Publication date: Aug 31, 2023

Lockdown was used worldwide to mitigate the spread of severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 and was the cornerstone non-pharmaceutical intervention of zero-COVID strategies. Many previous impact evaluations of lockdowns are unreliable because lockdowns co-occurred with severe coronavirus disease related health and financial insecurities. This was not the case in Melbourne’s 111-day lockdown, which left other Australian jurisdictions unaffected. Interrogating nationally representative longitudinal survey data and quasi-experimental variation, and controlling for multiple hypothesis testing, we found that lockdown had some statistically significant, albeit small, impacts on several domains of human life. Women had lower mental health (-0. 10 s. d., P = 0. 043, 95% confidence interval (CI) = -0. 21 to -0) and working hours (-0. 13 s. d., P = 0. 006, 95% CI = -0. 22 to -0. 04) but exercised more often (0. 28 s. d., P 

Semantics

Original Article