extreme lockdown measures observed in many countries do reduce the reproduction rate of the pandemic to such low numbers that this, actually, would fully extinguish the pandemic within two or three months. It is also possible, under a more lenient approach, to keep the pandemic under control by a stop-and-go policy of repeated lockdown episodes of a few weeks each until a vaccine is found. The problem is: Are all these measures worse than the health crisis itself?

When Princeton students were sent back home, just before the spring break, I was intrigued by this exceptional situation and built a model on a simple Excel spreadsheet, first for my own curiosity, but also as a possible teaching tool for my Woodrow Wilson School class on the microeconomic evaluation of public policy. Several friends and colleagues have helped me improve it, including my daughter, a physicist. 

The model simulates the pandemic as well as the lockdown and testing policies available, and includes a set of evaluation tools for the comparison of various policy options. You can download it from https://bit.ly/fleurbaey . (Users can change all parameters and assumptions and determine the timing and intensity of contact reduction and testing policies.) In a rough but informative way, the model takes account of inequalities in income and life expectancy across social groups and allows for various assumptions about the distribution of the economic cost and the fatality burden among these groups. Such assumptions relate to policy choices about social protection, income support, and access to health care.

The evaluation tools included in the model belong to two ethical approaches, which are the most common for such assessments. To be clear, yes, these methods all “put a dollar figure on human life,” but they do so in a principled way. The main reason they put a value on human life is that each one of us does it all the time. We all take risks every day, implicitly deciding that life is not worth more than the value of the risk taken. I used to ride my bike to the University even though the risk of a fatal accident, while low, was much higher than the risk I’d face driving my car. I thought the advantages of bike-riding — such as exercise and long-term health benefits — outweighed the greater risk I was taking on. Similarly, the main agencies of the federal government use a key number, the “Value of a Statistical Life,” to assess the benefits of various programs with consequences on population health and compare these benefits to the program costs. Without such a number, they would have no idea whether a safety program is worth the cost.

The ethical calculus based on the value of a statistical life is straightforward. In the current pandemic, the number of deaths avoided by the various measures taken by most governments is very high: about 1 percent of the population in developed countries. This huge number — more than 3 million people in the U.S. — comes in part from the overwhelmed hospitals being unable to receive all patients when the “curve” is not “flattened.” The value of a statistical life in the U.S. is generally taken to be around 150 times the annual per-capita income, or about $10 million. Therefore, the health benefits of avoiding all these deaths are worth about 150 percent of a year of income: more than $30 trillion! Assuming that the serious recession that would have occurred in absence of any government intervention is worsened only by about 10 percent of a year of income under the lockdown policy, the conclusion is obvious. The cure is vastly better than the disease.

An evaluation that gives special priority to the worse-off will favor policies granting all people equal access to health care and guaranteeing a lifeline to economically vulnerable workers and small businesses.

However, there are several issues with this overly simple approach. First, it does not account for the fact that the victims are mostly elderly people who do not lose many years of life. There is another number called the “Value of a Statistical Life-Year,” which can be used to assess the years lost instead of the lives lost. Considering that the average victim loses 10 years of life, and that the value of a statistical life-year is about three times the annual income per capita in the U.S., one obtains an estimate of the health benefits of about 30 percent of a year of income. This is still much greater than the predicted economic cost, but in the same order of magnitude — therefore, one should pay close attention to how the health and economic consequences unfold in the coming months. 

Another ethical problem with the Value of Statistical Life approach is that it does not pay attention to the unfair distribution of background conditions (such as income and life expectancy) among social groups, or to the distribution of the health and economic burdens of the ongoing crisis among them. In the U.S., in particular, disadvantaged communities are paying a heavy price on all fronts. These communities often include workers who are exposed to the virus or are among the first to be laid off or lose their businesses.

This is why I prefer an alternative approach that makes an evaluation of the well-being of the population, taking account of these fairness issues in the distribution of burdens and benefits. This “social well-being” approach is more demanding because it requires more data and more detailed predictions of the consequences of the crisis and the policies for different groups, but it provides more relevant evaluations. In particular, it allows the decision-maker to pick a key ethical parameter: the degree of priority granted to the worse-off. An evaluation that gives special priority to the worse-off will favor policies granting all people equal access to health care and guaranteeing a lifeline to economically vulnerable workers and small businesses. It will give more weight to health benefits if the victims of the virus are among the worse-off, and more weight to economic costs if the burden falls on the most disadvantaged. My colleagues and I are debating whether the elderly victims of the virus are really among the worse-off, since they include many pensioners who do not risk losing their jobs and who have been lucky to live to an old age — the average age of a COVID victim in developed countries is close to 80. That’s similar to the life expectancy of the population, which means that, on average, those who do not die from the virus will not live longer than the average victim of the virus. On the other hand, the average COVID victim has lived during times that were much less economically affluent than recent years. 

At any rate, in the current crisis both approaches — in all their variants — strongly favor an ambitious public-health policy combining strict shutdown, widespread testing, and universal mask wearing to promptly quash the spread of the virus at relatively little economic cost. Not many countries have succeeded in achieving this feat, but some have, including some low-income nations. It requires swift action and works best with clear vision, great transparency, a high level of trust and cooperation of everyone involved, and extensive support measures to help the economically vulnerable to go through the hiatus. This is really hard to achieve because the policy appears very painful in the moment, and if relaxation of the effort comes too early, most of the effort will have been done in vain and the pandemic will restart. When the pandemic remains rampant and one has to examine new measures as cases spike again, the question of the hard trade-off between lives and livelihoods reemerges. The tools offered in this model can be applied again and may help us better understand how to navigate this crisis of historic proportions. 

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One part inspiring, one part distressing.

I Thought We’d Learned Nothing From the Pandemic. I Wasn’t Seeing the Full Picture

M y first home had a back door that opened to a concrete patio with a giant crack down the middle. When my sister and I played, I made sure to stay on the same side of the divide as her, just in case. The 1988 film The Land Before Time was one of the first movies I ever saw, and the image of the earth splintering into pieces planted its roots in my brain. I believed that, even in my own backyard, I could easily become the tiny Triceratops separated from her family, on the other side of the chasm, as everything crumbled into chaos.

Some 30 years later, I marvel at the eerie, unexpected ways that cartoonish nightmare came to life – not just for me and my family, but for all of us. The landscape was already covered in fissures well before COVID-19 made its way across the planet, but the pandemic applied pressure, and the cracks broke wide open, separating us from each other physically and ideologically. Under the weight of the crisis, we scattered and landed on such different patches of earth we could barely see each other’s faces, even when we squinted. We disagreed viciously with each other, about how to respond, but also about what was true.

Recently, someone asked me if we’ve learned anything from the pandemic, and my first thought was a flat no. Nothing. There was a time when I thought it would be the very thing to draw us together and catapult us – as a capital “S” Society – into a kinder future. It’s surreal to remember those early days when people rallied together, sewing masks for health care workers during critical shortages and gathering on balconies in cities from Dallas to New York City to clap and sing songs like “Yellow Submarine.” It felt like a giant lightning bolt shot across the sky, and for one breath, we all saw something that had been hidden in the dark – the inherent vulnerability in being human or maybe our inescapable connectedness .

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But it turns out, it was just a flash. The goodwill vanished as quickly as it appeared. A couple of years later, people feel lied to, abandoned, and all on their own. I’ve felt my own curiosity shrinking, my willingness to reach out waning , my ability to keep my hands open dwindling. I look out across the landscape and see selfishness and rage, burnt earth and so many dead bodies. Game over. We lost. And if we’ve already lost, why try?

Still, the question kept nagging me. I wondered, am I seeing the full picture? What happens when we focus not on the collective society but at one face, one story at a time? I’m not asking for a bow to minimize the suffering – a pretty flourish to put on top and make the whole thing “worth it.” Yuck. That’s not what we need. But I wondered about deep, quiet growth. The kind we feel in our bodies, relationships, homes, places of work, neighborhoods.

Like a walkie-talkie message sent to my allies on the ground, I posted a call on my Instagram. What do you see? What do you hear? What feels possible? Is there life out here? Sprouting up among the rubble? I heard human voices calling back – reports of life, personal and specific. I heard one story at a time – stories of grief and distrust, fury and disappointment. Also gratitude. Discovery. Determination.

Among the most prevalent were the stories of self-revelation. Almost as if machines were given the chance to live as humans, people described blossoming into fuller selves. They listened to their bodies’ cues, recognized their desires and comforts, tuned into their gut instincts, and honored the intuition they hadn’t realized belonged to them. Alex, a writer and fellow disabled parent, found the freedom to explore a fuller version of herself in the privacy the pandemic provided. “The way I dress, the way I love, and the way I carry myself have both shrunk and expanded,” she shared. “I don’t love myself very well with an audience.” Without the daily ritual of trying to pass as “normal” in public, Tamar, a queer mom in the Netherlands, realized she’s autistic. “I think the pandemic helped me to recognize the mask,” she wrote. “Not that unmasking is easy now. But at least I know it’s there.” In a time of widespread suffering that none of us could solve on our own, many tended to our internal wounds and misalignments, large and small, and found clarity.

Read More: A Tool for Staying Grounded in This Era of Constant Uncertainty

I wonder if this flourishing of self-awareness is at least partially responsible for the life alterations people pursued. The pandemic broke open our personal notions of work and pushed us to reevaluate things like time and money. Lucy, a disabled writer in the U.K., made the hard decision to leave her job as a journalist covering Westminster to write freelance about her beloved disability community. “This work feels important in a way nothing else has ever felt,” she wrote. “I don’t think I’d have realized this was what I should be doing without the pandemic.” And she wasn’t alone – many people changed jobs , moved, learned new skills and hobbies, became politically engaged.

Perhaps more than any other shifts, people described a significant reassessment of their relationships. They set boundaries, said no, had challenging conversations. They also reconnected, fell in love, and learned to trust. Jeanne, a quilter in Indiana, got to know relatives she wouldn’t have connected with if lockdowns hadn’t prompted weekly family Zooms. “We are all over the map as regards to our belief systems,” she emphasized, “but it is possible to love people you don’t see eye to eye with on every issue.” Anna, an anti-violence advocate in Maine, learned she could trust her new marriage: “Life was not a honeymoon. But we still chose to turn to each other with kindness and curiosity.” So many bonds forged and broken, strengthened and strained.

Instead of relying on default relationships or institutional structures, widespread recalibrations allowed for going off script and fortifying smaller communities. Mara from Idyllwild, Calif., described the tangible plan for care enacted in her town. “We started a mutual-aid group at the beginning of the pandemic,” she wrote, “and it grew so quickly before we knew it we were feeding 400 of the 4000 residents.” She didn’t pretend the conditions were ideal. In fact, she expressed immense frustration with our collective response to the pandemic. Even so, the local group rallied and continues to offer assistance to their community with help from donations and volunteers (many of whom were originally on the receiving end of support). “I’ve learned that people thrive when they feel their connection to others,” she wrote. Clare, a teacher from the U.K., voiced similar conviction as she described a giant scarf she’s woven out of ribbons, each representing a single person. The scarf is “a collection of stories, moments and wisdom we are sharing with each other,” she wrote. It now stretches well over 1,000 feet.

A few hours into reading the comments, I lay back on my bed, phone held against my chest. The room was quiet, but my internal world was lighting up with firefly flickers. What felt different? Surely part of it was receiving personal accounts of deep-rooted growth. And also, there was something to the mere act of asking and listening. Maybe it connected me to humans before battle cries. Maybe it was the chance to be in conversation with others who were also trying to understand – what is happening to us? Underneath it all, an undeniable thread remained; I saw people peering into the mess and narrating their findings onto the shared frequency. Every comment was like a flare into the sky. I’m here! And if the sky is full of flares, we aren’t alone.

I recognized my own pandemic discoveries – some minor, others massive. Like washing off thick eyeliner and mascara every night is more effort than it’s worth; I can transform the mundane into the magical with a bedsheet, a movie projector, and twinkle lights; my paralyzed body can mother an infant in ways I’d never seen modeled for me. I remembered disappointing, bewildering conversations within my own family of origin and our imperfect attempts to remain close while also seeing things so differently. I realized that every time I get the weekly invite to my virtual “Find the Mumsies” call, with a tiny group of moms living hundreds of miles apart, I’m being welcomed into a pocket of unexpected community. Even though we’ve never been in one room all together, I’ve felt an uncommon kind of solace in their now-familiar faces.

Hope is a slippery thing. I desperately want to hold onto it, but everywhere I look there are real, weighty reasons to despair. The pandemic marks a stretch on the timeline that tangles with a teetering democracy, a deteriorating planet , the loss of human rights that once felt unshakable . When the world is falling apart Land Before Time style, it can feel trite, sniffing out the beauty – useless, firing off flares to anyone looking for signs of life. But, while I’m under no delusions that if we just keep trudging forward we’ll find our own oasis of waterfalls and grassy meadows glistening in the sunshine beneath a heavenly chorus, I wonder if trivializing small acts of beauty, connection, and hope actually cuts us off from resources essential to our survival. The group of abandoned dinosaurs were keeping each other alive and making each other laugh well before they made it to their fantasy ending.

Read More: How Ice Cream Became My Own Personal Act of Resistance

After the monarch butterfly went on the endangered-species list, my friend and fellow writer Hannah Soyer sent me wildflower seeds to plant in my yard. A simple act of big hope – that I will actually plant them, that they will grow, that a monarch butterfly will receive nourishment from whatever blossoms are able to push their way through the dirt. There are so many ways that could fail. But maybe the outcome wasn’t exactly the point. Maybe hope is the dogged insistence – the stubborn defiance – to continue cultivating moments of beauty regardless. There is value in the planting apart from the harvest.

I can’t point out a single collective lesson from the pandemic. It’s hard to see any great “we.” Still, I see the faces in my moms’ group, making pancakes for their kids and popping on between strings of meetings while we try to figure out how to raise these small people in this chaotic world. I think of my friends on Instagram tending to the selves they discovered when no one was watching and the scarf of ribbons stretching the length of more than three football fields. I remember my family of three, holding hands on the way up the ramp to the library. These bits of growth and rings of support might not be loud or right on the surface, but that’s not the same thing as nothing. If we only cared about the bottom-line defeats or sweeping successes of the big picture, we’d never plant flowers at all.

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1.  The need for economic resilience to health shocks

2.  false prophets, and naïve linear projection of recent history, 3.  factors that matter, 4.  the proof in the pudding, 5.  lives versus livelihoods, 6.  asian experiences, 7.  unmasking culture, 8.  what is to be done, saving lives and livelihoods in the covid-19 pandemic: what have we learned, particularly from asia.

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Derek Qi Ren Kok , Wing Thye Woo; Saving Lives and Livelihoods in the COVID-19 Pandemic: What Have We Learned, Particularly from Asia?. Asian Economic Papers 2021; 20 (1): 1–29. doi: https://doi.org/10.1162/asep_a_00833

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The key practices in successful government responses to the COVID-19 pandemic are (1) early border controls to contain the initial spread of the virus from abroad; (2) rapidly increasing the capacity of national health systems in terms of mobilizing staff, securing supplies (e.g., protective equipment and respiratory devices), and optimizing space (e.g., ensuring adequate numbers of acute and intensive care beds) to scale up testing-tracing-treating infrastructure; (3) promoting individual hygienic behavior such as social distancing and face mask use, which requires, respectively, active government enforcement of regulations against holding spreader events, and strong government intervention in the market to ensure adequate supplies; (4) fiscal measures to extend disaster relief to workers, businesses, and vulnerable populations; and (5) clear, concise, and consistent communications from leaders and authorities.

International cooperation must have a key role in the fight against the pandemic. So far, a global response to the crisis has been glaringly absent. Although it is understandable that countries prioritize their own needs, it must be understood that no country is safe until every other country is also safe. Global access to future vaccines, supplies, tests, and treatments is the only way to ensure the virus is truly eradicated within a country. The richer countries should establish a global fund to provide the poor countries with the needed vaccine, and to enhance their efforts in testing, tracing, and treating COVID-19 cases.

The world first woke up to the seriousness of COVID-19 in January 2020; the disease is still marching relentlessly and getting deadlier across the world in February 2021 when this paper is sent for publication. The total number of deaths worldwide soared from 1 million in September 2020 to 2.5 million in February 2021. The number is expected to increase because large European countries like France, Italy, Spain, and Germany are bracing for another wave (the third wave) of infections, with the appearance of more easily transmitted variants of COVID-19. 1

Comparing the Output Consequences of the GFC and the COVID-19 pandemic

Source: 2007–2009 data are from International Monetary Fund, IMF ( 2020 ).

2019–2020 data are from International Monetary Fund, IMF ( 2021 ).

Of these nine large economies in the five regions, there is only one case (Germany) where the GFC inflicted more material damage than COVID-19, and even then only marginally so, −5.7 percent in 2009 versus −5.4 percent in 2020. More tellingly, only one country (China) reported positive growth in 2020. As China is the only country that had the pandemic under control by July 2020, we can see the clear lesson that successful control of COVID-19 is necessary for production and investment to resume their normal courses.

Given the fundamental nature of the COVID-19 threat to life and to livelihoods, the Asian Economic Panel (AEP) mobilized its membership to study this negative public health shock and come up with recommendations on policy suggestions to strengthen economic resilience to future occurrences of this type of shock. This mobilization follows the AEP tradition of publishing special issues of the Asian Economic Papers (ASEP) devoted to understanding important economic developments and large negative shocks, for example, the Spring/Summer 2003 issue of ASEP analyzed the implications of China's full integration into the world economy upon its accession to the WTO in 2001; the Winter 2004 issue explored the impact of the SARS pandemic of 2002–03; the Winter 2009 issue on the GFC sparked by the collapse of Lehman Brothers in September 2008; the Winter/Spring 2012 issue on the middle-income trap phenomenon; and the Fall 2019 issue on the U.S.–China trade 1 war.

This time, ASEP is devoting two issues, released simultaneously, to examine the COVID-19 phenomenon. These two issues of ASEP place special emphasis on the experiences of the Asian economies because the death rates in East and Southeast Asia pale in comparison with those in the largest European economies and in the United States. To this end, this special edition has convened two groups of papers.

The first group of papers are analyses conducted at the global level to enable us to examine the pandemic's impact on Asian economies vis-à-vis other economies, such as an East–West comparison of policy responses (Sachs); an evaluation of the global economic costs of COVID-19 under different scenarios (McKibbin and Fernando); the pandemic's effects on international trade (Hayakawa and Mukunoki) and financial markets (Azis, Virananda, and Estiko); and changes to our lifestyle and work behaviors (Okubo, Inoue, and Sekijima).

