Harms of public health interventions against covid-19 must not be ignored | The BMJ
▻https://www.bmj.com/content/371/bmj.m4074
The harmful consequences of public health interventions can be direct or indirect—for example, psychological harms, equity harms, group and social harms, opportunity harms, and inequalities in intervention benefits.12 These interventions can increase the adverse outcomes they seek to prevent or affect other health outcomes.234 Policy makers, acting to protect public health, need to weigh the possible side effects when deciding on, implementing, and evaluating specific public health interventions.1
Public policy efforts that have been implemented to deal with the covid-19 pandemic have been caught in a political maelstrom precisely because these efforts, in their first iteration, did not consider the potential negative consequences. Although policies to bring about mass social distancing may have slowed viral spread, they also brought about unprecedented levels of unemployment that led to justifiable resistance from some sectors. Had these policy efforts explicitly considered these consequences from the start—and social distancing has long been an element of planning for a severe pandemic—this would have obviated some of the political backlash, leading to more uniform and more effective implementation of these policies.
