One reason some experts emphasise the need of not imposing restrictions and demands is the detrimental effects of the pandemic on mental health.
At the beginning of the epidemic, restrictions like masks and physical separation helped to slow transmission, prevent overcrowding in hospitals, and buy time for researchers to create efficient vaccines and therapies. However, a rising number of healthcare experts now consider such requirements and limits are outmoded and, in some situations, even unnecessary.
“In the beginning, we had no other tools in how to deal with this, but it’s the time we have kept restrictions going that really highlights the fact that there has been very limited discussions in the harms of the restrictions, which has allowed policymakers to keep them in place way beyond when they were possibly effective,” Dr. Jeanne Noble said.
Professor of medicine at the University of California, San Francisco, Dr. Monica Gandhi, concurred. She claimed that before vaccines, public health officials made every effort to prevent transmission since illnesses may put susceptible people in the hospital.
Gandhi explained that because vaccines are so effective at avoiding severe disease, cases have been uncoupled from severe disease since the introduction of the vaccines and with the rise in population immunity. Cases no longer correlate with hospitalizations.
For instance, recent study findings revealed that much lower COVID-19 incidence and significantly less severe COVID-19 cases during the Delta spike were related to better vaccine coverage.
Noble claimed that safeguards like social limitations don’t make a discernible impact because the nation currently has a lot of natural or acquired immunity against COVID-19.
According to the US CDC, 78.5 percent of the population will have received at least one dose of the COVID-19 vaccine by February 2022, and at least 50 to 60 percent of adults aged 18 to 64, 33 percent of adults aged 65 and up, and 75 percent of children will have contracted the virus naturally.
Gandhi pointed out that exposure is probably much higher today because to following Omicron waves.
“Cases have risen and fallen across states in the U.S. regardless of restrictions, such as mask mandates or vaccine mandates. Our high rates of population immunity in the United States, however, is keeping our case rates much lower than before and our COVID-19 deaths lower than any time since the beginning of the pandemic,” she said. Gandhi concurred with the CDC’s policy as of February 2022, which prohibited mask recommendations unless hospitalizations from COVID-19 were extremely high.
Gandhi thinks there shouldn’t be any restrictions at this time. She explains that COVID-19 cannot be eradicated because it can be carried by animals, making it impossible to immunise them. Additionally, she added, COVID displays symptoms that are similar to those of other infections and has a protracted infectious phase. She said that the evolution of COVID-19 appears to be becoming more predictable as population immunity rises, reflecting the seasonality of influenza and the common cold.
Vaccine mandates should also be eliminated, according to Noble. Her stance, however, evolved with time. She argued that in the beginning of the pandemic, vaccine mandates could be the quickest way to get things back to normal and an avenue to getting public health officials to lift restrictions, particularly on children, because vaccination is an effective and necessary tool against severe disease from COVID-19.
“But vaccine mandates did not do that in places that had and continue to have very strict vaccine mandates. I don’t think it necessarily increased the vaccine uptake much more quickly than in places that did not enforce any kind of mandates so that they saw a clear effect of getting out under the heavy burden of COVID more so than other places,” said Noble.
While COVID-19 vaccine mandates in schools were very effective in raising vaccination uptake for children, the efficiency of adult vaccination mandates in boosting vaccination uptake may be lower, according to one paper published in the Lancet. Even though there is currently enough evidence to support mandates regarding the safety of COVID-19 vaccinations for adults, the authors came to the conclusion that mandate policies cannot be the main strategy for improving immunisation rates.
It’s challenging to build a compelling case for or against immunisation requirements. There are a variety of factors, but according to Noble, a vaccine mandate does not imply that 100% of the population will receive vaccinations. There is disagreement over the reasons why they weren’t, but opposition to something that is imposed on people will always exist.
Impact of COVID-19 related restrictions:
In 2021, Noble started to be concerned about the burden COVID-19 regulations and requirements were placing on mental health and the detrimental effects they were having on children’s life in particular. She started considering the advantages and disadvantages of keeping individuals from their jobs and robbing some of them of their education and youth while still remaining committed to caring for COVID-19 patients.
According to a report from October 2021, there was a sharp drop in mental health in 204 nations and territories in 2020. The majority of those afflicted are women and younger individuals, with an additional 53 million cases of serious depressive disorders and 76 million cases of anxiety disorders highlighted by researchers.
The COVID-19 epidemic brought attention to the teenage mental health crisis, and the U.S. Surgeon General issued a warning about it in December 2021. The U.S. Department of Health & Human Services noted in a press release that the pandemic disrupted children’s and adolescents’ lives by preventing in-person schooling, in-person social opportunities with peers and mentors, access to health care and social services, food, housing, and the health of their caregivers in addition to the difficulties already faced by America’s youth.
A July 2022 study that appeared in the Journal of Teenage Health examined the relationship between observed changes in adolescent mental health and substance use and the financial effect, stress, loneliness, and isolation brought on by COVID-19.
According to study:
- Adolescents’ symptoms of sadness and anxiety and increased alcohol use were associated with family financial instability, including greater use of a food bank, job loss, or self-reported unfavourable changes in economic condition.
- In the United States, 16.5 percent of people under the age of 18 have at least one mental health disorder, with emotional disorders and behavioural issues being among the most common.
- Adolescent substance abuse rates are significant; more than 8% of 12- to 17-year-olds report using drugs, and 9.15% report drinking recently.
- Teenagers who did not restrict their socialising because of COVID-19 showed significantly less signs of depression and were significantly less likely to limit their physical contacts.
- Adolescent stability and development were negatively impacted by disruptions in school communities, as was the availability of mental health services; over 3 million adolescents nationwide, or 13% of all adolescents, are estimated to have used school mental health services.
“When we did things like close schools, there were some studies that showed kids who were out of school and in remote school were more likely to test positive for COVID than kids who did in-person schooling, and this probably had to do with the fact that kids who were remote learning were largely unsupervised and their parents were at work and may have been more exposed,” said Noble.
Parvathy Sukumaran 