The second group of papers are in-depth analyses of select economies: China (Tian; and Li, Lu, and Zheng), Japan (Konishi, Saito, Ishikawa, Kanai, and Igei), Malaysia (Khalid), the Philippines (Monsod and Gochoco-Bautista), South Korea (Lim, Hong, Mou, and Cheong), Taiwan (Kuo), and Thailand (Tangkitvanich). We have the largely successful stories of China, Japan, Taiwan, Thailand, and South Korea; and accounts of policy miscalculations, missteps, and mistakes in other economies in the continent like the Philippines and Malaysia.

Any discussion over government responses to the pandemic almost always involves debate over whether lockdowns are the appropriate response to combating and containing the virus. Critics of lockdowns hold that stay-at-home orders wield more devastating consequences than the COVID-19 virus itself. The Great Barrington Declaration typified this line of thought. 2 This proposal argued that lockdown policies would lower childhood vaccination rates, reduce screening for diseases like cancer, and hurt mental health—leading to greater excess mortality than without a lockdown. If government action is needed at all, it should be limited to those most at risk of death from COVID-19, for example, the elderly and people who are immunologically impaired. The uncompromising recommendation is that those with “minimal risk of death”—the majority of the population—should be encouraged to go about their lives normally and build herd immunity to the virus through natural infection.

The best example of this attitude among public health officers is that of Sweden's chief epidemiologist, Anders Tegnell. Sweden refrained from imposing a lockdown and instead chose to provide its citizens with voluntary social distancing guidelines at its bars, restaurants, parks, public transportation, and schools; and even kept its national borders unconditionally open. This Swedish public health response was starkly different from the other Nordic countries (Denmark, 3 Norway, and Finland), as well as different from the overwhelmingly majority of Western European economies. When it was pointed out to Tegnell in March 2020 that keeping schools open would risk children infecting the 10 percent of Swedish population that is aged, his e-mailed response was, “10 percent might be worth it?” (Bjorklund 2020 ).

Sentiments like that of Tegnell and the Great Barrington Declaration were met with strong responses by most members of the medical community. For example, Alwan et al. ( 2020 ), in a letter to the leading medical journal, Lancet , called the herd immunity proposal “a dangerous fallacy unsupported by the scientific evidence.” If put into practice, the letter warned, the approach would not end the COVID-19 pandemic but would instead result in recurrent epidemics and impose even greater burdens on the economy and health care system. Furthermore, they argued, although lockdowns were disruptive on mental and physical health, and the economy, they were essential to buy time to reduce mortality and establish pandemic response systems. “The evidence is very clear: controlling community spread of COVID-19 is the best way to protect our societies and economies until safe and effective vaccines and therapeutics arrive within the coming months. We cannot afford distractions that undermine an effective response; it is essential that we act urgently based on the evidence.” 4

It is interesting to note that the herd immunity option was also the preferred response of UK Prime Minister Boris Johnson and U.S. President Donald Trump to the outbreak of COVID-19. 5 We can rule out that the reason that they did so was because it was the politically expedient position to take. If political expediency is the primary determinant of a leader's policy choice, then the fact that the overwhelming majority of democratically elected leaders in Western Europe chose lockdowns instead would mean that lockdowns, not herd immunity (i.e., “look busy” not “be passive”), are the more politically expedient choice. 6

The likely explanation for why Johnson, Trump, and the signatories of the Great Barrington Declaration rejected the need for compulsory mask wearing, social distancing, school closing, and border controls is that they were gambling on the COVID-19 pandemic to be in line with recent experiences with other pandemics, the naive projection of which would suggest that COVID-19 was unlikely to have much impact on the richest countries.

Health consequences of selected pandemics

Sources: Center for Disease Control, CDC ( 2019a and 2019b ), Johns Hopkins University ( 2021 ), World Health Organization, WHO ( 2020 and 2021 ).

A key feature revealed in Table 2 is that the influenza virus had been much more deadly than the coronavirus. The number of global deaths and U.S. deaths were, respectively, 50 million and 675,000 for the Spanish flu; and 284,000 and 12,649 for the swine flu. The U.S. share of deaths in these two virus groups were 1.35 percent and 4.45 percent, respectively. For the two previous coronaviruses (SARS and MERS), the number of U.S. deaths was zero in both cases; and the global number of deaths did not exceed 1,000 in either case. And because it has been known since January 2020 that this latest respiratory disease is caused by a coronavirus, it was therefore tempting in early 2020 to guess that history would repeat itself, and that the COVID-19 infection would not be a big killer. Herein lies the empirical basis of the willingness of Johnson, Trump, and Tegnell to gamble on the herd immunity solution to the COVID-19 pandemic.

It turns out, however, that this time, the deadliness of the COVID-19 type of coronavirus greatly exceeded that of SARS and MERS. By the end of February 2021, 2.5 million had been killed worldwide, of which 0.5 million deaths were in the United States alone. The United States accounted for 20 percent of global casualties, a proportion that far exceeded the 1.35 percent in the Spanish flu and the 4.35 percent in the swine flu.

The high proportion of global deaths in the United States reflects the extreme concentration of the occurrence of the disease in that country. At the end of February 2020, the United States accounted for 29.3 million of the 118.8 million cases worldwide, with the U.S. number of cases being substantially greater than the sum of the number of cases in India and Brazil, which had the second and third highest number of cases, at 11.3 million each.

In sum, 2020 COVID-19 has proved itself to be deadly different from the earlier 2002 SARS and 2012 MERS, rendering reckless leaders like Trump humbled humbugs. To the rest of us, this event is a timely reminder that the past is often a very poor guide to the future.

Public health preparedness, death rate, and growth in 2020

Note: Estimates for 2020 GDP growth: IMF ( 2021 ) for Australia, China, France, Germany, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, Russia, Spain, Thailand, UK and the United States / Kim ( 2021 ) for South Korea / Cheng et al. ( 2021 ) for Taiwan / Stats NZ (2020) for New Zealand / countryeconomy.com (2021) for remaining.

Table 3 shows the surprising absence of a clear negative correlation between the degree of public health preparedness in 2019 and the COVID-19 death rate in 2020. The United States and the United Kingdom are ranked first and second in the GHS index and yet they have among the highest death rates, 184.9 and 156.5 respectively, compared with the lowest ranked economies, India (no. 57) and Russia (no. 63), which had substantially lower death rates, 11.2 and 58.4, respectively. This surprising feature in Table 3 is actually quite a general phenomenon in that all six economies that had death rates above 100 are in the top 19 rank of the 195 economies—that is, these highest-death economies are in the top 10 percent of economies in terms of preparedness for public health emergencies.

Two factors suggest themselves to be relevant here. The first factor is “wrong policies versus right policies.” Although the United States, the UK, and Sweden (with GHS rank of 1, 2, and 7, respectively) had effective responses in place to be implemented, these responses were either not implemented (Sweden), implemented late (UK), or implemented badly and half-heartedly (United States).

The second factor is that geography matters in COVID-19 outcomes. Five of the six economies with death rates over 100 are in Western Europe and four of them are Schengen countries. Eight economies have death rates under 4, with six of them in East and Southeast Asia (Taiwan, Vietnam, China, Thailand, South Korea, and Malaysia) and the other two in Australasia (New Zealand and Australia). There is a Europe–Asia difference in fatality rates.

A geographical perspective on COVID-19 pandemic

Source: See Table 3 .

Age structure of population

One general difference between Europe and Asia is that the proportion of elderly is substantially higher in the former; and it is known that COVID-19 is deadlier for the elderly. Finland and Norway have the lowest death rates (13.45 and 11.70, respectively) in Western Europe, and these rates are at the high end of Asian death rates—India (11.16), Indonesia (13.44), and the Philippines (11.52), which are all young societies—even though Finland and Norway are much higher ranked in the GHS index. The importance of the age structure factor as an explanatory factor is given more credence by the fact that (1) Japan, the most aged society in Northeast Asia, also has the highest death rate; and (2) Russia, an aged society, has a death rate of 58, which is within the range of European fatality rates.

Degree of geographical isolation that can be achieved

The low-population Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, and Norway, which are located on the northern cold fringe of Western Europe, have the lowest death rates in Western Europe. Russia, at the far fringe of Europe, has a death rate that is closer to Denmark than to any of the non-Nordic Western European countries that together contain most of the Schengen area population. The effectiveness of reducing infection and death by the successful control of a country's borders is supported by the low death rates in faraway Australia and New Zealand, which both have low population and tight controls on entry and stringent border health-screening and quarantine.

The geographical partition in Table 4 also allows us to identify more clearly the contribution of “wrong policies” in creating huge disparities in the death rate. The United States is separated from Europe by the large Atlantic Ocean, and from Asia by the even larger Pacific Ocean; and its border with Mexico in the Trump period was a de facto militarized zone (e.g., heavily guarded with night-vision cameras and intensively patrolled by surveillance drones, backed up by rapid-response immigration teams), complete with a high and thick border wall. Yet, until Joseph Biden took over in January 2021, there was no health screening at the entry points, and there were no quarantine requirements. Geographical isolation was possible to achieve, but barriers to entry into the United States were ramped up only for mainland Chinese, poor Latin Americans, and select groups of Muslims.

The age structure of the U.S. population would have also helped to lower the death rate because it is not an aged society like Western Europe, Japan, and Russia, and is also not a rapidly aging society like China, South Korea, and Taiwan. Only Belgium has a death rate (193) that is higher than that of the United States (156). In contrast, the geographically isolated and non-aging societies of Australia and New Zealand have deaths rates of only 3.6 and 0.5, respectively.

Until Trump left office in January 2021, he and the conservative governors of several large states maintained their refusal to promote mask wearing and social distancing. Trump devoted his time, instead, to riling up xenophobic emotions. He escalated his racist rhetoric with remarks such as “China Virus” and “Kung Flu,” 12 and he pulled the United States out of the World Health Organization (WHO) in the midst of the deadly COVID-19 pandemic after claiming that WHO had turned a blind eye to malicious behavior by China. This non-science-based public health position of the Trump administration reflected Trump's political instinct and the tribalist nature of Trump's political movement.

Table 4 also allows us to see the human and material costs of different public policy responses to COVID-19, taking China and Sweden as polar cases. The death rate was 0.35 in China and 125.95 in Sweden; and their GDP growth rates in 2020 were 2.3 percent and −2.8 percent, respectively.

China adopted lockdowns in its strictest sense, deploying a stringent formula of immediate lockdowns and mass testing even at the first signs of infection. There is perhaps no stronger example of this than Wuhan, the initial epicenter of the pandemic, where a complete lockdown of the population was put in place from 23 January to 8 April. The Chinese government also decreased population mobility nationwide—for example, extending the duration of the Lunar New Year holiday break, and closing schools, museums, and provincial public transportation. A nationwide public information campaign was also launched to promote social distancing and hygienic measures, and to discourage the visiting of relatives during the Lunar New Year period.

Sweden, on the other hand, only provided voluntary social distancing guidelines at bars, restaurants, parks, public transportation, and schools. At the height of the coronavirus outbreak in spring, Sweden's death rate was not only one of the highest in Europe, it was also on par with the United States. However, the daily number of new infections in Sweden started declining rapidly in late June, bringing the daily number of deaths from COVID-19 to just three daily deaths in early September compared with a peak of 115 in April. When the number of new cases per capita in Sweden averaged lower than Norway and Denmark, state epidemiologist Tegnell proclaimed that “Sweden has gone from being one of the countries in Europe with the most spread to one that has some of the fewest cases in Europe” (Erdbrink 2020 ).

But the situation reversed after early September. The debate on the wisdom of the herd immunity solution to the COVID-19 challenge was finally settled on 16 November 2020 when Prime Minister Stefan Lofven told the Swedish public: “Don't go to the gym, don't go the library, don't have dinner out, don't have parties—cancel!”; followed by the announcement of strict social distancing measures beginning the week after (Schaverien 2020 ). The next day, King Carl Gustaf posted a royal message on Instagram instructing his subjects to “Hold on tight!” (ibid.). However, Tegnell insisted in a BBC interview that it is “not yet possible to say which country has right strategy” (BBC 2020 c).

A month later, in Gustaf's annual TV interview, he said: “I think we have failed. We have a large number who have died and that is terrible.” Lofven agreed: “Of course the fact that so many have died can't be considered as anything other than a failure” (BBC 2020 c). It seems likely that Tegnell is now one of the few defenders of herd immunity left.

As China is very different from Sweden, the comparison of outcomes is rightly subject to disputes on many dimensions. A comparison among the Nordic countries in Table 4 would come closest to a controlled experiment, given their similarities in economic structure, physical geography, and socioeconomic framework. The unfortunate but unsurprising outcome is that Sweden has a significantly higher death rate than its Nordic neighbors, which had all implemented early lockdowns of their economies. The death rate (up through the end of February 2021) was 125.95 6 in Sweden, 40.69 in Denmark, 13.45 in Finland, and 11.70 in Norway.

The surprising outcome from the comparison of Nordic countries was on the economic front. The 2020 GDP growth rate for Sweden is expected to be −2.8 percent, a bit better than Denmark's (−3.3 percent), almost the same as Finland's (−2.9 percent), but markedly worse than Norway's (−0.8 percent). In short, Sweden allowed many more citizens to die without bringing much more economic benefits to the survivors. It was magical thinking to believe that COVID-19 could be allowed to run its course unimpeded to attain the natural nirvana state of herd immunity in the community.

“Comparing COVID-19 Control in the Asia-Pacific and North-Atlantic Regions” by Jeffrey D. Sachs in this issue quantifies the relative importance of the key factors in determining the virus’ daily reproduction number (R) in 25 economies during the first wave of infection. R tells us the average number of infections that is transmitted by an infectious individual. If R is less than 1, then the infectious individual would infect less than one other individual on average, meaning the number of active cases in the population would decline over time. But if R is larger than 1, each infected individual will, on average, infect more than one person, hence causing the epidemic to expand.

Sachs’ main finding is that the Asia-Pacific Region—which Sachs defines as mainland China, Hong Kong, Taiwan, Japan, Korea, Australia, New Zealand, and the ASEAN countries—has effectively controlled the epidemic in comparison with the North Atlantic region, which includes North America and Western Europe. Between the two regions, the Asia-Pacific region reported fewer confirmed cases and deaths per million, with a lower disruption of economic activity.

stopping the entry of infected individuals from other countries;

promoting individual responsibility in avoiding infection through hygienic practices such as wearing face masks and physical distancing;

isolating infected individuals to keep them from infecting others;

protecting vulnerable groups, especially the elderly, from infection;

protecting residents of congregate settings such as care centers, prisons, and worker hostels;

shutting down schools and public events (sports, religious, entertainment); and

shutting down workplaces and order non-essential workers to shelter at home.

He notes that strategies (1), (2), and (3) are low-cost measures. In contrast, the lockdowns espoused in strategies (6) and (7) carry a tremendous cost to the economy.

According to Sachs’ regression results, the variable with the largest magnitude by far is hygienic behavior, which includes four distinct practices: the wearing of face masks, avoiding crowded places, improving personal hygiene, and avoiding touching objects in public. According to Sachs' estimate, varying hygienic behavior from 0 to 1 results in a reduction of R by 2.0. As the frequent point estimate of COVID-19’s R reproduction number is 2.4, universal hygienic practices would thus reduce R to 0.4, which is more than enough to contain the virus.

The indicator with the next largest impact on the regression is the economic shutdown indicator. However, a full lockdown, meaning a 100 percent drop in visits to economic sites, would only result in a modest reduction of the R reproduction number of the virus. Sachs argues that this underscores that lockdowns are “at best a stop-gap policy until more efficient and powerful public health measures—hygiene and isolating—can be scaled up.”

Sachs found that when it comes to deploying the low-cost public health measures of early restrictions on international travel, widespread use of face masks and physical distancing, and testing-isolating-and-tracing, the Asia-Pacific region outperformed the North Atlantic region and were less reliant on costly lockdowns.

This difference translated to the Asia-Pacific region's performance in terms of containing the virus. In contrast to North Atlantic countries, several Asian-Pacific economies showed “superlative results” in suppressing the virus and keeping death rates per million very low, which include Australia, Cambodia, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Lao PDR, New Zealand, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

Sachs’ analysis of the Asia-Pacific experience provides evidence that the pandemic can be contained through public health means such as improved hygiene, face mask wearing, and isolation of infectious individuals, instead of a primary reliance on lockdowns.

In response to Sachs’ findings, Pengfei Li, Ming Lu, and Yilin Zheng, in “A Note on the Role of Cultural, Institutional, and Urbanization Features in the COVID-19 Pandemic,” contend that hygienic behavior like the willingness to wear masks is “related to cultural traditions.” According to the authors, “traditional Confucian culture emphasizes the achievement of social stability via individual internalization of social welfare,” which explains why “governments throughout much of East Asia adopted comprehensive lockdown policies during the initial outbreak of COVID-19 because they judged their citizens to be willing to comply.” In contrast, North Atlantic countries tend to prioritize individual freedom, thus its governments were “less inclined” to impose lockdowns in containing the pandemic.

James K. Galbraith, in his comment on Sachs’ paper, cautions that while the Asia-Pacific region has indeed outperformed the North Atlantic region in terms of containing the virus, “one should be wary of drawing cultural inferences.” Galbraith highlights that Japan's performance in reducing R is not much better than the United States or Canada, and the Philippines, Indonesia, and India have some of the highest cases in the world despite hailing from the Asia-Pacific region. On the other hand, Denmark, Norway, and Finland are doing well despite opting for lockdowns instead of low-cost public health means, as we discussed above. To borrow Galbraith's words, much remains to be explored.

The IMF's World Economic Outlook in October 2020 reports that lockdowns can substantially lower infections (e.g., a stringent lockdown leads to a reduction in cumulated infections of about 40 percent after 30 days. Countries that deployed lockdowns early when the number of cases were still low reported considerably fewer infections compared with countries that introduced lockdowns when cases were already high. Besides the early adoption of lockdowns, the lockdowns must be strict enough to contain infections, suggesting therefore that stringent and short-lived lockdowns would be superior to mild but prolonged measures.

