Home
/
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
/
The forgotten victims of COVID-19: 7 groups punished by lockdowns
The forgotten victims of COVID-19: 7 groups punished by lockdowns
Apr 2, 2025 7:52 PM

The pandemic’s trail of destruction reaches far further than the death toll of the virus.

Read More…

COVID-19 is the most deadly global pandemic since the 1918 influenza outbreak, claiming more than 5 million lives worldwide and counting. Well over 700,000 of these deaths occurred in the United States, which parable to the number of lives lost in the American Civil War.

Yet the pandemic’s trail of destruction reaches even further than this death toll. Millions of Americans have suffered as a result of lockdowns and other mitigation efforts. Here are some categories of forgotten victims, whose stories should also be heard.

1. The Untreated

The CDCfoundthat by June 30, 2020, more than 40 percent of U.S. adults had avoided medical care due to concerns over COVID-19. In other cases, people who sought medical attention had their treatments postponed. Delayed treatment causes known conditions to worsen and prevents the discovery of new conditions.The Washington Postreportsthat a surge of advanced illnesses came to light in the spring of 2021, many of which developed due to inattention in 2020. Cancer screenings and treatments, for example, dramatically decreased during the pandemic. A study published inJCO Clinical Care Informaticsfoundthat “screenings for breast, colon, prostate, and lung cancers were lower by 85%, 75%, 74%, and 56%, respectively” in April 2020. The authors of the study conclude that these delays in treatment may “increase cancer morbidity and mortality for years e.”

2. The Substance Abusers

There were also over 93,000 drug overdose deaths in 2020, according toCDC data, a staggering 29.4 percent increase from 2019. Addiction Centerexplainsthat “[a]ddiction, often referred to as the disease of isolation, has been affected by strict social distancing guidelines, working from home, and other factors.” Alcohol abuse also sharply increased in 2020. A RAND Corporationstudyfound that the frequency of heavy drinking among women rose 41 percent during the pandemic. Other researchersfoundthat participants who reported high degrees of stress due to COVID-19 consumed “significantly more alcohol than participants who did not report these high levels of stress.”

3. The Depressed

Depression among US adultstripledduring the pandemic, according to one study, skyrocketing from 8.5 percent to 27.8 percent of those surveyed. Census Bureau data likewiseindicatesan exploding mental health crisis, with 41.1 percent of adults reporting symptoms of anxiety disorder or depressive disorder in January pared to 11.0 percent before the pandemic. These numbers suggest that tens of millions of Americans acquired depression during and likely as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak and ensuing lockdowns. More than 26 percent of adults reported having a trauma-and stressor-related disorder attributable to the pandemic,accordingto a CDC study. The same survey found that over a quarter of people ages 18–24 had seriously considered suicide in June 2020.

4. The Abused

Domestic violenceis being calleda “pandemic within the COVID-19 pandemic,” with a systematic review of studiesconcludingthat “[i]ncidents of domestic violence increased in response to stay-at-home/lockdown orders.” One studyexplainsthat “stay-at-home orders may create a worst-case scenario for individuals suffering from DV” as isolation “may expose or worsen vulnerabilities due to a lack of established social support systems.”

5. The Jobless

More than 20 million Americans lost their jobs during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, surging theunemployment rateto 14.7 percent, the highest rate since the Great Depression. Unemployment is steadily declining now, but nearly 200,000 businesses closed permanently due to the pandemic,accordingto an estimate from the Federal Reserve Board, and many laid-off Americans remain jobless.

6. The Isolated Elderly

Many nursing home residents were also separated from their spouses, families, and even co-residents for over a year. Extreme isolation leads to mental and physical degradation, which theAssociated Pressestimatesresulted in more than 40,000 excess “neglect deaths” from March to November 2020.

7. The Untaught

When schools closed, online education largely failed to adequately replace in-person learning. Research from NWEAdiscoveredthat students in the 2020–21 school year fell behind 8–12 percentile points in math and 3–6 points in pared to historical trends. They concluded, moreover, that “American Indian and Alaska Native (AIAN), Black, and Latinx students, as well as students in high-poverty schools, were disproportionately impacted.” Beyond a reduction in learning, another studyfoundthat school closures “contribute to stress in parents and children” and can “threaten child growth and development.”

The ways society has suffered from the pandemic go on and on. To name just a few more:

Mask wearing has further isolated millions of Americans who are deaf or hard of hearing and depend on lip-reading munication.Many homeless shelterscut their capacities while other charities serving the homeless population closed their doors. More people slept on the street as a result, and homeless deathsincreased.Electronic device usage dramatically increased during the pandemic, causing a variety of health problems, includingsleep disturbances andvision problems.Many prisonssuspended all visitations, making life even harder for an often-overlooked vulnerable population.

Some of these costs were preventable; others may not have been. Some are short-term problems; others will have lasting effects. Many of them resulted from lockdowns, restrictions, and fear-inducing messaging, illustrating how the way we respond to outbreaks can cause additional problems.

Human beings are not merely bodies subject to viral infection, but social and spiritual beings, dependent on established ways of life and vulnerable to fear and isolation. Culture and society evolved to fulfill the many physical, emotional, and spiritual needs of the population, and huge changes to this way of life cause unintended effects across the entire ecosystem. The past 20 months have demonstrated this more than ever.