The IMF's analysis also confirmed what many already knew, that lockdowns have a considerable negative effect on economic activity. Interestingly, it found that the recession was also largely driven by people voluntarily reducing their social interactions out of fear of contracting the virus. In fact, the analysis indicates that voluntary social distancing played a near comparable role with lockdowns in the contraction of economic activity. The crucial ramification is that lifting lockdowns would unlikely result in a rise in economic activity as voluntary social distancing would still persist, especially when infection numbers are still high. 13

What is becoming clearer to see from the emerging evidence is that the oft-touted assumption that countries face a trade-off between health and the economy in their responses to COVID-19 is perhaps unfounded. This initial assumption has been revealed to be a false dilemma. Table 3 showed that the three economies with the lowest death rates—Taiwan (0.04), Vietnam (0.04), and China (0.35)—were the only ones with positive GDP growth rates in 2020, suggesting that economies that had managed to control the pandemic had also generally protected their economy. This relationship is a weak one, however. The next group of low-fatality economies—Thailand (0.12) and New Zealand (0.53)—had negative growth rates but there was not a monotonic relationship between death rate and GDP growth rate, as the 2020 GDP growth rate was −6.6 percent for Thailand and −2.2 percent for New Zealand. To quote Bhanupong Nidhiprabha, there is simply “no paradox between the low death rate caused by COVID-19 and the economic hardships caused by COVID-19 because there is no determinate relationship between these two variables” (“Comment on ‘The Paradox of Thailand's Success in Controlling COVID-19’ by Poum Tangkitvanich”).

The evidence just discussed shows that it is possible for countries to achieve good outcomes on both health and economic dimensions in response to COVID-19. But what were the precise strategies taken by these countries and are there lessons to be learned by the rest of the world? Where do Asian economies fall in the divide between lockdown or no lockdown?

The experience of Taiwan, detailed by Chun-Chien Kuo in “COVID-19 in Taiwan: Economic Impacts and Lessons Learned,” is particularly worth examining as Taiwan finds itself with the stunning record of actually recording a positive 1.59 percent GDP growth in the first quarter of 2020, while maintaining one of the lowest death rates in the world without the use of lockdowns. Kuo's analysis reveals that much of its economic rebound can be attributed to a rise in external demand for its information and communications technology and semiconductor products. The author asserts that this is more the exception than the norm, stating that Taiwan's economic success in this specific area seems more the result of being situated in larger global economic contexts, instead of the government's relief package.

If Kuo is hesitant to credit the government's actions for Taiwan's bounce in its information and communications technology and semiconductor exports, any reluctance dissipates in his exposition of Taiwan's implementation of its national “precision-prevention” strategy, which he praises for the minimal health and economic impacts to the society. Taiwan's experience of SARS led to substantial improvements in its public health system, of which the existence of a national health insurance program with 99 percent population coverage played a crucial role in ensuring that all active cases, even foreigners, received proper medical care. A key success factor in the Taiwanese response was how early the government responded to the outbreak, with the creation of a central command center merely weeks after the first cases of an unknown pneumonia were notified to the WHO by China. Although it did not adopt a lockdown, Taiwan was one of the earliest economies to implement border closures, which helped reduce the influx of potentially infectious travelers from China in the early stages of the outbreak. Taiwan also applied its artificial intelligence and big data technology not only to detect and track cases, but also to enforce home isolation and home quarantine policy. For instance, passenger travel histories, medical information of quarantined individuals, and even their cellphone location data are captured by Taiwan's big data cloud system, which makes it easy to test, trace, isolate, and monitor cases.

Similarly, South Korea was able to flatten the curve of its infections with minimal economic disruption, as Byungho Lim et al. recount in “COVID-19 in Korea: Success Based on Past Failure.” Initially deemed as the second most vulnerable country to the virus after China, South Korea has instead become a model nation in the global fight against COVID-19. Its “3T” approach of large-scale testing-tracing-treating has been key to its success, especially the much-heralded use of drive-through testing centers that have been followed by other countries. Instead of imposing a lockdown when numbers surged, the government merely announced work-from-home guidelines and asked the public to reduce non-essential outdoor activities and to wear masks in public. When numbers dropped to single digits in April 2020, the government decided to relax the guidelines and switch to what it calls the “everyday life quarantine” system, whereby, with social distancing and maskwearing in place, Koreans could return to their daily lives with the exception of attendance at high-risk facilities such as sports stadiums, concert halls, and universities. Economically, South Korea's private consumption did not fall as much as the OECD's prediction of a one-third decrease. Instead, fueled with a large fiscal stimulus that is equivalent to 54 percent of its 2020 budget, domestic sales have returned to pre-outbreak levels.

Where Taiwan and South Korea were successful in containing the virus without use of a lockdown, China adopted the most severe lockdowns. In the early stages of the two-month-long lockdown of Wuhan, people were allowed out to purchase food, but this was completely halted by mid-February where no one could leave their home compounds. Wei Tian in “How China Managed the COVID-19 Pandemic” provides us with an explanation as to why such a harsh lockdown was enacted in Wuhan. The month before Wuhan was placed under lockdown coincided with the peak period of population mobility due to the Lunar New Year celebrations, where people usually return to their hometowns for the festivities. The city of Wuhan had the tenth largest population outflow among Chinese cities, with an average daily outflow of 250,000 people. During this peak period, the population outflow from Wuhan to other cities numbered at 4.3 million, which made up 70 percent of total outflow. The lockdown of Wuhan was therefore necessary to avoid a large outflow of people spreading the virus across the country.

In general, China discouraged all travel, both within-country and out-of-country, by reducing flights and train services, closing tourist sites and public events, and enforcing mask-wearing and social distancing. Due to measures like these, intercity population mobility was greatly reduced, helping China to curb massive spreads of the virus across the country. Although China's GDP contracted by 6.8 percent in the first quarter, its rapid containment of the virus has helped its economy to rebound in the second quarter by 3.2 percent, far exceeding the 1.2 percent projection of the IMF and superior to many other economies. Tian's account of the second wave of infections that hit Beijing in June is particularly valuable in understanding how the Chinese government has so efficiently refined its systematic and standard epidemic containment practices, so much so that this second wave was brought under control in less than a month.

If the likes of China and Taiwan's responses exemplify the continent's “gold standard,” a region as large and diverse as Asia would inevitably also carry accounts of government missteps and policy failures.

For instance, the speedy response of Malaysia's Ministry of Health in combining robust contact tracing measures with punitive lockdown orders helped the country to record one of the lowest death rates in the world. There was a severe lockdown from 18 March through 3 May under four consecutive Mobility Control Orders (MCOs), followed by a Conditional MCO between 4 May and 9 June that allowed many businesses to reopen and permitted some interstate travel. With continued decline in COVID-19 cases, a Recovery MCO was proclaimed on 10 June 2020, which allowed the almost complete resumption of normal economic life, but restrictions on international travel remained in place, albeit greatly relaxed. Nevertheless, its 17.1 percent GDP contraction in the second quarter of 2020 was the worst in ASEAN. Muhammed Abdul Khalid, in “COVID-19: Malaysia Experience and Key Lessons,” attributes this to the government's miniscule direct fiscal injection of only 1.9 percent of GDP, far lower than the ASEAN-6 average.

After the completion of Khalid's paper in mid-September 2020, the point at which his account stopped, Malaysia's initial successful response has become a distant memory. At the end of July 2020, the Sabah state government on Borneo island was brought down by defections and new elections were called for 26 September 2020. The enforcement of social distancing regulations at political gatherings was not strict, making all of them superspreader events. Politicians and campaign workers travelled back and forth between Peninsular Malaysia and Sabah in August and September, but quarantining and screening protocols at these airports were deemed unnecessary by health authorities.

Malaysia's case tally started skyrocketing upward in October and a partial lockdown was re-introduced on 9 November 2020. The number of infections continued to climb, however, and on 11 January 2021, the federal government announced the re-imposition of its strictest form of lockdown, the MCO, on 13 January 2021. On the day before, 12 January 2021, the King declared Emergency Rule in Malaysia (whereby the seating of Parliament was suspended) under advice from Prime Minister Muhyiddin Yassin that this political measure was necessary to “to control and flatten daily COVID-19 positive cases that have breached four figures continuously since December” (Rodzi 2021 ). Previous nationwide emergencies were in 1964 during the Indonesia-Malaysia conflict, and in 1969 during an ethnic clash.

Unlike the temporary success in Malaysia, Thailand was successful in containing the outbreak of the virus within its population. This achievement, however, risks being overshadowed by its economy's largest annual contraction in 22 years during the second quarter of 2020. Poum Tangkitvanich opines in “The Paradox of Thailand's Success in Controlling COVID-19” that the Thai economic lockdown was overly harsh and lasted longer than needed with its repeated extensions despite the fact that daily domestic infections were regularly at zero, although some, like Nidhiprabha, speculate that the prolonged lockdown was more likely to prevent political protests.

If the Thai case shows that a country's economic recovery may not necessarily accompany its epidemiological success, the Philippines stands on the other end of the spectrum. Despite imposing the longest lockdown on Southeast Asia, the country now has the highest number of infections in the sub-region. Despite having strong macroeconomic fundamentals before the pandemic, the Philippines ended up with the second largest GDP contraction in the second quarter of 2020 and the worst projected economic growth outcome in 2020 among its ASEAN neighbors (see Table 4 ). Most commentators and fund managers have attributed this output collapse to the strict community lockdown imposed by the government in March that went on until the third quarter of the year.

However, Toby Melissa C. Monsod and Maria Socorro Gochoco-Bautista (“Rethinking ‘Economic Fundamentals’ in an Era of Global Physical Shocks: Insights from the Philippine Experience with COVID-19”) argue that underlying institutional factors play a larger role in explaining the Philippines’ economic and health outcomes rather than the country's use of lockdowns. According to the authors, the choice of containment measures was a reflection of how organized and prepared public health institutions were in facing global shocks like COVID-19. The authors agree that the lockdown of the country was necessary to contain the pandemic but make the case that the Philippines failed to use the “bought time” from the lockdown to scale up an effective national system of testing and tracing. Specifically, they point at the country's poor pandemic response infrastructure, which would help explain the recent blunders in testing and quarantine protocol amid the return of more than 100,000 overseas workers after losing their jobs abroad.

Citing the Philippines’ robust macroeconomic ratings before the pandemic, the authors assert that the institutional preparedness of governments matter much more in dealing with global shocks than macroeconomic metrics. Using a cross-sectional data set of 24 countries, the authors sought to test this hypothesis by examining the relationship between the projected economic contraction in 2020 and the capability of the national health systems to detect and respond to emergency outbreaks. The regression findings strongly support the authors’ argument that institutional capacities and capabilities influence intercountry difference in post-pandemic economic outcomes more so than other factors such as initial fiscal position, average age of the population, and country-specific geographical effects. Thus, instead of the timing, intensity, or length of lockdowns, the core capacities of countries to detect and respond to the pandemic accounts significantly for the poor economic outcomes of countries like the Philippines.

The Monsod and Gochoco-Bautista results also suggest that, for pandemics, the usual metrics of robust macroeconomic fundamentals either do not matter or, worse, are associated with poorer economic outcomes. The authors opine that that the usual multiplier effects of traditional macroeconomic channels are either not operative or, if they are, are overshadowed by the need for specific core capacities to address the underlying physical causes of disease transmission and progression. Crucially, the authors warn that large fiscal spending can even result in perverse economic effects if it is not directed at addressing the pandemic itself. Fiscal injections to boost a country's national health system capacity should be prioritized over and above other types of traditional stimulus spending, with investments in the former potentially being able to do more for economic recovery than the latter.

Aside from studies of country-level responses to the pandemic, this double special issue of ASEP also features empirical analyses of novel queries that have arisen from the pandemic. Applying a hybrid of dynamic stochastic general equilibrium and computable general equilibrium models, Warwick McKibbin and Roshen Fernando in “The Global Macroeconomic Impacts of COVID-19: Seven Scenarios” look at the potential global economic costs of COVID-19 in 2020 under seven different permutations. Scenarios 1–3 assume that the virus’ epidemiological effects are contained in China but the economic effects spill over from China to other countries through trade, capital flows, and changes in the risk premia in global financial markets. On the other hand, scenarios 4–6 reflect epidemiological shocks occurring in differing degrees in all countries. For scenarios 1–6, it is assumed that the shocks are temporary whereas scenario 7 expects a mild pandemic to recur each year indefinitely.

GDP loss in 2020 (% deviation from the baseline)

Source: McKibbin and Fernando, this issue.

An interesting finding from “Impacts of Lockdown Policies on International Trade” by Kazunobu Hayakawa and Hiroshi Mukunoki is that workplace closure orders do not affect intra-Asian trade. In comparison, Iwan J. Azis, I. G. Sthitaprajna Virananda, and Fauzi I. Estiko (“Financial Spillover in Emerging Asia: A Tale of Three Crises”) found that the scale and nature of spillovers from the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is set to be more severe than the financial spillover during the GFC and the 2013 taper tantrum from the phasing of quantitative easing by the U.S. Federal Reserve.

On the effects of the pandemic at a more micro-level, Toshihiro Okubo, Atsushi Inoue, and Kozue Sekijima (“Teleworker Performance in the COVID-19 Era in Japan”) look at teleworker efficiency in Japan and whether COVID-19 has changed the performance of Japanese teleworkers. Overall, the authors found that: (1) compared with working as normal, the efficiency of most teleworkers is reduced by around 20 percent on average; (2) longer experience in teleworking helps improve efficiency; (3) the employment system, such as flexible working time, can contribute to boosting efficiency; and (4) poorer mental health conditions due to the COVID-19 crisis worsens teleworking efficiency.

What various sources of evidence have shown is that there is much diversity and divergence in terms of both approach and result in the responses of governments to the pandemic. From Table 3 , we know that prior preparedness counts for little when there is failure in execution (UK), leadership (USA), and diagnosis (Sweden). Countries like China and South Korea drew on their past experiences with epidemics (particularly SARS and MERS) to mount successful strategies to contain the virus. It is simply wrong to largely view the solution as a binary choice between lockdown or no lockdown. We see from the success stories in Asia that the appropriate policy combination consists of (a) public health measures like social distancing, mask-wearing, and hygienic behavior; and (b) targeted macro-stimulus aimed at disaster relief, service industries, and small and medium enterprises.

Note: Period is March 2020 through December 2020, except for China data ending on 11 Oct 2020; and Japan data ending on 3 May 2020.

The four Nordic economies and the UK were unusually slow in adopting mask-wearing

In other economies, the proportion of mask-wearers in the population responded quickly to the COVID-19 outbreak in the home economy to reach at least 60 percent in May 2020. In May 2020, the proportion of mask-wearers was less than 10 percent in the Nordic economies, and under 20 percent in the British economy.

One could think of mask-wearing as less needed for sanitary reasons in the “sparsely populated” Nordic economies when interpersonal contact is rarer, but then the UK is definitely not sparsely populated. Does the reluctance to respond quickly to wearing masks in these five populations show a deep cultural difference not only between them and Asians, but also between them, Americans, and other Europeans (France and Germany)? This last question suggests that “culture” is a weak explanation for this “slow to adopt” phenomenon in Denmark, Finland, Norway, Sweden, and the United Kingdom.

In steady-state, Asian populations had a generally higher proportion of mask-wearing than non-Asian populations

In all eight Asian populations, the proportion of mask-wearing was mostly at or above 80 percent in the May 2020 through December 2020 period. The French proportion of mask-wearers went over 80 percent since late July 2020; the U.S. proportion reached 70 percent in late June 2020, and went over 80 percent only since November; the British proportion climbed upward slower (as noted earlier) to cross 70 percent in mid-August 2020 and then to cross 80 percent on November 2020; and the German proportion stayed put at 60 percent in the May–October 2020 period and moved to 70 percent in November.

This resistance to mask-wearing is most pronounced in the four Nordic economies, where the proportion of mask-wearers in June 2020 was under 10 percent for every country. In September 2020, it was 34 percent in Denmark, 21 percent in Finland, 16 percent in Norway, and 8 percent in Sweden; and the respective numbers in December 2020 were 69 percent, 65 percent, 48 percent, and 16 percent.

Some analysts have attempted to explain this difference between Asian and non-Asian populations by attributing it to the so-called conformist and collectivist cultures of Asian societies whose citizens are more likely to mask themselves and practice social distancing out of respect for government guidelines and the welfare of others, as opposed to “individualistic” Western populations who care more for personal liberty. Others like Sweden's Minister of Health and Social Affairs Lena Hallengren would say that there is no “tradition or culture” of mask wearing in their country, unlike Asia.

Although cultural values can influence a population's response to events such as a pandemic, such essentialist caricatures may obscure and ignore the crucial role of government policy in driving these practices in the first place. It is perhaps a trite point that government policy influences behavioral outcomes. The act of mask-wearing is not endemic to any culture nor did it emerge out of a vacuum. If Asian economies such as Hong Kong and Taiwan appear to have a “culture” of mask-wearing, it is more likely because it is a direct result of experiencing past epidemics such as SARS whereby wearing face masks was a recommended practice.

Strict enforcement, especially when accompanied by punitive actions, can be highly effective. In Malaysia, face masks were made compulsory in crowded public areas from 1 August 2020 onwards. Face mask use in the country jumped from under 50 percent in March to 91 percent by August—Malaysia now records the highest face mask use in the YouGov tracker as of 28 February 2021.

Furthermore, countries with high face mask use often had leaders who not only communicated the importance of such practices but also set an example for their populace. For instance, Western countries like Slovakia and Czech Republic are not the first places that one associates with the prevalent use of face masks, but their leaders have been shown to wear masks in public appearances and this played a crucial role in normalizing its use among their citizens. It is no surprise that face mask usage is so low in countries like the United States where President Trump constantly downplayed the importance of wearing face masks, or in Brazil where President Jair Bolsonaro only started to wear face masks after being ordered to do so by a federal judge.

The contrast in face mask use prevalence between Finland and Sweden is another example. In Sweden, where authorities actually recommend against wearing them, face mask use was at 8 percent in September 2020. In comparison, after Finland reversed its policy in August and recommended that people wear masks in public places, mask use jumped from 7 percent at the end of June to 46 percent on 12 October 2020.

It is also of little use if governments mandate the wearing of masks or other hygienic behavior if there are inadequate supplies of the very items that are needed for these practices, even in countries where mask-wearing is the norm. Once again, the role of government is crucial. In “How Did Japan Cope with COVID-19? Big Data and Purchasing Behavior” by Yoko Konishi, Takashi Saito, Naoya Igei, and Toshiki Ishikawa, the authors use point of sales data from supermarkets, convenience stores, home centers, drug stores, and electronics retail stores to show that mask sales in Japan spiked following the WHO's declaration of a global state of emergency in January, causing a shortage of face masks in the market. This shortage moderated, however, after Japanese authorities implemented a ban on reselling masks and introduced a subsidy for businesses to expand mask-producing capacity.

In Taiwan, Kuo documents how the government pioneered a digital rationing system to facilitate mask distribution for its residents. Citizens could purchase face masks from state-contracted pharmacies either online or in person. For the latter, the digital system assigned citizens to different dates according to the last digit of their national ID number to avoid long queues. An app was also developed that worked to inform citizens of the number of masks in stock at each store, along with information on store names, locations, opening hours, and contact information. A special committee was also established to drive the production of masks domestically—as a result, 60 mask production lines were created that enabled daily domestic mask production to be increased from 1.88 million to 19 million as of the end of April 2020.

Simply put, if governments do not recommend mask use and implement policies that encourage it, citizens will not wear them readily. This is the key differentiating factor instead of a population's alleged primordial propensity to wear masks. Although citizens are individually accountable for their own hygienic behaviors, this does not absolve governments of their crucial role and responsibility to inculcate and encourage such practices, as the Asian experience illustrates.

Early border controls to contain the initial spread of the virus from abroad;

Rapidly increasing the capacity of national health systems in terms of mobilizing staff, securing supplies (e.g., protective equipment and respiratory devices) and optimizing space (e.g., ensuring adequate numbers of acute and intensive care beds) to scale up testing-tracing-treating infrastructure;

Promoting individual hygienic behavior such as social distancing and face mask use, which requires, respectively, active government enforcement of regulations against holding superspreader events, and strong government intervention in the market to ensure adequate supplies;

Fiscal measures to extend disaster relief to workers, businesses, and vulnerable populations; and

Clear, concise, and consistent communications from leaders and authorities.

These common measures seem so intuitive and straightforward, but why then have so many places failed to implement these measures, or when implemented, fail to achieve comparable results?

Sherry Tao Kong in “Comment on ‘COVID-19 in Taiwan: Economic Impacts and Lessons Learned’ by Chun-Chien Kuo” offers a likely explanation. The likelihood of such measures being implemented successfully by a government is “likely to be a function of its prevailing conditions, such as provision of public health service, degree of socioeconomic inequality, household living arrangements, and general attitude towards its government.”

Indeed, as has been often said, the pandemic has laid bare all the social, political, and economic fault lines that have already existed in a society. This is especially true for lower-income countries. If higher-income countries with sophisticated health systems are struggling to contain the virus, what about states with lesser public health infrastructure and weaker social safety nets? Whereas richer countries can have the luxury of choosing whether to implement lockdowns, low-income countries have had no choice but to keep their economies open (or open them prematurely) because they cannot afford fiscal injections to keep individuals and businesses afloat. The fiscal stimulus in the G20 so far is 17 percent of GDP, which is eight times more than the low-income countries’ macro-stimulus of 1.9 percent of GDP (Ragaa and Velde 2021). India, for instance, had lifted lockdown measures prematurely to revive an economy that is likely to hit a 30-year-low, although case numbers have surged to record highs.

This is where international cooperation can play a role. International cooperation against the pandemic will not only assist countries, especially poorer states, to contain the virus and exit the epidemiological crisis in the immediate term, but can also facilitate socioeconomic recovery and help prepare for future pandemics and other global crises in the longer run. But a global response to the crisis has been glaringly absent. Instead, efforts against COVID-19 are largely domestic-centric so far. While it is understandable that countries prioritize their own needs first, the infectious nature of the virus means that no country is safe until every other country is also safe. Global access to future vaccines, supplies, tests, and treatments is the only way to ensure the virus is truly eradicated within a country. Governments of rich countries should commit not only to preserve trade openness for these vital items, but also to ensure that poor countries have access to key medical supplies at affordable prices. All these efforts must be accompanied by fiscal support by developed countries to help countries in need to successfully deploy both epidemiological and economic measures in curbing the virus—rich countries should establish a global fund to provide the poor countries with the needed vaccine, and to enhance their efforts in testing, tracking, and treating COVID-19 cases.

The need for global cooperation has become even more urgent as frequent pandemics could become the new norm. Humanity's relentless encroachment on the environment guarantees this.

In the proof stage of this article, France announced a month-long lockdown of Paris on 18 March 2021.

The Great Barrington Declaration. 4 October 2020; Available at https://gbdeclaration.org .

Denmark even violated the terms of its Schengen membership by banning entry of non-resident foreigners for a month, starting 14 March 2020 (Nikel 2020 ).

Tedros Adhanom, the Director-General of the World Health Organization, pointed out that “never in the history of public health has herd immunity been used as a strategy for responding to an outbreak, let alone a pandemic” (BBC 2020b ). And Anthony Fauci, head of the White House Coronavirus Task Force, called the Declaration “ridiculous,” “total nonsense,” and “very dangerous,” saying that it would lead to a larger number of hospitalizations and avoidable deaths (Higgins-Dunn 2020 ).

Johnson had told the Italian Prime Minister in March 2020 that the UK was going for the herd immunity solution (Payne 2020 ). And Trump had predicted in early February 2020 that the COVID-19 disease would be gone in April 2020 (Bump 2020 ).

We can also rule out the reason for Trump's choice being that he was better informed or more perspicacious than the leaders of Western Europe. Trump's level of (self-proclaimed) genius-ness was plainly revealed on 24 April 2020, when he suggested that injection of disinfectant and exposure to ultraviolet light be the treatment for COVID-19 (BBC 2020a ).

Pitt ( 2020 ) is an excellent succinct exposition of the differences between the influenza virus and the coronavirus. Also see Centers for Disease Control ( 2020 ), and Hewings-Martin ( 2020 ).

China, India, Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan, Thailand, and Vietnam.

Belgium, Denmark, Finland, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, Sweden, and the UK.

The analyst's decision about which data series to examine is inevitably based at least on an implicit (often vaguely formed) hypothesis about causality and/or the transmission mechanism. The examination of data is arbitrary only when the analyst is totally at sea about how to think about the problem and is looking randomly at data series that are available.

The GHS index was constructed by the Johns Hopkins Center for Healthy Security to rank the degree of preparedness by 195 countries in 2019 to handle negative public health shocks like the emergence and spread of pathogens (enabled by factors like climate change, urbanization, and international mass displacement of people), and accidental or deliberate release of a deadly engineered pathogen.

Vasquez and Klein ( 2020 ) and Lee ( 2020 ). Biden banned this racialization of COVID-19 when he came into office ( The Star Democrat 2021 ).

Analyzing location data from about 45 million mobile devices, Alcott et al. ( 2020 ) confirmed that official stay-at-home orders had very little to do with the huge drop of economic mobility in the United States. Chetty et al. ( 2020 ) found from private sector data that high-income households sharply reduced spending in sectors that require physical interaction due to health concerns and that state-ordered reopening of economies have had only small impacts on spending and employment.

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How to Write About Coronavirus in a College Essay

Students can share how they navigated life during the coronavirus pandemic in a full-length essay or an optional supplement.

Writing About COVID-19 in College Essays

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Experts say students should be honest and not limit themselves to merely their experiences with the pandemic.

The global impact of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, means colleges and prospective students alike are in for an admissions cycle like no other. Both face unprecedented challenges and questions as they grapple with their respective futures amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic.

Colleges must examine applicants without the aid of standardized test scores for many – a factor that prompted many schools to go test-optional for now . Even grades, a significant component of a college application, may be hard to interpret with some high schools adopting pass-fail classes last spring due to the pandemic. Major college admissions factors are suddenly skewed.

"I can't help but think other (admissions) factors are going to matter more," says Ethan Sawyer, founder of the College Essay Guy, a website that offers free and paid essay-writing resources.

College essays and letters of recommendation , Sawyer says, are likely to carry more weight than ever in this admissions cycle. And many essays will likely focus on how the pandemic shaped students' lives throughout an often tumultuous 2020.

But before writing a college essay focused on the coronavirus, students should explore whether it's the best topic for them.

Writing About COVID-19 for a College Application

Much of daily life has been colored by the coronavirus. Virtual learning is the norm at many colleges and high schools, many extracurriculars have vanished and social lives have stalled for students complying with measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.

"For some young people, the pandemic took away what they envisioned as their senior year," says Robert Alexander, dean of admissions, financial aid and enrollment management at the University of Rochester in New York. "Maybe that's a spot on a varsity athletic team or the lead role in the fall play. And it's OK for them to mourn what should have been and what they feel like they lost, but more important is how are they making the most of the opportunities they do have?"

That question, Alexander says, is what colleges want answered if students choose to address COVID-19 in their college essay.

But the question of whether a student should write about the coronavirus is tricky. The answer depends largely on the student.

"In general, I don't think students should write about COVID-19 in their main personal statement for their application," Robin Miller, master college admissions counselor at IvyWise, a college counseling company, wrote in an email.

"Certainly, there may be exceptions to this based on a student's individual experience, but since the personal essay is the main place in the application where the student can really allow their voice to be heard and share insight into who they are as an individual, there are likely many other topics they can choose to write about that are more distinctive and unique than COVID-19," Miller says.

Opinions among admissions experts vary on whether to write about the likely popular topic of the pandemic.

"If your essay communicates something positive, unique, and compelling about you in an interesting and eloquent way, go for it," Carolyn Pippen, principal college admissions counselor at IvyWise, wrote in an email. She adds that students shouldn't be dissuaded from writing about a topic merely because it's common, noting that "topics are bound to repeat, no matter how hard we try to avoid it."

Above all, she urges honesty.

"If your experience within the context of the pandemic has been truly unique, then write about that experience, and the standing out will take care of itself," Pippen says. "If your experience has been generally the same as most other students in your context, then trying to find a unique angle can easily cross the line into exploiting a tragedy, or at least appearing as though you have."

But focusing entirely on the pandemic can limit a student to a single story and narrow who they are in an application, Sawyer says. "There are so many wonderful possibilities for what you can say about yourself outside of your experience within the pandemic."

He notes that passions, strengths, career interests and personal identity are among the multitude of essay topic options available to applicants and encourages them to probe their values to help determine the topic that matters most to them – and write about it.

That doesn't mean the pandemic experience has to be ignored if applicants feel the need to write about it.

Writing About Coronavirus in Main and Supplemental Essays

Students can choose to write a full-length college essay on the coronavirus or summarize their experience in a shorter form.

To help students explain how the pandemic affected them, The Common App has added an optional section to address this topic. Applicants have 250 words to describe their pandemic experience and the personal and academic impact of COVID-19.

"That's not a trick question, and there's no right or wrong answer," Alexander says. Colleges want to know, he adds, how students navigated the pandemic, how they prioritized their time, what responsibilities they took on and what they learned along the way.

If students can distill all of the above information into 250 words, there's likely no need to write about it in a full-length college essay, experts say. And applicants whose lives were not heavily altered by the pandemic may even choose to skip the optional COVID-19 question.

"This space is best used to discuss hardship and/or significant challenges that the student and/or the student's family experienced as a result of COVID-19 and how they have responded to those difficulties," Miller notes. Using the section to acknowledge a lack of impact, she adds, "could be perceived as trite and lacking insight, despite the good intentions of the applicant."

To guard against this lack of awareness, Sawyer encourages students to tap someone they trust to review their writing , whether it's the 250-word Common App response or the full-length essay.

Experts tend to agree that the short-form approach to this as an essay topic works better, but there are exceptions. And if a student does have a coronavirus story that he or she feels must be told, Alexander encourages the writer to be authentic in the essay.

"My advice for an essay about COVID-19 is the same as my advice about an essay for any topic – and that is, don't write what you think we want to read or hear," Alexander says. "Write what really changed you and that story that now is yours and yours alone to tell."

Sawyer urges students to ask themselves, "What's the sentence that only I can write?" He also encourages students to remember that the pandemic is only a chapter of their lives and not the whole book.

Miller, who cautions against writing a full-length essay on the coronavirus, says that if students choose to do so they should have a conversation with their high school counselor about whether that's the right move. And if students choose to proceed with COVID-19 as a topic, she says they need to be clear, detailed and insightful about what they learned and how they adapted along the way.

"Approaching the essay in this manner will provide important balance while demonstrating personal growth and vulnerability," Miller says.

Pippen encourages students to remember that they are in an unprecedented time for college admissions.

"It is important to keep in mind with all of these (admission) factors that no colleges have ever had to consider them this way in the selection process, if at all," Pippen says. "They have had very little time to calibrate their evaluations of different application components within their offices, let alone across institutions. This means that colleges will all be handling the admissions process a little bit differently, and their approaches may even evolve over the course of the admissions cycle."

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Read these 12 moving essays about life during coronavirus

Artists, novelists, critics, and essayists are writing the first draft of history.

by Alissa Wilkinson

The world is grappling with an invisible, deadly enemy, trying to understand how to live with the threat posed by a virus . For some writers, the only way forward is to put pen to paper, trying to conceptualize and document what it feels like to continue living as countries are under lockdown and regular life seems to have ground to a halt.

So as the coronavirus pandemic has stretched around the world, it’s sparked a crop of diary entries and essays that describe how life has changed. Novelists, critics, artists, and journalists have put words to the feelings many are experiencing. The result is a first draft of how we’ll someday remember this time, filled with uncertainty and pain and fear as well as small moments of hope and humanity.

• The Vox guide to navigating the coronavirus crisis

At the New York Review of Books, Ali Bhutto writes that in Karachi, Pakistan, the government-imposed curfew due to the virus is “eerily reminiscent of past military clampdowns”:

Beneath the quiet calm lies a sense that society has been unhinged and that the usual rules no longer apply. Small groups of pedestrians look on from the shadows, like an audience watching a spectacle slowly unfolding. People pause on street corners and in the shade of trees, under the watchful gaze of the paramilitary forces and the police.

His essay concludes with the sobering note that “in the minds of many, Covid-19 is just another life-threatening hazard in a city that stumbles from one crisis to another.”

Writing from Chattanooga, novelist Jamie Quatro documents the mixed ways her neighbors have been responding to the threat, and the frustration of conflicting direction, or no direction at all, from local, state, and federal leaders:

Whiplash, trying to keep up with who’s ordering what. We’re already experiencing enough chaos without this back-and-forth. Why didn’t the federal government issue a nationwide shelter-in-place at the get-go, the way other countries did? What happens when one state’s shelter-in-place ends, while others continue? Do states still under quarantine close their borders? We  are  still one nation, not fifty individual countries. Right?

• A syllabus for the end of the world

Award-winning photojournalist Alessio Mamo, quarantined with his partner Marta in Sicily after she tested positive for the virus, accompanies his photographs in the Guardian of their confinement with a reflection on being confined :

The doctors asked me to take a second test, but again I tested negative. Perhaps I’m immune? The days dragged on in my apartment, in black and white, like my photos. Sometimes we tried to smile, imagining that I was asymptomatic, because I was the virus. Our smiles seemed to bring good news. My mother left hospital, but I won’t be able to see her for weeks. Marta started breathing well again, and so did I. I would have liked to photograph my country in the midst of this emergency, the battles that the doctors wage on the frontline, the hospitals pushed to their limits, Italy on its knees fighting an invisible enemy. That enemy, a day in March, knocked on my door instead.

In the New York Times Magazine, deputy editor Jessica Lustig writes with devastating clarity about her family’s life in Brooklyn while her husband battled the virus, weeks before most people began taking the threat seriously:

At the door of the clinic, we stand looking out at two older women chatting outside the doorway, oblivious. Do I wave them away? Call out that they should get far away, go home, wash their hands, stay inside? Instead we just stand there, awkwardly, until they move on. Only then do we step outside to begin the long three-block walk home. I point out the early magnolia, the forsythia. T says he is cold. The untrimmed hairs on his neck, under his beard, are white. The few people walking past us on the sidewalk don’t know that we are visitors from the future. A vision, a premonition, a walking visitation. This will be them: Either T, in the mask, or — if they’re lucky — me, tending to him.

Essayist Leslie Jamison writes in the New York Review of Books about being shut away alone in her New York City apartment with her 2-year-old daughter since she became sick:

The virus.  Its sinewy, intimate name. What does it feel like in my body today? Shivering under blankets. A hot itch behind the eyes. Three sweatshirts in the middle of the day. My daughter trying to pull another blanket over my body with her tiny arms. An ache in the muscles that somehow makes it hard to lie still. This loss of taste has become a kind of sensory quarantine. It’s as if the quarantine keeps inching closer and closer to my insides. First I lost the touch of other bodies; then I lost the air; now I’ve lost the taste of bananas. Nothing about any of these losses is particularly unique. I’ve made a schedule so I won’t go insane with the toddler. Five days ago, I wrote  Walk/Adventure!  on it, next to a cut-out illustration of a tiger—as if we’d see tigers on our walks. It was good to keep possibility alive.

At Literary Hub, novelist Heidi Pitlor writes about the elastic nature of time during her family’s quarantine in Massachusetts:

During a shutdown, the things that mark our days—commuting to work, sending our kids to school, having a drink with friends—vanish and time takes on a flat, seamless quality. Without some self-imposed structure, it’s easy to feel a little untethered. A friend recently posted on Facebook: “For those who have lost track, today is Blursday the fortyteenth of Maprilay.” ... Giving shape to time is especially important now, when the future is so shapeless. We do not know whether the virus will continue to rage for weeks or months or, lord help us, on and off for years. We do not know when we will feel safe again. And so many of us, minus those who are gifted at compartmentalization or denial, remain largely captive to fear. We may stay this way if we do not create at least the illusion of movement in our lives, our long days spent with ourselves or partners or families.

• What day is it today?

Novelist Lauren Groff writes at the New York Review of Books about trying to escape the prison of her fears while sequestered at home in Gainesville, Florida:

Some people have imaginations sparked only by what they can see; I blame this blinkered empiricism for the parks overwhelmed with people, the bars, until a few nights ago, thickly thronged. My imagination is the opposite. I fear everything invisible to me. From the enclosure of my house, I am afraid of the suffering that isn’t present before me, the people running out of money and food or drowning in the fluid in their lungs, the deaths of health-care workers now growing ill while performing their duties. I fear the federal government, which the right wing has so—intentionally—weakened that not only is it insufficient to help its people, it is actively standing in help’s way. I fear we won’t sufficiently punish the right. I fear leaving the house and spreading the disease. I fear what this time of fear is doing to my children, their imaginations, and their souls.

At ArtForum , Berlin-based critic and writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen reflects on martinis, melancholia, and Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo’s 2018 graphic novel  Retreat , in which three young people exile themselves in the woods:

In melancholia, the shape of what is ending, and its temporality, is sprawling and incomprehensible. The ambivalence makes it hard to bear. The world of  Retreat  is rendered in lush pink and purple watercolors, which dissolve into wild and messy abstractions. In apocalypse, the divisions established in genesis bleed back out. My own Corona-retreat is similarly soft, color-field like, each day a blurred succession of quarantinis, YouTube–yoga, and televized press conferences. As restrictions mount, so does abstraction. For now, I’m still rooting for love to save the world.