As the virus continues to spread around the world, we must do what we can to protect people from all of the present dangers, including the immediate health risks of COVID-19 and as many of the piled above as possible.

May our eyes recognizeallthe victims of this pandemic, our hearts break for them, our minds learn from their stories, and, most importantly, our actions prevent future disasters of this scale.

This essay appeared originally on the FEE Stories website on Nov. 19, 2021, and is republished here with FEE’s permission.

Comments
Welcome to mreligion comments! Please keep conversations courteous and on-topic. To fosterproductive and respectful conversations, you may see comments from our Community Managers.
Sign up to post
Sort by
Show More Comments
RELIGION & LIBERTY ONLINE
The Jewish roots of freedom
Morning Panel at “Judaism, Christianity, & the West.” On September 9, leading scholars of the world came together to discuss the ways in which Judaism and Christianity have contributed to building the foundations of liberty. “Judaism, Christianity, and the West: Building and preserving the institutions of freedom” was the fourth conference in the “One and indivisible? The relationship between religious and economic freedom” conference series. Sponsored by the Acton Institute and the Jerusalem Institute for Market Studies, this day-long event...
The Bright Side of Sharia Law
Why aren’t church leaders who are so quick to condemn capitalism, asks Rev. Jerry J. Pokorsky in this week’s Acton Commentary, decrying Big Government bureaucracy? The warnings of recent papal teachings on questions of social justice rarely – if ever – identify the dangers of a highly bureaucratized central government. Apparently most of the sinful and corrosive “love for es from private sector capitalists, not government public sector agencies. Certainly corporate capitalistic greed can and does have serious economic consequences....
The New Socialists and the Social Ownership of Money
After getting home from work you get a statement in the mail from the local government saying you owe $20,000 for college tuition. You’re surprised to receive the billsince (a) you never went to college yourself and (b) your own children are still in preschool. Upon reading the fine print you discover the expected payment is not to cover any costs you’ve incurred but to pay for the tuition of college students in your neighborhood. Outraged, you turn to your...
5 Facts About the U.S. Constitution
Constitution Day is celebrated in America every year on September 17, the anniversary of the day the framers signed the document. Here are five facts you should know about the U.S. Constitution. 1. The Constitution contains 4,543 words, including the signatures and has four sheets, 28-3/4 inches by 23-5/8 inches each. It contains 7,591 words including the 27 amendments. It is the oldest and shortest written Constitution of any major government in the world. 2. Thomas Jefferson did not sign...
Video: Jonathan Witt On Tolkien’s Vision Of Freedom
As we prepare to kick off the fall portion of the 2015 Acton Lecture Series tomorrow (featuring Don Devine speaking about how America can find its way back to a harmony between freedom and tradition), we take a look back at thefinal lecture of the spring series, which was delivered on May 21 by Jonathan Witt, who aside from being aformer English professor, a Research and Media Fellow at the Acton Institute, and Managing Editor of The Stream, is also...
Admiring Pope Francis Doesn’t Prohibit Disagreement
Anyone not touched by Pope Francis’ appearance on ABC television earlier this month may want to have their pulse checked for signs of a heart. Quite frankly, he knocked it out of the park in this writer’s humble opinion. Whether speaking to the plight of immigrant children, obviously enjoying a young girl’s vocal rendition of a hymn, or offering encouragement to a single mother of two, Francis was in his element. As I marveled at the Pope on primetime, national...
Is Free Market Capitalism Moral?
Is free market capitalism moral or immoral? If it’s based on greed and selfishness, should it be rejected for an alternative economic system? And if capitalism is moral, what makes it so? Walter Williams, a economist at George Mason University, answers these questions and explains why the free market is morally superior to any other approaches to organizing economic behavior. ...
Entrepreneurship and Interdisciplinary Scholarship
Israel M. Kirzner While reading economist (and rabbi) Israel M. Kirzner’s Competition & Entrepreneurship (1973), it occurred to me that his description of what the “pure entrepreneur” does could also be applied to what a good interdisciplinary scholar, such as someone who studies faith and economics, does (or at least aspires to do). In our world of imperfect knowledge, Kirzner writes, there are likely to exist, at any given time, a multitude of opportunities that have not yet been taken...
Why the Poor Should Be Able to Scalp Their Tickets to See Pope Francis
Last week, 80,000 residents of New York got a free gift: a ticket to see Pope Francis’s procession through Central Park on September 25. Not surprisingly, soon after the tickets started showing up for sale on websites like eBay and Craigslist for hundreds and even thousands of dollars. Also not a surprise is the disgusted reaction some people had to news abouttheticket scalping: “Tickets for events with Pope Francis are distributed free for a reason — to enable as many...
Let’s Listen for ‘Cry of the Poor’ before the ‘Cry of the Earth’
When governments have followed the sort of environmental and free-market admonitions Pope Francis gave us in Laudato Si, negative results often follow. This struck your writer this past week as he read a piece reporting the unforeseen consequences of one specific wrongheaded environmental effort. In his encyclical, Pope Francis writes: Today, however, we have to realize that a true ecological approach always es a social approach; it must integrate questions of justice in debates on the environment, so as to...
Related Classification
Copyright 2023-2025 - www.mreligion.com All Rights Reserved