At the Paris Review , Matt Levin writes about reading Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves during quarantine:

A retreat, a quarantine, a sickness—they simultaneously distort and clarify, curtail and expand. It is an ideal state in which to read literature with a reputation for difficulty and inaccessibility, those hermetic books shorn of the handholds of conventional plot or characterization or description. A novel like Virginia Woolf’s  The Waves  is perfect for the state of interiority induced by quarantine—a story of three men and three women, meeting after the death of a mutual friend, told entirely in the overlapping internal monologues of the six, interspersed only with sections of pure, achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a day’s procession and recession of light and waves. The novel is, in my mind’s eye, a perfectly spherical object. It is translucent and shimmering and infinitely fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest disturbance. It is not a book that can be read in snatches on the subway—it demands total absorption. Though it revels in a stark emotional nakedness, the book remains aloof, remote in its own deep self-absorption.

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In an essay for the Financial Times, novelist Arundhati Roy writes with anger about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anemic response to the threat, but also offers a glimmer of hope for the future:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. 

From Boston, Nora Caplan-Bricker writes in The Point about the strange contraction of space under quarantine, in which a friend in Beirut is as close as the one around the corner in the same city:

It’s a nice illusion—nice to feel like we’re in it together, even if my real world has shrunk to one person, my husband, who sits with his laptop in the other room. It’s nice in the same way as reading those essays that reframe social distancing as solidarity. “We must begin to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we  don’t do  is also brilliant and full of love,” the poet Anne Boyer wrote on March 10th, the day that Massachusetts declared a state of emergency. If you squint, you could almost make sense of this quarantine as an effort to flatten, along with the curve, the distinctions we make between our bonds with others. Right now, I care for my neighbor in the same way I demonstrate love for my mother: in all instances, I stay away. And in moments this month, I have loved strangers with an intensity that is new to me. On March 14th, the Saturday night after the end of life as we knew it, I went out with my dog and found the street silent: no lines for restaurants, no children on bicycles, no couples strolling with little cups of ice cream. It had taken the combined will of thousands of people to deliver such a sudden and complete emptiness. I felt so grateful, and so bereft.

And on his own website, musician and artist David Byrne writes about rediscovering the value of working for collective good , saying that “what is happening now is an opportunity to learn how to change our behavior”:

In emergencies, citizens can suddenly cooperate and collaborate. Change can happen. We’re going to need to work together as the effects of climate change ramp up. In order for capitalism to survive in any form, we will have to be a little more socialist. Here is an opportunity for us to see things differently — to see that we really are all connected — and adjust our behavior accordingly.  Are we willing to do this? Is this moment an opportunity to see how truly interdependent we all are? To live in a world that is different and better than the one we live in now? We might be too far down the road to test every asymptomatic person, but a change in our mindsets, in how we view our neighbors, could lay the groundwork for the collective action we’ll need to deal with other global crises. The time to see how connected we all are is now.

The portrait these writers paint of a world under quarantine is multifaceted. Our worlds have contracted to the confines of our homes, and yet in some ways we’re more connected than ever to one another. We feel fear and boredom, anger and gratitude, frustration and strange peace. Uncertainty drives us to find metaphors and images that will let us wrap our minds around what is happening.

Yet there’s no single “what” that is happening. Everyone is contending with the pandemic and its effects from different places and in different ways. Reading others’ experiences — even the most frightening ones — can help alleviate the loneliness and dread, a little, and remind us that what we’re going through is both unique and shared by all.

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Household Generosity During the Pandemic

Social and behavioral sciences can help us understand why COVID-19 is making giving practices more localized and expansive.

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By Sevda Kilicalp Jan. 19, 2021

A few weeks ago, a close friend approached me to join in a giving circle supporting families facing financial hardship in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic. I accepted the invitation without a second thought. And I was not the only one: In less than 24 hours, a circle of 25 donors from my friend’s personal networks was formed, with monthly giving orders placed to regularly meet the needs of a group of vulnerable families identified by volunteers. No questions were asked, nor concerns raised about how the money would be spent. The first family received assistance the following day.

If I had been solicited to donate directly to individual victims before the pandemic, I would not only have declined, but I would have tried to convince my friend to give to a charity working for the eradication of poverty, in a systematic manner, advocating for policy change or holding government to account for its responsibility to take care of those who are in need of social assistance. And as someone who has studied and promoted strategic giving and development of organized civil society for more than 15 years, I still strongly believe in the importance of supporting systems change work that attacks root causes of problems rather than treating symptoms of the problems through the acts of benevolence.

However, I am not the only person who has gone far outside of their usual donation path during the pandemic. The pandemic and related lock-down not only gave rise to charitable giving but triggered a different type of generosity compared to other disasters and difficult times in history.

Here are some highlights about how COVID-19 is shifting household giving:

Pressing Needs Lifted Up Causes Linked to the Crisis … While Leaving Others Behind

The amount donated to charities in the UK on Giving Tuesday was up by almost half this year despite the restrictions on in-person fundraising activities. But this doesn’t mean that households increased their giving to the same causes they used to support: Support grew for causes linked to the crisis, while causes like animal shelters, disability support groups, and homeless shelters saw a big hit to donations (even while facing extraordinary new financial pressures). Similarly, 21 percent of US households indicated that their giving to charitable organizations focused on purposes besides basic needs/health and religion (e.g., education, arts, the environment) decreased during the COVID-19 pandemic. US households prioritized giving to meet the pressing needs of those in their area.

While all nonprofits face new challenges, the financial impact of the crisis has been uneven: Environmental, education, arts and culture organizations are least likely to get gifts while charitable giving for social services remains steady. Since donations make up an important part of small to mid-size nonprofit revenues, nonprofits that see a serious drop in donations may have to shift focus and approach following the current changes in the nature of charitable giving. While some of them resort to layoffs, reduce operations, or merge with other organizations in order to survive, for others it will be almost impossible to recover, and they will be forced to shut their doors. This requires those that are not providing direct COVID-19 relief to communicate effectively with donors regarding the interconnectedness between their causes and the challenges we are all experiencing during the pandemic.

Mutual Aid Is Rising

So many mutual aid groups have been flourishing over the pandemic. Mutual aid, far from being a new concept, means voluntary and reciprocal exchanges of resources and services, often among members of struggling communities for meeting their own needs and addressing underlying social causes behind hardship based on principles of cooperation, solidarity, care, and direct action. Most recently, in the context of pandemic, we see more and more ordinary people come together in the spirit of solidarity and engage in mutual support to protect the most vulnerable in their community and beyond. Inspiring stories have been emerging about neighbors helping neighbors with hardship. Mutual aid groups took on various tasks such as collecting groceries, supplying masks, sanitizers, and medicine, sharing information, offering emotional support, tutoring children.

This highly localized approach to supporting communities seems to be working because smaller mutual aid groups are able to act quickly and provide locally specific support. Mutual aid is also distinguished from top-down resource distribution by its focus on reciprocity, horizontality, and equality. Mutual aid groups remove the divide between helper and helped and dismiss means test to assess whether the person effectively lacks sufficient resources. In this way, they not only reach out to people left behind by other relief programs but also go beyond crisis relief and offer community empowerment.

The question is whether mutual aid groups will be dissolved after the end of the crisis, if the sense of urgency disappears and people go back to their routine, or whether the rediscovery of mutual aid in the northern hemisphere signals the start of a long-term phenomenon. If mutual aid is here to stay, nonprofit practitioners will need to figure out whether mutual aid expands the civic space or crowds out the support for top-down, professionally-organized civil society by applying more participatory, inclusive, and hands-on methods and engaging ordinary people in community affairs.

Solidarity Is Coming Together With Social Justice Activism

Some commentators argue that these self-organized, spontaneous community efforts serve to compensate for states’ failure or unwillingness to provide welfare functions. While some of the mutual aid groups are less ideological and view their activities in terms of short-term crisis response, others see COVID-19 aid as an opportunity to work towards transformative change . Although I am cautious about the risk of instrumentalization of mutual aid by governments to pursue their own political agendas, I firmly believe in the potential of mutual aid for creating new commons and building bottom-up structures of cooperation. Even the very simple act of building social relations among neighbors from diverse backgrounds in our polarized societies can be considered a form of everyday activism .

This renewed sense of community and alternative social relationships based on solidarity, reciprocity, and inclusion can change prevailing ideas about how society works and sow the seeds of long term social and political change. In addition to prefiguring a radically different society, mutual aid shifts our understanding of inequalities in access to basic services and rights away from abstract societal issues toward local realities affecting real people living in our geographic proximity. This kind of awareness and personal connection with social justice causes is likely to increase people’s civic and political engagement.

More Expansive Forms of Generosity Are Emerging

Just as the pandemic is unlike anything we’ve seen in our lifetimes, the responses to it are different, more creative and resourceful. According to a recent report from Indiana University Lilly Family School of Philanthropy’s Women’s Philanthropy Institute, nearly half of households in the USA gave indirectly in response to the pandemic during the early months of the crisis (for example, by ordering takeout to support restaurants and their employees or continuing to pay individuals and businesses for services they could not render). The share of households participating in these unique forms of philanthropy far surpassed the share of those giving directly to charitable organizations, individuals, or businesses in response to the crisis during this time. This is an important finding to show that declines in measured household giving do not mean less generosity, care for one’s fellow citizens, or support for communities. We need to start recognizing and celebrating different kinds of informal giving and develop adequate measures.

Likewise, another study with young Americans (ages 18-30) in April 2020, found that these individuals engaged in a variety of activities to help others during the crisis, including starting to purchase or increasing their purchase of local products or services (26 percent), donating goods or services (24 percent), and posting or sharing content on social media about COVID-19 prevention (21 percent). Taking all these acts of kindness into consideration, our understanding of generosity behavior becomes much richer, inclusive, and complete than formal measures of household giving.

Insights From the Social and Behavioral Sciences

The conditions created by the pandemic influence how much people give, whom to give, what to give, and how to give. Of course, several factors, such as age, gender, economic stability, and exposure to COVID-19 have an influence on our pro-social behavior, so do neural, biological, and emotional mechanisms. Insights from the social and behavioral sciences can be useful for understanding why charitable giving is changing and becoming more localized and expansive.

1.  Social distancing urges us to reconnect with others to cope with psychological distress. While social distancing has been effective at flattening the curve of infection, it has had significant negative effects on mental health (leading to psychological distress like depression, anxiety, and stress) as found in recent research . Humans are by their nature social animals and have a fundamental need for connection with one another: As neuroscientist and social psychologist Matthew Lieberman explains, evolution made us more social, more connected to and dependent on the social world to ensure that humans thrive as a species; hence our brains suffer from threat to social bonds in much the same way we experience physical pain.

The neural link between social and physical pain urges us to reach out to and interact with others. Caring for others, especially informal helping , increases the sense of social connectedness and becomes the best way to combat social pain and loneliness. By engaging in acts of kindness we are not contributing to the common good but responding to our survival need.

2.  Reawakening to our collective vulnerability creates a sense of collaboration. Not everyone reacts to stress in the same way, whether fight-or-flight or tend-and-befriend mode. But the tend-and-befriend response to COVID-19 involves caring for ourselves and those close to us, as well as building collective self-help networks to reduce vulnerability and exchange resources and responsibilities. Alex Evans of Collective Psychology Project suggests that the pandemic incites our “tend-and-befriend” nature to the extent that we consider ourselves part of a larger us, feel like we can shape our lives and have mental space to deliberatively reflect on and choose how to react to events instead of being driven by fear and anxiety.

3.  The problem of numbers . Some argue that the surge of generosity during the COVID-19 pandemic is due to the sheer magnitude of the crisis , but the brain’s inability to make sense of big numbers makes it difficult to process tragedy of this scale, and concern for those in distress does not tend to rise in parallel to the increase in cases. On the contrary, the more our attention is divided by multiple victims, the less emotion we feel and action we take to support them. Individual stories of pain and small groups of victims trigger more empathy and compassion than statistics.

In addition to numeracy bias, a false feeling of inefficacy has an enormous impact on how and whether people provide aid. Thinking about one’s inability to remedy all sufferings triggers feelings of hopelessness and diminishes the warm glow from helping an individual victim. As a result, individuals tend to give toward identifiable victims rather than statistical victims. This may be one reason why households prefer helping people in their surrounding environment.

4.  Feeling collective . The notion that “we’re all in this together” and the virus threatens everyone (although not equally) creates a collective emotional experience. Research shows sharing adverse experiences may increase cooperative behavior within groups, leading individuals to mutually seek and provide support to one another. While these negative experiences enhance ingroup cooperation, they also fuel polarization , and intergroup bias toward outgroup members, thus contribute to conflict, discrimination, and exclusion.

We Need Critical Reflection About the Localization of Charitable Giving

COVID-19 has driven a surge in “localism” around the world, bringing increased attention to pressing needs within our communities and the responsibility to take care of one another as well as fears about the end of globalization . As The Economist wrote, “Wave goodbye to the greatest era of globalization—and worry about what is going to take its place.” Similar concerns have been echoed in the philanthropic community.

However, we don’t need to feel threatened by the localization of philanthropy or the rise of new forms of giving; we simply need to recognize various ways in which individuals express their charitable impulses. These are important developments for nonprofits to watch and understand not only to remain relevant and resonate with citizens but also to build on these recent practices to empower communities. Much attention has been placed on responses of institutional philanthropy and how philanthropic foundations do/can support the resilience of nonprofits. How charitable giving by households—as we know it—has been changing amid the COVID-19 pandemic has been overshadowed by these discussions.

In the face of growing critiques of big-money philanthropy, there have been calls to extend our definition and understanding of philanthropy beyond formalized actions and recognize the value of everyday giving by ordinary people. Making philanthropy more democratic, accessible, and inclusive is necessary not to tackle philanthropy’s “image problem,” rather to bring back the classic notion of civil society response to local problem solving, which will be more needed than ever for regenerating trust and collective sense of caring in the post-COVID era.

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The Coronavirus Crisis

Flattening a pandemic's curve: why staying home now can save lives.

Maria Godoy

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As the coronavirus continues to spread in the U.S., more and more businesses are sending employees off to work from home. Public schools are closing, universities are holding classes online, major events are getting canceled, and cultural institutions are shutting their doors. Even Disney World and Disneyland are set to close . The disruption of daily life for many Americans is real and significant — but so are the potential life-saving benefits.

It's all part of an effort to do what epidemiologists call flattening the curve of the pandemic. The idea is to increase social distancing in order to slow the spread of the virus, so that you don't get a huge spike in the number of people getting sick all at once. If that were to happen, there wouldn't be enough hospital beds or mechanical ventilators for everyone who needs them, and the U.S. hospital system would be overwhelmed. That's already happening in Italy.

Goats and Soda

Comic: i spent a day in coronavirus awareness mode. epidemiologists, how did i do.

"If you think of our health care system as a subway car and it's rush hour and everybody wants to get on the car once, they start piling up at the door," says Drew Harris, a population health researcher at Thomas Jefferson University in Philadelphia. "They pile up on the platform. There's just not enough room in the car to take care of everybody, to accommodate everybody. That's the system that is overwhelmed. It just can't handle it, and people wind up not getting services that they need."

Harris is the creator of a widely shared graphic visualizing just why it is so important to flatten the curve of a pandemic, including the current one — we've reproduced his graphic at the top of this page. The tan curve represents a scenario in which the U.S. hospital system becomes inundated with coronavirus patients.

However, Harris says, if we can delay the spread of the virus so that new cases aren't popping up all at once, but rather over the course of weeks or months, "then the system can adjust and accommodate all the people who are possibly going to get sick and possibly need hospital care." People would still get infected, he notes, but at a rate that the health care system could actually keep up with — a scenario represented by the more gently sloped blue curve on the graph.

Singapore Wins Praise For Its COVID-19 Strategy. The U.S. Does Not

These two curves have already played out in the U.S. in an earlier age — during the 1918 flu pandemic. Research has shown that the faster authorities moved to implement the kinds of social distancing measures designed to slow the transmission of disease, the more lives were saved. And the history of two U.S. cities — Philadelphia and St. Louis — illustrates just how big a difference those measures can make.

In Philadelphia, Harris notes, city officials ignored warnings from infectious disease experts that the flu was already circulating in their community. Instead, they moved forward with a massive parade in support of World War I bonds that brought hundreds of thousands of people together. "Within 48, 72 hours, thousands of people around the Philadelphia region started to die," Harris notes. Within six months, about 16,000 people had died.

Meanwhile, officials in St. Louis, Mo., had a vastly different public health response. Within two days of the first reported cases, the city quickly moved to social isolation strategies, according to a 2007 analysis.

"They really tried to limit the travel of people and implement Public Health 101 — isolating and treating the sick, quarantining the people who have been exposed to disease, closing the schools, encouraging social distancing of people," Harris says. "And, of course, encouraging hand hygiene and other individual activities."

As a result, St. Louis suffered just one-eighth of the flu fatalities that Philadelphia saw, according to that 2007 research. But if St. Louis had waited another week or two to act, it might have suffered a fate similar to Philadelphia's, the researchers concluded.

At the time the 2007 research was released, Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and a leading adviser in the U.S. response to COVID-19, the disease caused by the current coronavirus, said the evidence was clear that early intervention was critical in the midst of the 1918 pandemic.

As for just how big the current coronavirus pandemic will be in America? "It is going to be totally dependent upon how we respond to it," Fauci told Congress earlier this week.

"I can't give you a number," he said. "I can't give you a realistic number until we put into [it] the factor of how we respond. If we're complacent and don't do really aggressive containment and mitigation, the number could go way up and be involved in many, many millions."

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The complexity of managing COVID-19: How important is good governance?

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Alaka m. basu , amb alaka m. basu professor, department of global development - cornell university, senior fellow - united nations foundation kaushik basu , and kaushik basu nonresident senior fellow - global economy and development @kaushikcbasu jose maria u. tapia jmut jose maria u. tapia student - cornell university.

November 17, 2020

• 13 min read

This essay is part of “ Reimagining the global economy: Building back better in a post-COVID-19 world ,” a collection of 12 essays presenting new ideas to guide policies and shape debates in a post-COVID-19 world.

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the inadequacy of public health systems worldwide, casting a shadow that we could not have imagined even a year ago. As the fog of confusion lifts and we begin to understand the rudiments of how the virus behaves, the end of the pandemic is nowhere in sight. The number of cases and the deaths continue to rise. The latter breached the 1 million mark a few weeks ago and it looks likely now that, in terms of severity, this pandemic will surpass the Asian Flu of 1957-58 and the Hong Kong Flu of 1968-69.

Moreover, a parallel problem may well exceed the direct death toll from the virus. We are referring to the growing economic crises globally, and the prospect that these may hit emerging economies especially hard.

The economic fall-out is not entirely the direct outcome of the COVID-19 pandemic but a result of how we have responded to it—what measures governments took and how ordinary people, workers, and firms reacted to the crisis. The government activism to contain the virus that we saw this time exceeds that in previous such crises, which may have dampened the spread of the COVID-19 but has extracted a toll from the economy.

This essay takes stock of the policies adopted by governments in emerging economies, and what effect these governance strategies may have had, and then speculates about what the future is likely to look like and what we may do here on.

Nations that build walls to keep out goods, people and talent will get out-competed by other nations in the product market.

It is becoming clear that the scramble among several emerging economies to imitate and outdo European and North American countries was a mistake. We get a glimpse of this by considering two nations continents apart, the economies of which have been among the hardest hit in the world, namely, Peru and India. During the second quarter of 2020, Peru saw an annual growth of -30.2 percent and India -23.9 percent. From the global Q2 data that have emerged thus far, Peru and India are among the four slowest growing economies in the world. Along with U.K and Tunisia these are the only nations that lost more than 20 percent of their GDP. 1

COVID-19-related mortality statistics, and, in particular, the Crude Mortality Rate (CMR), however imperfect, are the most telling indicator of the comparative scale of the pandemic in different countries. At first glance, from the end of October 2020, Peru, with 1039 COVID-19 deaths per million population looks bad by any standard and much worse than India with 88. Peru’s CMR is currently among the highest reported globally.

However, both Peru and India need to be placed in regional perspective. For reasons that are likely to do with the history of past diseases, there are striking regional differences in the lethality of the virus (Figure 11.1). South America is worse hit than any other world region, and Asia and Africa seem to have got it relatively lightly, in contrast to Europe and America. The stark regional difference cries out for more epidemiological analysis. But even as we await that, these are differences that cannot be ignored.

To understand the effect of policy interventions, it is therefore important to look at how these countries fare within their own regions, which have had similar histories of illnesses and viruses (Figure 11.2). Both Peru and India do much worse than the neighbors with whom they largely share their social, economic, ecological and demographic features. Peru’s COVID-19 mortality rate per million population, or CMR, of 1039 is ahead of the second highest, Brazil at 749, and almost twice that of Argentina at 679.

Similarly, India at 88 compares well with Europe and the U.S., as does virtually all of Asia and Africa, but is doing much worse than its neighbors, with the second worst country in the region, Afghanistan, experiencing less than half the death rate of India.

The official Indian statement that up to 78,000 deaths 2 were averted by the lockdown has been criticized 3 for its assumptions. A more reasonable exercise is to estimate the excess deaths experienced by a country that breaks away from the pattern of its regional neighbors. So, for example, if India had experienced Afghanistan’s COVID-19 mortality rate, it would by now have had 54,112 deaths. And if it had the rate reported by Bangladesh, it would have had 49,950 deaths from COVID-19 today. In other words, more than half its current toll of some 122,099 COVID-19 deaths would have been avoided if it had experienced the same virus hit as its neighbors.

What might explain this outlier experience of COVID-19 CMRs and economic downslide in India and Peru? If the regional background conditions are broadly similar, one is left to ask if it is in fact the policy response that differed markedly and might account for these relatively poor outcomes.

Peru and India have performed poorly in terms of GDP growth rate in Q2 2020 among the countries displayed in Table 2, and given that both these countries are often treated as case studies of strong governance, this draws attention to the fact that there may be a dissonance between strong governance and good governance.

The turnaround for India has been especially surprising, given that until a few years ago it was among the three fastest growing economies in the world. The slowdown began in 2016, though the sharp downturn, sharper than virtually all other countries, occurred after the lockdown.

On the COVID-19 policy front, both India and Peru have become known for what the Oxford University’s COVID Policy Tracker 4 calls the “stringency” of the government’s response to the epidemic. At 8 pm on March 24, 2020, the Indian government announced, with four hours’ notice, a complete nationwide shutdown. Virtually all movement outside the perimeter of one’s home was officially sought to be brought to a standstill. Naturally, as described in several papers, such as that of Ray and Subramanian, 5 this meant that most economic life also came to a sudden standstill, which in turn meant that hundreds of millions of workers in the informal, as well as more marginally formal sectors, lost their livelihoods.

In addition, tens of millions of these workers, being migrant workers in places far-flung from their original homes, also lost their temporary homes and their savings with these lost livelihoods, so that the only safe space that beckoned them was their place of origin in small towns and villages often hundreds of miles away from their places of work.

After a few weeks of precarious living in their migrant destinations, they set off, on foot since trains and buses had been stopped, for these towns and villages, creating a “lockdown and scatter” that spread the virus from the city to the town and the town to the village. Indeed, “lockdown” is a bit of a misnomer for what happened in India, since over 20 million people did exactly the opposite of what one does in a lockdown. Thus India had a strange combination of lockdown some and scatter the rest, like in no other country. They spilled out and scattered in ways they would otherwise not do. It is not surprising that the infection, which was marginally present in rural areas (23 percent in April), now makes up some 54 percent of all cases in India. 6

In Peru too, the lockdown was sudden, nationwide, long drawn out and stringent. 7 Jobs were lost, financial aid was difficult to disburse, migrant workers were forced to return home, and the virus has now spread to all parts of the country with death rates from it surpassing almost every other part of the world.

As an aside, to think about ways of implementing lockdowns that are less stringent and geographically as well as functionally less total, an example from yet another continent is instructive. Ethiopia, with a COVID-19 death rate of 13 per million population seems to have bettered the already relatively low African rate of 31 in Table 1. 8

We hope that human beings will emerge from this crisis more aware of the problems of sustainability.

The way forward

We next move from the immediate crisis to the medium term. Where is the world headed and how should we deal with the new world? Arguably, that two sectors that will emerge larger and stronger in the post-pandemic world are: digital technology and outsourcing, and healthcare and pharmaceuticals.

The last 9 months of the pandemic have been a huge training ground for people in the use of digital technology—Zoom, WebEx, digital finance, and many others. This learning-by-doing exercise is likely to give a big boost to outsourcing, which has the potential to help countries like India, the Philippines, and South Africa.

Globalization may see a short-run retreat but, we believe, it will come back with a vengeance. Nations that build walls to keep out goods, people and talent will get out-competed by other nations in the product market. This realization will make most countries reverse their knee-jerk anti-globalization; and the ones that do not will cease to be important global players. Either way, globalization will be back on track and with a much greater amount of outsourcing.

To return, more critically this time, to our earlier aside on Ethiopia, its historical and contemporary record on tampering with internet connectivity 9 in an attempt to muzzle inter-ethnic tensions and political dissent will not serve it well in such a post-pandemic scenario. This is a useful reminder for all emerging market economies.

We hope that human beings will emerge from this crisis more aware of the problems of sustainability. This could divert some demand from luxury goods to better health, and what is best described as “creative consumption”: art, music, and culture. 10 The former will mean much larger healthcare and pharmaceutical sectors.

But to take advantage of these new opportunities, nations will need to navigate the current predicament so that they have a viable economy once the pandemic passes. Thus it is important to be able to control the pandemic while keeping the economy open. There is some emerging literature 11 on this, but much more is needed. This is a governance challenge of a kind rarely faced, because the pandemic has disrupted normal markets and there is need, at least in the short run, for governments to step in to fill the caveat.

Emerging economies will have to devise novel governance strategies for doing this double duty of tamping down on new infections without strident controls on economic behavior and without blindly imitating Europe and America.

Here is an example. One interesting opportunity amidst this chaos is to tap into the “resource” of those who have already had COVID-19 and are immune, even if only in the short-term—we still have no definitive evidence on the length of acquired immunity. These people can be offered a high salary to work in sectors that require physical interaction with others. This will help keep supply chains unbroken. Normally, the market would have on its own caused such a salary increase but in this case, the main benefit of marshaling this labor force is on the aggregate economy and GDP and therefore is a classic case of positive externality, which the free market does not adequately reward. It is more a challenge of governance. As with most economic policy, this will need careful research and design before being implemented. We have to be aware that a policy like this will come with its risk of bribery and corruption. There is also the moral hazard challenge of poor people choosing to get COVID-19 in order to qualify for these special jobs. Safeguards will be needed against these risks. But we believe that any government that succeeds in implementing an intelligently-designed intervention to draw on this huge, under-utilized resource can have a big, positive impact on the economy 12 .

This is just one idea. We must innovate in different ways to survive the crisis and then have the ability to navigate the new world that will emerge, hopefully in the not too distant future.

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Homi Kharas, John W. McArthur

Anthony F. Pipa, Max Bouchet

Note: We are grateful for financial support from Cornell University’s Hatfield Fund for the research associated with this paper. We also wish to express our gratitude to Homi Kharas for many suggestions and David Batcheck for generous editorial help.

• “GDP Annual Growth Rate – Forecast 2020-2022,” Trading Economics, https://tradingeconomics.com/forecast/gdp-annual-growth-rate.
• “Government Cites Various Statistical Models, Says Averted Between 1.4 Million-2.9 Million Cases Due To Lockdown,” Business World, May 23, 2020, www.businessworld.in/article/Government-Cites-Various-Statistical-Models-Says-Averted-Between-1-4-million-2-9-million-Cases-Due-To-Lockdown/23-05-2020-193002/.
• Suvrat Raju, “Did the Indian lockdown avert deaths?” medRxiv , July 5, 2020, https://europepmc.org/article/ppr/ppr183813#A1.
• “COVID Policy Tracker,” Oxford University, https://github.com/OxCGRT/covid-policy-tracker t.
• Debraj Ray and S. Subramanian, “India’s Lockdown: An Interim Report,” NBER Working Paper, May 2020, https://www.nber.org/papers/w27282.
• Gopika Gopakumar and Shayan Ghosh, “Rural recovery could slow down as cases rise, says Ghosh,” Mint, August 19, 2020, https://www.livemint.com/news/india/rural-recovery-could-slow-down-as-cases-rise-says-ghosh-11597801644015.html.
• Pierina Pighi Bel and Jake Horton, “Coronavirus: What’s happening in Peru?,” BBC, July 9, 2020, https://www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-53150808.
• “No lockdown, few ventilators, but Ethiopia is beating Covid-19,” Financial Times, May 27, 2020, https://www.ft.com/content/7c6327ca-a00b-11ea-b65d-489c67b0d85d.
• Cara Anna, “Ethiopia enters 3rd week of internet shutdown after unrest,” Washington Post, July 14, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/africa/ethiopia-enters-3rd-week-of-internet-shutdown-after-unrest/2020/07/14/4699c400-c5d6-11ea-a825-8722004e4150_story.html.
• Patrick Kabanda, The Creative Wealth of Nations: Can the Arts Advance Development? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018).
• Guanlin Li et al, “Disease-dependent interaction policies to support health and economic outcomes during the COVID-19 epidemic,” medRxiv, August 2020, https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2020.08.24.20180752v3.
• For helpful discussion concerning this idea, we are grateful to Turab Hussain, Daksh Walia and Mehr-un-Nisa, during a seminar of South Asian Economics Students’ Meet (SAESM).

Global Economy and Development

Sam Boocker, Alexander Conner, David Wessel

May 29, 2024

Raymond Gilpin, Daouda Sembene, Daniel Cash, Jacob Assa, Aloysius Uche Ordu

Amit Jain, Landry Signé

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Impact of digital surge during Covid-19 pandemic: A viewpoint on research and practice

Rahul de’.

a Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, India

Neena Pandey

b Indian Institute of Management Visakhapatnam, India

Abhipsa Pal

c Indian Institute of Management Kozhikode, India

• • We examine the digital surge during the pandemic, and after.
• • Prominent issues in the use of blockchains, gig economy, workplace monitoring.
• • Aspects of internet governance, digital payments, privacy and security.
• • Implications for future research and technology policy.

The Covid-19 pandemic has led to an inevitable surge in the use of digital technologies due to the social distancing norms and nationwide lockdowns. People and organizations all over the world have had to adjust to new ways of work and life. We explore possible scenarios of the digital surge and the research issues that arise.

An increase in digitalization is leading firms and educational institutions to shift to work-from-home (WFH). Blockchain technology will become important and will entail research on design and regulations. Gig workers and the gig economy is likely to increase in scale, raising questions of work allocation, collaboration, motivation, and aspects of work overload and presenteeism. Workplace monitoring and technostress issues will become prominent with an increase in digital presence. Online fraud is likely to grow, along with research on managing security. The regulation of the internet, a key resource, will be crucial post-pandemic.

Research may address the consequences and causes of the digital divide. Further, the issues of net neutrality and zero-rating plans will merit scrutiny. A key research issue will also be the impact and consequences of internet shutdowns, frequently resorted to by countries. Digital money, too, assumes importance in crisis situations and research will address their adoption, consequences, and mode. Aspects of surveillance and privacy gain importance with increased digital usage.

1. Introduction

By late May 2020, at the time of writing of this article, over 200 countries and territories in the world were affected by the Coronavirus pandemic. This included most urban clusters and even rural regions.

With the spread of the pandemic, almost all regions have implemented lockdowns, shutting down activities that require human gathering and interactions - including colleges, schools, malls, temples, offices, airports, and railway stations. The lockdown has resulted in most people taking to the internet and internet-based services to communicate, interact, and continue with their job responsibilities from home. Internet services have seen rises in usage from 40 % to 100 %, compared to pre-lockdown levels. Video-conferencing services like Zoom have seen a ten times increase in usage, and content delivery services like Akamai have seen a 30 % increase in content usage ( Branscombe, 2020 ). Cities like Bangalore have seen a 100 % increase in internet traffic.

The lockdowns across countries have entailed a rise in the use of information systems and networks, with massive changes in usage patterns and usage behaviour. Employees are adjusting to new "normals” - with meetings going completely online, office work shifting to the home, with new emerging patterns of work. These changes have come across most organizations, whether in business, society, or government. The changes have also come suddenly, with barely any time for organizations and people to plan for, prepare and implement new setups and arrangements; they have had to adjust, try, experiment, and find ways that did not exist before.

Though now, in late May 2020, the pandemic is receding and stabilized in certain countries, it is still on the increase in many others, and with serious threats. Experts in most countries are wary of the possibility of the disease spread re-emerging, and that lockdown norms may be relaxed carefully and slowly with social distancing at the core of the new normal.

It is in this context that we see the use of information systems to continue in the same vein for some time in the foreseeable future as during the lockdown. We examine the possible scenarios in this surge in information technology usage during and post the pandemic. Our estimation of these effects assumes that there was a digital transformation already underway, before the pandemic set in, and it will take certain forms owing to the impact of the lockdowns.

In the next section, we examine the impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on the use of digital technologies, where we discuss some possible scenarios and research issues of the post-pandemic world. The next section summarizes the implications for research and practice, and in the last section, we present our conclusions.

2. Scenarios and research issues of the digital surge

In this section, we discuss some of the most pressing issues regarding the post-pandemic digital surge. These themes reveal the multiple directions in which IS research can focus in relation to impacts on technology.

2.1. Increasing digitalization

As the use of video- and audio-conferencing tools increases significantly, organizations will ramp up their technology infrastructure to account for the surge. This will lead to increased investment in bandwidth expansion, network equipment, and software that leverages cloud services. With employees becoming acclimatized to the idea of work-from-home (WFH), meeting and transacting online, firms will shift to WFH as a norm rather than as an exception. This is being adopted by many firms ( Akala, 2020 ; BBC News, 2020 ; Khetarpal, 2020 ), which have the digital infrastructure in place to handle the required load and bandwidth.

Education is another domain in which there a dramatic shift to the online mode of transacting. Since the beginning of the lockdown, schools, colleges, and universities around the world have shifted their classes to video conferencing platforms like Zoom and Google Meet. Along with these synchronous modes of teaching, asynchronous platforms like edX and Coursera have also seen an increase in enrolments ( Shah, 2020 ). Some institutions are now shifting entirely to the online mode for the forthcoming academic year, with the exception of sessions that require a physical presence, such as the University of Cambridge in the UK and the California State system in the US ( New York Times, 2020 ).

Digital transformation technologies such as Cloud, Internet-of-Things (IoT), Blockchain (BC), Artificial Intelligence (AI), and Machine Learning (ML), constitute a bulk of the of what is being adopted by organizations as part of their transformation effort.

Blockchain (BC) technology presents an opportunity to create secure and trusted information control mechanisms ( Upadhyay, 2020 ). As education and healthcare services witnesses a shift to the digital domain, BCs enable a way to secure and authenticate certificates, health records, medical records, and prescriptions. Research on the design of such systems, along with maintaining their ease-of-use and usefulness will gain importance. Another issue is that of designing systems that work with smart contracts – how the contracts are authenticated, how these contracts will be designed in a complex chain of processes with many agents involved, and how arbitration related to contracts will be handled. Further, IS research may point to regulatory aspects of BCs with regard to what must be encrypted and shared (such as for authenticating news and information sources), and how security will be managed. For instance, government demand for access to private keys to view blocks for surveillance and monitoring, versus the requirements of privacy and protection from persecution.

2.2. Work-from-home and gig workers

The gig economy is driven by online platforms that hire workers on an ad hoc, short-contract, and mostly informal basis. Well-known examples of these include Uber and Airbnb globally and Ola and Swiggy in India. These platforms have grown immensely since the wide availability of smartphones from 2010 onwards. During the lockdown, workers employed by these platforms have suffered heavily, as the demand for their services, taxi rides, rentals, or skill work, has disappeared ( Bhattacharya, 2020 ). Further, since these workers had no guaranteed salaries, their incomes dropped dramatically.

In the post-pandemic scenario, there is likely to be, in the short term, a slow return of gig economy workers, as manufacturing and service firms return to their old activities. However, we anticipate that in the longer term as the threat of infection and spread recedes, the gig economy will thrive. This will also be driven by the WFH culture.

Work-from-home and gig work has received attention in IS research, through topics in telecommuting, digital nomads, and virtual teams. One key issue is that of work allocation and collaboration, across and inside teams, and across projects. This issue will face a rise in scale and importance in the post-pandemic world, as the numbers of WFH and gig workers increase. Research may focus on aspects of the design of work norms, work contracts, trust-building, and team-building, amongst others.

Research on telecommuting and virtual teams ( Belanger, Collins, & Cheney, 2001 ; Morrison-Smith & Ruiz, 2020 ) has a long history in IS literature. Issues include the nature of “distance” whether temporal, spatial, or cultural, and the psychological needs of workers, the technological support and design for this kind of work, and many others. This research is important for the post-pandemic period.

We anticipate that the “dark side” of virtual teams and dispersed work also assumes importance in the post-pandemic world. Substantive issues related to technostress - particularly work overload and presenteeism arise in these situations. Research will have to address issues of design of collaborative work, evaluation, team performance and motivation, stress, and the issue of continuous learning.

2.3. Workplace monitoring and technostress

Another aspect of digital use by large sections of the working population is that of constant workplace monitoring and being on-the-job continuously. Those working from home using video conferencing technology find themselves under intense scrutiny and all interactions are “hyper-focused” ( Kalia, 2020 ). Digital technology makes it easier for bosses and managers to call and locate subordinates at any time, knowing that they can be reached at all times. Though there is anecdotal early evidence that this has led to an increase in productivity, it has also led to increased technostress ( Ayyagari, Grover, & Purvis, 2011 ; Tarafdar, Tu, Ragu-Nathan, & Ragu-Nathan, 2007 ) where employees must learn new technologies, be available for work at almost all times, stay with digital devices all the time, and cope with multi-tasking.

Post-pandemic, it is likely that workers' organizations will demand no-digital hours, where they will find refuge from the constant work pressure. Research may address the concerns of work equity, balance, and managing stress.

2.4. Online fraud

Along with the surge in the use of digital technologies, we are now witnessing a rise in online fraud, scams, intrusions, and security breaches. The pandemic has created a scenario of insecurity that is inviting fraudsters to exploit the crisis situation by extracting money or information or by creating vulnerabilities ( Agarwal, Sengupta, Kulshrestha, Anand, & Guha, 2017 ) Many users are beginning to rely on digital resources extensively, some for the first time, and are becoming targets for fraud and scams. Organizations and governments are aware of this threat and are taking countermeasures – for instance, some governments took a strong stand against Zoom sessions for education, forcing the platform provider to upgrade security ( Yu, 2020 ).

It is likely that these scams and frauds will increase in intensity after the pandemic. Organizations will implement massive security arrangements, along with extensive information campaigns by government departments. Security innovations and firms that offer security services will rise. Research will likely focus on managing security, assess the causes of breaches, and the economic and social loss from them.

2.5. Internet access and digital divide

Information technology, and particularly the internet, will remain central to the post-pandemic scenario, where innovations will drive the surge in use. A key aspect of this surge will be the management and regulation of the internet itself. Though the internet is a global resource and no one country can control its protocols and features, its local access and availability remain an in-country issue. During the pandemic too some countries have restricted access to the internet ( Chhibber, 2020 ), for certain reasons.

The regulation of the internet will become crucial after the pandemic as it will remain a policy tool for governments. They can intercede on aspects of monitoring, bandwidth control, surveillance, intermediary liability, and e-commerce.

The pandemic has brought the world to a situation where those not connected to the internet are facing total exclusion. With strict social and physical distancing measures in place, new routines require accessing the internet for most services. Hence, those on the wrong side of the digital divide are completely left out. Reasons for the divide are many: unaffordable device access, unaffordable Internet access, content relevance, access skills or government ordered Internet shutdowns( Armbrecht, 2016 ; Scheerder, van Deursen, & van Dijk, 2017 ) In developing countries, the condition is more serious. Thus, it becomes extremely important to explore the possibilities of ensuring connectivity. Although these issues have been researched and discussed earlier ( Warschauer, 2004 ), COVID-19 has brought about a situation where internet access seems to have become necessary for survival. As a few studies have suggested, access or no-access to ICTs may reinforce societal inequalities ( Ragnedda, 2017 ), where the post-pandemic situation may enhance this further. With substantial use of technology in accessing basic requirements like health and education, it is imperative to understand the impact of the digital divide on social equality. Therefore, it calls for researchers to examine the impact of connectivity to draw policymakers’ interest and, perhaps, offer ways to enhance it towards better inclusion.

2.6. Internet governance: net neutrality and zero-rating

Heavy use of the internet during the pandemic, for various purposes, has raised people's data requirements. With a significant digital divide in societies, this surge in the Internet data requirement has revived the discussion on zero-rating plans.

Zero-rating plans enable firms to let users access data from their sites and services, without having to bear data charges. Usually, this is not strictly permitted as it violates the basic principles of net neutrality, where internet traffic has to have the same priority and cost.

India, for instance, had an exemplary record of regulating zero-rating plans. Although the government did not permit the implementation of such plans, in the aftermath of the pandemic, the telecom regulatory authority of India (TRAI) decided to allow waiving charges for data and voice for certain websites (; COAI, 2020 ). The list primarily consisted of the sites related to COVID-19 - such as the World Health Organisation and India’s Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. The list also included some private players. The principal aim was to allow people, across all socio-economic levels, access COVID-19 related information.

Given that zero-rating plans can be useful in exceptional circumstances, as is evident from the example of India, research on the conditions on various parameters where allowing ZR plans may increase social welfare has enormous practical implications, both for firms as well as regulators. The existing literature on net-neutrality regulations and zero-rating plans ( Belli, 2017 ; Cho, Qiu, & Bandyopadhyay, 2016 ) forms the basis to enhance research in this aspect. Issues to be studied include: expanding telecom infrastructure, providing subsidized internet devices, free extra data, or waiving off users’ subscription fees ( Shashidhar, 2020 )

2.7. Internet governance: shutdowns

In current times, when the productivity of people depends significantly on the internet, its shutdown can be extremely detrimental to societies ( ISOC, 2019 ) However, internet shutdowns are not uncommon even in times like these. The internet was shutdown in Kashmir, a union territory in India, since August 5th, 2019 and continued till May 2020, making it the longest ever imposed in a democracy ( Masih, Irfan, & Slater, 2019 ) Basic internet services, such as filing for driving licenses, were accessed by locals using the Internet Express, which is a train that shuttles Kashmiris to the nearest town where they can get online. The Kashmir Chamber of Commerce estimates $1.4 billion in losses owing to the internet shutdown ( Masih et al., 2019 ). Similar events are regularly noted across various other countries, Arab Spring being the significant starting point.

With the pandemic, when the internet has become the most important tool available to citizens, the impact of Internet shutdowns has become grimmer. Shutdowns lead to severe implications for all aspects of life, and there are many issues that require research in this regard. The impacts resulting from a climate of uncertainty can potentially discourage foreign investors and spill over to a wide range of sectors, including education, healthcare, press and news media, and e-commerce ( Kathuria, Kedia, Verma, Bagchi, & Sekhani, 2018 ). It is important to understand the far-reaching human rights impact of internet shutdowns, which are exacerbated in the current scenario. Shutdowns have deep political reasons and in many cases the consequences are indeterminate. Research can focus on aspects of domino-effect consequences leading to grave political crises.

2.8. Digital money

Digital payments and digital currencies are likely to have a key role in the post-pandemic situation. As digital payments are contact-less they will be encouraged by governments, and will likely see a surge. This will also be boosted by the gig economy and WFH situations.

There are two distinct phenomena related to digital money that has aided the fight during the pandemic. First, banknotes and coins were suspected to be carrying the virus and digital payment was preferred to the ‘dirty money’ ( Gardner, 2020 ; Samantha, 2020 ). Online delivery services were encouraging customers to make payments through digital payment systems like a credit/debit card or mobile payments, with mandates by the government in several parts of India ( Bhandari, 2020 ). This is likely to result in a surge in digital payment usage, which will lead to work on the diffusion of digital payment technology. Second, during the lockdown, there was a loss of jobs, and governments provided aid through payment apps and digital payment modes. These are a convenient mode of fund transfer from donors to recipients, as seen in previous crisis relief cases as well ( Pollach, Treiblmaier, & Floh, 2005 ). In various crisis and disaster events, where the mobility of civilians was restrained, many mobile payment service providers (e.g. Vodafone in Afghanistan, Safaricom in Kenya, and Orange in Africa) provided quick funds transfer of remittances from migrants to their homes, and relief aid from the government to victims ( Aker, Boumnijel, McClelland, & Tierney, 2016 ; Pega, Liu, Walter, & Lhachimi, 2015 ; Wachanga, 2015 ). This is once again observed in the Covid-19 crisis and needs further examination.

2.9. Surveillance and privacy

Issues of surveillance and privacy are gaining prominence with digital usage during lockdowns. Commentators, such as Yuval Harari, have written about the potential for state surveillance “under the skin” ( Harari, 2020 ) as governments rely on digital means to monitor the spread of the pandemic. As many governments have started using apps on smartphones to monitor infected persons and trace their contacts, civil society organizations have raised privacy and state surveillance concerns ( Pant & Lal, 2020 ). Post-pandemic, these measures of monitoring populations for epidemiological reasons with digital means are likely to continue and become prevalent. Though the concerns of privacy and surveillance are valid and have to be addressed, these digital platforms are the most reliable and efficient way of tracking disease spread.

“Surveillance is a distinctive product of the modern world” ( Misa, Brey, & Feenberg, 2003, p. 161 ), and today we are living in a surveillance society where any internet-based activity using a mobile phone or other electronic gadgets can be monitored and accessed in unfathomable ways ( Gilliom & Monahan, 2012 ; Lyon, 1994 ). This has resulted in a surge in IS research on implications of such web or app-based surveillance in applications including mobile health apps ( Lupton, 2012 ), environment monitoring and pollution control apps ( Castell et al., 2015 ), self-tracking apps ( Barassi, 2017 ), and parental surveillance ( Ghosh, Badillo-Urquiola, Guha, LaViola, & Wisniewski, 2018 ). Covid-19 has introduced a new application of surveillance for tracking citizens with the symptoms of the virus. This includes the Covid-19 tracker in China ( Davidson, 2020 ), the Aarogya Setu app for tracking infectious citizens in India ( Shahane, 2020 ), and contact tracking apps in the United States ( Guynn, 2020 ). While these technologies are innovations for fighting the global pandemic today, the issue of government surveillance on citizens has evolved repeatedly. Research can focus on the multiple benefits of these apps, but also should not ignore the potential social complications that are possible to arise, including the historic problem of bureaucratic control by the government, using IT ( Gandy, 1989 ).

Closely related to surveillance is the issue of privacy that mobile apps, including Covid-19 trackers, often tend to threaten users’ personal information ( Gu, (Calvin) Xu, Xu, Zhang, & Ling, 2017 ; Joy, 2020 ). For example, online classes during the pandemic lockdowns have suffered issues of ‘intrusion of privacy’ as students and teachers are on camera in the private spaces of their homes ( Garcia, 2020 ). Privacy in the digital age has remained a research topic of high priority for IS researchers ( Belanger et al., 2001 ; Smith, Dinev, & Xu, 2011 ). Privacy has also been considered by IS adoption and usage researchers, with privacy risk as a dominant and recurring factor in studies on mobile payments (e.g., Johnson, Kiser, Washington, & Torres, 2018 ; Luo, Li, Zhang, & Shim, 2010 ), location-based mobile services ( Zhou, 2012 ), and social networking sites ( Aghasian, Garg, Gao, Yu, & Montgomery, 2017 ; Youn & Hall, 2008 ). It would be interesting to examine the different privacy concerns of users while adapting both Covid-19 tracking apps, and online classroom applications. The risks involved in the breach of privacy by these two technologies are unalike and must be investigated with adequate contextual references.

3. Implications for research and practice

In this section, we revisit some of the key issues that are important for research and practice. Our discussion is based on the assumptions about the post-pandemic situation and the aspects of IS research presented above.

3.1. Implications for research

• 1 While deploying security technologies like the blockchain, it will be important to understand the implications of smart contracts, their integration in workflows, and their effectiveness in complex resource-constrained settings, as in developing countries. Further, understanding the implications of secure and non-erasable technologies like blockchains will become relevant for regulation.
• 2 Many research issues arise with regard to work-from-home and gig work, which include aspects of trust, measurement of performance, communication effectiveness, and collaboration.
• 3 It can be expected that the dark side of virtual work and gig work, will raise questions of stress, presenteeism, work overload, surveillance, and monitoring. New and severe forms of digital surveillance will have to be understood and their implications gauged.
• 4 Though much work has been done in understanding the parameters and impact of the digital divide, it will be important to understand how those without access suffer more from the consequences of the pandemic when the world survives on digital communications and operations.
• 5 Management of the internet within countries is important, and aspects of enhancing networks include regulating zero-rating plans cautiously, seeing their implications for welfare, and how they can enhance access.
• 6 Internet shutdowns during and after a pandemic lead to severe difficulties for citizens, who have come to depend on these services. Research has to examine the direct, second-order, and third-order impacts of these shutdown measures.
• 7 Research on digital payments and their impact in crisis situations, for providing aid and subsidies to affected populations, and for disaster management.
• 8 Surveillance issues about the extent of data collection by contact tracing apps are important areas of research. Issues of persistence and elimination of data, the expanse of data collection, sharing of data between apps, and the multiple trade-offs involved.

3.2. Implications for practice

• 1 Design of secure technologies, like blockchain-based applications, for the surge in online education and healthcare activities.
• 2 Policy for regulating digital infrastructure needed for increased digital transformation.
• 3 Design of technologies for managing secure online interactions – for education, healthcare, payments.
• 4 Design of apps for contract tracing and disease surveillance that balance privacy versus public health.
• 5 Managers will have to understand resistance to technology and ways to manage change, both among employees as well as customers.
• 6 Given the significant role which the internet is about to play in times to come, Internet intermediaries will work with government and civil society to address privacy and surveillance issues for better adoption of technology.

4. Conclusion

We understand that a pandemic can have severe consequences ( Keys, 2000 ), including changing the political contour of the world, destroying empires, and creating nations. For the Covid-19 pandemic, we envisage a dramatic shift in digital usage with impacts on all aspects of work and life. How this change plays out remains largely dependent on our responses to and shaping of the emerging trends.

In this paper, we have outlined what we see as some key trends and research issues that need to be examined urgently. They will have substantial consequences in the future.

CRediT authorship contribution statement

Rahul De’: Conceptualization, Writing - original draft. Neena Pandey: Writing - original draft. Abhipsa Pal: Writing - review & editing.

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• Volume 76, Issue 2
• COVID-19 pandemic and its impact on social relationships and health
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• http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1512-4471 Emily Long 1 ,
• Susan Patterson 1 ,
• Karen Maxwell 1 ,
• Carolyn Blake 1 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7342-4566 Raquel Bosó Pérez 1 ,
• Ruth Lewis 1 ,
• Mark McCann 1 ,
• Julie Riddell 1 ,
• Kathryn Skivington 1 ,
• Rachel Wilson-Lowe 1 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4409-6601 Kirstin R Mitchell 2
• 1 MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit , University of Glasgow , Glasgow , UK
• 2 MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, Institute of Health & Wellbeing , University of Glasgow , Glasgow , UK
• Correspondence to Dr Emily Long, MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G3 7HR, UK; emily.long{at}glasgow.ac.uk

This essay examines key aspects of social relationships that were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses explicitly on relational mechanisms of health and brings together theory and emerging evidence on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic to make recommendations for future public health policy and recovery. We first provide an overview of the pandemic in the UK context, outlining the nature of the public health response. We then introduce four distinct domains of social relationships: social networks, social support, social interaction and intimacy, highlighting the mechanisms through which the pandemic and associated public health response drastically altered social interactions in each domain. Throughout the essay, the lens of health inequalities, and perspective of relationships as interconnecting elements in a broader system, is used to explore the varying impact of these disruptions. The essay concludes by providing recommendations for longer term recovery ensuring that the social relational cost of COVID-19 is adequately considered in efforts to rebuild.

• inequalities

Data availability statement

Data sharing not applicable as no data sets generated and/or analysed for this study. Data sharing not applicable as no data sets generated or analysed for this essay.

This is an open access article distributed in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 Unported (CC BY 4.0) license, which permits others to copy, redistribute, remix, transform and build upon this work for any purpose, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the licence is given, and indication of whether changes were made. See: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ .

https://doi.org/10.1136/jech-2021-216690

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Introduction

Infectious disease pandemics, including SARS and COVID-19, demand intrapersonal behaviour change and present highly complex challenges for public health. 1 A pandemic of an airborne infection, spread easily through social contact, assails human relationships by drastically altering the ways through which humans interact. In this essay, we draw on theories of social relationships to examine specific ways in which relational mechanisms key to health and well-being were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Relational mechanisms refer to the processes between people that lead to change in health outcomes.

At the time of writing, the future surrounding COVID-19 was uncertain. Vaccine programmes were being rolled out in countries that could afford them, but new and more contagious variants of the virus were also being discovered. The recovery journey looked long, with continued disruption to social relationships. The social cost of COVID-19 was only just beginning to emerge, but the mental health impact was already considerable, 2 3 and the inequality of the health burden stark. 4 Knowledge of the epidemiology of COVID-19 accrued rapidly, but evidence of the most effective policy responses remained uncertain.

The initial response to COVID-19 in the UK was reactive and aimed at reducing mortality, with little time to consider the social implications, including for interpersonal and community relationships. The terminology of ‘social distancing’ quickly became entrenched both in public and policy discourse. This equation of physical distance with social distance was regrettable, since only physical proximity causes viral transmission, whereas many forms of social proximity (eg, conversations while walking outdoors) are minimal risk, and are crucial to maintaining relationships supportive of health and well-being.

The aim of this essay is to explore four key relational mechanisms that were impacted by the pandemic and associated restrictions: social networks, social support, social interaction and intimacy. We use relational theories and emerging research on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic response to make three key recommendations: one regarding public health responses; and two regarding social recovery. Our understanding of these mechanisms stems from a ‘systems’ perspective which casts social relationships as interdependent elements within a connected whole. 5

Social networks

Social networks characterise the individuals and social connections that compose a system (such as a workplace, community or society). Social relationships range from spouses and partners, to coworkers, friends and acquaintances. They vary across many dimensions, including, for example, frequency of contact and emotional closeness. Social networks can be understood both in terms of the individuals and relationships that compose the network, as well as the overall network structure (eg, how many of your friends know each other).

Social networks show a tendency towards homophily, or a phenomenon of associating with individuals who are similar to self. 6 This is particularly true for ‘core’ network ties (eg, close friends), while more distant, sometimes called ‘weak’ ties tend to show more diversity. During the height of COVID-19 restrictions, face-to-face interactions were often reduced to core network members, such as partners, family members or, potentially, live-in roommates; some ‘weak’ ties were lost, and interactions became more limited to those closest. Given that peripheral, weaker social ties provide a diversity of resources, opinions and support, 7 COVID-19 likely resulted in networks that were smaller and more homogenous.

Such changes were not inevitable nor necessarily enduring, since social networks are also adaptive and responsive to change, in that a disruption to usual ways of interacting can be replaced by new ways of engaging (eg, Zoom). Yet, important inequalities exist, wherein networks and individual relationships within networks are not equally able to adapt to such changes. For example, individuals with a large number of newly established relationships (eg, university students) may have struggled to transfer these relationships online, resulting in lost contacts and a heightened risk of social isolation. This is consistent with research suggesting that young adults were the most likely to report a worsening of relationships during COVID-19, whereas older adults were the least likely to report a change. 8

Lastly, social connections give rise to emergent properties of social systems, 9 where a community-level phenomenon develops that cannot be attributed to any one member or portion of the network. For example, local area-based networks emerged due to geographic restrictions (eg, stay-at-home orders), resulting in increases in neighbourly support and local volunteering. 10 In fact, research suggests that relationships with neighbours displayed the largest net gain in ratings of relationship quality compared with a range of relationship types (eg, partner, colleague, friend). 8 Much of this was built from spontaneous individual interactions within local communities, which together contributed to the ‘community spirit’ that many experienced. 11 COVID-19 restrictions thus impacted the personal social networks and the structure of the larger networks within the society.

Social support

Social support, referring to the psychological and material resources provided through social interaction, is a critical mechanism through which social relationships benefit health. In fact, social support has been shown to be one of the most important resilience factors in the aftermath of stressful events. 12 In the context of COVID-19, the usual ways in which individuals interact and obtain social support have been severely disrupted.

One such disruption has been to opportunities for spontaneous social interactions. For example, conversations with colleagues in a break room offer an opportunity for socialising beyond one’s core social network, and these peripheral conversations can provide a form of social support. 13 14 A chance conversation may lead to advice helpful to coping with situations or seeking formal help. Thus, the absence of these spontaneous interactions may mean the reduction of indirect support-seeking opportunities. While direct support-seeking behaviour is more effective at eliciting support, it also requires significantly more effort and may be perceived as forceful and burdensome. 15 The shift to homeworking and closure of community venues reduced the number of opportunities for these spontaneous interactions to occur, and has, second, focused them locally. Consequently, individuals whose core networks are located elsewhere, or who live in communities where spontaneous interaction is less likely, have less opportunity to benefit from spontaneous in-person supportive interactions.

However, alongside this disruption, new opportunities to interact and obtain social support have arisen. The surge in community social support during the initial lockdown mirrored that often seen in response to adverse events (eg, natural disasters 16 ). COVID-19 restrictions that confined individuals to their local area also compelled them to focus their in-person efforts locally. Commentators on the initial lockdown in the UK remarked on extraordinary acts of generosity between individuals who belonged to the same community but were unknown to each other. However, research on adverse events also tells us that such community support is not necessarily maintained in the longer term. 16

Meanwhile, online forms of social support are not bound by geography, thus enabling interactions and social support to be received from a wider network of people. Formal online social support spaces (eg, support groups) existed well before COVID-19, but have vastly increased since. While online interactions can increase perceived social support, it is unclear whether remote communication technologies provide an effective substitute from in-person interaction during periods of social distancing. 17 18 It makes intuitive sense that the usefulness of online social support will vary by the type of support offered, degree of social interaction and ‘online communication skills’ of those taking part. Youth workers, for instance, have struggled to keep vulnerable youth engaged in online youth clubs, 19 despite others finding a positive association between amount of digital technology used by individuals during lockdown and perceived social support. 20 Other research has found that more frequent face-to-face contact and phone/video contact both related to lower levels of depression during the time period of March to August 2020, but the negative effect of a lack of contact was greater for those with higher levels of usual sociability. 21 Relatedly, important inequalities in social support exist, such that individuals who occupy more socially disadvantaged positions in society (eg, low socioeconomic status, older people) tend to have less access to social support, 22 potentially exacerbated by COVID-19.

Social and interactional norms

Interactional norms are key relational mechanisms which build trust, belonging and identity within and across groups in a system. Individuals in groups and societies apply meaning by ‘approving, arranging and redefining’ symbols of interaction. 23 A handshake, for instance, is a powerful symbol of trust and equality. Depending on context, not shaking hands may symbolise a failure to extend friendship, or a failure to reach agreement. The norms governing these symbols represent shared values and identity; and mutual understanding of these symbols enables individuals to achieve orderly interactions, establish supportive relationship accountability and connect socially. 24 25

Physical distancing measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 radically altered these norms of interaction, particularly those used to convey trust, affinity, empathy and respect (eg, hugging, physical comforting). 26 As epidemic waves rose and fell, the work to negotiate these norms required intense cognitive effort; previously taken-for-granted interactions were re-examined, factoring in current restriction levels, own and (assumed) others’ vulnerability and tolerance of risk. This created awkwardness, and uncertainty, for example, around how to bring closure to an in-person interaction or convey warmth. The instability in scripted ways of interacting created particular strain for individuals who already struggled to encode and decode interactions with others (eg, those who are deaf or have autism spectrum disorder); difficulties often intensified by mask wearing. 27

Large social gatherings—for example, weddings, school assemblies, sporting events—also present key opportunities for affirming and assimilating interactional norms, building cohesion and shared identity and facilitating cooperation across social groups. 28 Online ‘equivalents’ do not easily support ‘social-bonding’ activities such as singing and dancing, and rarely enable chance/spontaneous one-on-one conversations with peripheral/weaker network ties (see the Social networks section) which can help strengthen bonds across a larger network. The loss of large gatherings to celebrate rites of passage (eg, bar mitzvah, weddings) has additional relational costs since these events are performed by and for communities to reinforce belonging, and to assist in transitioning to new phases of life. 29 The loss of interaction with diverse others via community and large group gatherings also reduces intergroup contact, which may then tend towards more prejudiced outgroup attitudes. While online interaction can go some way to mimicking these interaction norms, there are key differences. A sense of anonymity, and lack of in-person emotional cues, tends to support norms of polarisation and aggression in expressing differences of opinion online. And while online platforms have potential to provide intergroup contact, the tendency of much social media to form homogeneous ‘echo chambers’ can serve to further reduce intergroup contact. 30 31

Intimacy relates to the feeling of emotional connection and closeness with other human beings. Emotional connection, through romantic, friendship or familial relationships, fulfils a basic human need 32 and strongly benefits health, including reduced stress levels, improved mental health, lowered blood pressure and reduced risk of heart disease. 32 33 Intimacy can be fostered through familiarity, feeling understood and feeling accepted by close others. 34

Intimacy via companionship and closeness is fundamental to mental well-being. Positively, the COVID-19 pandemic has offered opportunities for individuals to (re)connect and (re)strengthen close relationships within their household via quality time together, following closure of many usual external social activities. Research suggests that the first full UK lockdown period led to a net gain in the quality of steady relationships at a population level, 35 but amplified existing inequalities in relationship quality. 35 36 For some in single-person households, the absence of a companion became more conspicuous, leading to feelings of loneliness and lower mental well-being. 37 38 Additional pandemic-related relational strain 39 40 resulted, for some, in the initiation or intensification of domestic abuse. 41 42

Physical touch is another key aspect of intimacy, a fundamental human need crucial in maintaining and developing intimacy within close relationships. 34 Restrictions on social interactions severely restricted the number and range of people with whom physical affection was possible. The reduction in opportunity to give and receive affectionate physical touch was not experienced equally. Many of those living alone found themselves completely without physical contact for extended periods. The deprivation of physical touch is evidenced to take a heavy emotional toll. 43 Even in future, once physical expressions of affection can resume, new levels of anxiety over germs may introduce hesitancy into previously fluent blending of physical and verbal intimate social connections. 44

The pandemic also led to shifts in practices and norms around sexual relationship building and maintenance, as individuals adapted and sought alternative ways of enacting sexual intimacy. This too is important, given that intimate sexual activity has known benefits for health. 45 46 Given that social restrictions hinged on reducing household mixing, possibilities for partnered sexual activity were primarily guided by living arrangements. While those in cohabiting relationships could potentially continue as before, those who were single or in non-cohabiting relationships generally had restricted opportunities to maintain their sexual relationships. Pornography consumption and digital partners were reported to increase since lockdown. 47 However, online interactions are qualitatively different from in-person interactions and do not provide the same opportunities for physical intimacy.

Recommendations and conclusions

In the sections above we have outlined the ways in which COVID-19 has impacted social relationships, showing how relational mechanisms key to health have been undermined. While some of the damage might well self-repair after the pandemic, there are opportunities inherent in deliberative efforts to build back in ways that facilitate greater resilience in social and community relationships. We conclude by making three recommendations: one regarding public health responses to the pandemic; and two regarding social recovery.

Recommendation 1: explicitly count the relational cost of public health policies to control the pandemic

Effective handling of a pandemic recognises that social, economic and health concerns are intricately interwoven. It is clear that future research and policy attention must focus on the social consequences. As described above, policies which restrict physical mixing across households carry heavy and unequal relational costs. These include for individuals (eg, loss of intimate touch), dyads (eg, loss of warmth, comfort), networks (eg, restricted access to support) and communities (eg, loss of cohesion and identity). Such costs—and their unequal impact—should not be ignored in short-term efforts to control an epidemic. Some public health responses—restrictions on international holiday travel and highly efficient test and trace systems—have relatively small relational costs and should be prioritised. At a national level, an earlier move to proportionate restrictions, and investment in effective test and trace systems, may help prevent escalation of spread to the point where a national lockdown or tight restrictions became an inevitability. Where policies with relational costs are unavoidable, close attention should be paid to the unequal relational impact for those whose personal circumstances differ from normative assumptions of two adult families. This includes consideration of whether expectations are fair (eg, for those who live alone), whether restrictions on social events are equitable across age group, religious/ethnic groupings and social class, and also to ensure that the language promoted by such policies (eg, households; families) is not exclusionary. 48 49 Forethought to unequal impacts on social relationships should thus be integral to the work of epidemic preparedness teams.

Recommendation 2: intelligently balance online and offline ways of relating

A key ingredient for well-being is ‘getting together’ in a physical sense. This is fundamental to a human need for intimate touch, physical comfort, reinforcing interactional norms and providing practical support. Emerging evidence suggests that online ways of relating cannot simply replace physical interactions. But online interaction has many benefits and for some it offers connections that did not exist previously. In particular, online platforms provide new forms of support for those unable to access offline services because of mobility issues (eg, older people) or because they are geographically isolated from their support community (eg, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) youth). Ultimately, multiple forms of online and offline social interactions are required to meet the needs of varying groups of people (eg, LGBTQ, older people). Future research and practice should aim to establish ways of using offline and online support in complementary and even synergistic ways, rather than veering between them as social restrictions expand and contract. Intelligent balancing of online and offline ways of relating also pertains to future policies on home and flexible working. A decision to switch to wholesale or obligatory homeworking should consider the risk to relational ‘group properties’ of the workplace community and their impact on employees’ well-being, focusing in particular on unequal impacts (eg, new vs established employees). Intelligent blending of online and in-person working is required to achieve flexibility while also nurturing supportive networks at work. Intelligent balance also implies strategies to build digital literacy and minimise digital exclusion, as well as coproducing solutions with intended beneficiaries.

Recommendation 3: build stronger and sustainable localised communities

In balancing offline and online ways of interacting, there is opportunity to capitalise on the potential for more localised, coherent communities due to scaled-down travel, homeworking and local focus that will ideally continue after restrictions end. There are potential economic benefits after the pandemic, such as increased trade as home workers use local resources (eg, coffee shops), but also relational benefits from stronger relationships around the orbit of the home and neighbourhood. Experience from previous crises shows that community volunteer efforts generated early on will wane over time in the absence of deliberate work to maintain them. Adequately funded partnerships between local government, third sector and community groups are required to sustain community assets that began as a direct response to the pandemic. Such partnerships could work to secure green spaces and indoor (non-commercial) meeting spaces that promote community interaction. Green spaces in particular provide a triple benefit in encouraging physical activity and mental health, as well as facilitating social bonding. 50 In building local communities, small community networks—that allow for diversity and break down ingroup/outgroup views—may be more helpful than the concept of ‘support bubbles’, which are exclusionary and less sustainable in the longer term. Rigorously designed intervention and evaluation—taking a systems approach—will be crucial in ensuring scale-up and sustainability.

The dramatic change to social interaction necessitated by efforts to control the spread of COVID-19 created stark challenges but also opportunities. Our essay highlights opportunities for learning, both to ensure the equity and humanity of physical restrictions, and to sustain the salutogenic effects of social relationships going forward. The starting point for capitalising on this learning is recognition of the disruption to relational mechanisms as a key part of the socioeconomic and health impact of the pandemic. In recovery planning, a general rule is that what is good for decreasing health inequalities (such as expanding social protection and public services and pursuing green inclusive growth strategies) 4 will also benefit relationships and safeguard relational mechanisms for future generations. Putting this into action will require political will.

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Twitter @karenmaxSPHSU, @Mark_McCann, @Rwilsonlowe, @KMitchinGlasgow

Contributors EL and KM led on the manuscript conceptualisation, review and editing. SP, KM, CB, RBP, RL, MM, JR, KS and RW-L contributed to drafting and revising the article. All authors assisted in revising the final draft.

Funding The research reported in this publication was supported by the Medical Research Council (MC_UU_00022/1, MC_UU_00022/3) and the Chief Scientist Office (SPHSU11, SPHSU14). EL is also supported by MRC Skills Development Fellowship Award (MR/S015078/1). KS and MM are also supported by a Medical Research Council Strategic Award (MC_PC_13027).

Competing interests None declared.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

Read the full text or download the PDF:

Covid 'essential' workers were always important. Don't abandon them post-pandemic.

There is so much from 2020's terrible plague year that we all hope to leave behind, but for those of us who have survived , not everything needs to be tossed aside. Smaller things, like wintertime mask-wearing , will probably stick around (there's a reason flu season barely registered this year), but the pandemic has also brought bigger ideological shifts in how we see the world — and, more specifically, in how we conceptualize and value work itself.

The workers whose labor was all too often been ignored, dismissed or rendered invisible before Covid-19 arrived were suddenly thrust into the spotlight.

The workers whose labor was all too often been ignored, dismissed or rendered invisible before Covid-19 arrived were suddenly thrust into the spotlight, greeted with rounds of applause and signs of gratitude and granted a brand new designation: essential. Of course, these workers were always essential, and the work they do has long been the only thing that keeps our society functioning at what passes for a normal level. But as those who could do so suddenly retreated to home offices (or vacation homes), it became painfully apparent how much our society depends on the people who wouldn't have been able to just stay safe at home, even if they wanted to.

Health care workers and first responders rightly got their due, but so did other hospital workers: the folks who mopped the floors, did the laundry and handled the bodies while doctors and nurses frantically tried to stem the tide of death. City dwellers rallied around sanitation workers and transit workers and helped amplify their demands for proper protective equipment and wages; r estaurant staffers and delivery workers kept people's bellies full and their cupboards stocked and ensured that the more vulnerable members of our communities could stay out of harm's way.

Opinion Delivery workers risk their lives to bring you pizza. And they need your help.

Farmworkers and meatpacking plant employees risked it all to prevent major disruptions in the food supply chain, and grocery store workers stood on the front lines to deliver that food into panicked, waiting hands. Teachers struggled to keep their students and themselves safe, an impossible puzzle that they have thrown their hearts into solving. Warehouse workers — particularly those at e-commerce behemoths like Amazon, Target and Walmart — picked and packed millions of orders of necessities and depression buys alike, and utility workers across the country kept the lights on.

Now, a year into the pandemic, over a half-million people are dead; few of them were government officials or the wealthy elite, but a great and terrible number of them spent their final season on Earth engaged in the very essential work that turned them into heroes — but ended up costing them their lives.

While the applause has died down and the signs have wilted in the early spring rain, we will remember that phrase — "essential worker" — and the knowledge of who exactly kept the world turning while the government twiddled its thumbs and the superrich raked in record profits.

Those who were already suffering felt the knife twist deepest, and even many of those who started out on stable ground had their lives collapse around them. While grocery store workers were dying, tech moguls Jeff Bezos and Elon Musk made billions ; when transit workers were saying goodbye to their colleagues, the former president was golfing, his veins pumped full of exclusive treatments.

There is no going back now, and a new wave of labor activism and working class resistance not only is inevitable; it is already happening.

A necessary class consciousness has arisen in this country's essential workforce, and the explosion in new organizing and labor actions is an excellent sign of potential victories. Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama , are in the midst of a vote to form the company's first union, which could have major ripple effects on the company's other U.S. facilities. Teachers across the country are striking to protect their students and open schools safety. Unionized grocery store workers have forced major supermarket chains to provide more hazard pay. Coal miners and graduate student workers are threatening to strike over wages and safety — and these are only a few examples.

Opinion We want to hear what you THINK. Please submit a letter to the editor.

On a federal level, the new administration has taken a decidedly pro-labor stance, and the Covid-19 relief bill offered financial support to millions of workers (despite its shameful failure to include a $15 minimum wage hike), while with the potential passage of the PRO Act, labor is in a decent position to make real material gains. Things still aren't great, but they're an awful lot better than they were this time last year.

The pinprick of light at the end of this dark tunnel is finally coming into view, and it will hopefully bring a new era of working-class resistance along with it. Their work was always essential, but now, it is impossible to ignore.

Other essays from our project on what we should keep post-pandemic:

• Covid masks save American lives. They still can (and should) post-pandemic , by Dr. Megan Ranney
• Social distancing during Covid means no hugs. My personal space finally feels respected , by Christina Wyman
• Covid's remote parties allowed us to celebrate with all of our dearest, not just our nearest , by Rachel Pomerance Berl
• Even post-Covid, outdoor dining should keep going. Our staid restaurant culture has to evolve , by Deanna Fox
• I moved back home during the Covid pandemic. Here's what I gained by giving up my solo life , by Samhita Mukhopadhyay
• Covid walks kept this angry caffeine addict sane. And I'm going to keep walking , by Meredith Bennett-Smith
• Covid deaths made us aware of our mortality. Here's why that's a good thing , by Maggie Mulqueen

Kim Kelly is a freelance journalist and organizer based in Philadelphia. She is the author of “ Fight Like Hell: The Untold History of American Labor .” Her work on labor, politics and working-class resistance can be found in Teen Vogue, The Baffler, The New Republic, The Washington Post and many others.