Lockdown: The (little) Good, the Bad and the Ugly
When the first Covid-19 cases started to crop up amongst Sri Lanka’s general public in the early days of March 2020, we were sudden submerged headfirst in a tidal wave of panic-buying, flimsy surgical masks and the completely foreign act of “social distancing”. And perhaps the most daunting of all, lockdowns. For a community that thrives off social interaction, the prospect of spending days and days within the walls of your house was almost ominous.
But with a forced mask of optimism, we watered down our worries. It’ll be over by April! There’ll be a cure for sure. Of course we can travel in summer. The kids will start school again in May. And a year and a half later, the word “lockdown” is used far more frequently in our vocabulary rather than travel or summer or school. The battle against Covid-19 still rages on and we are unsure of when we will emerge victorious.
Popping down to the paan kadé to have seenibanis with tea or cycling around Independence Arcade as the sun was swallowed by a blaze of orange and yellow became our rarities instead of our usuals.
Meeting up for unhealthy lunches and strolling into dark movie theaters, grease-smeared fingers clutching sodas and popcorn buckets seems like a fever dream. Long school days were replaced by staring in front of a screen, typing away at what seems like your seventeenth essay of the month, ultimately dozing off in last period because your eyes burnt too much to sleep well last night.
With all of these factors, it is understandable to say that the nearly-two-year pandemic has taken a significant toll on the mental health of everyone. It is not easy to stay positive and force a smile on your face when your boss has announced another pay cut or you have eight hours of online classes tomorrow.
But how much has our mental health plummeted over the past year due to lockdown?
There are no color coded pie charts or complicated graphs to estimate how significantly the numerous lockdowns have affected us.
However, the overall impacts of the Covid-19 lockdown on emotional state, feelings and lifestyle of children and their parents, to explore the changes to daily routine and to understand what can be done to resume some semblance of normalcy can be discussed.
One impact of the lockdown was a sense of isolation. Even though we were in literal isolation, it became disturbingly easy to slip into a sense of complete disconnectedness, as if we were not only cut off from everyone around us but from ourselves as well.
The lockdown destroyed what we deemed normal and forced us into an unfamiliar environment that made us feel mentally drained, devitalized and sometimes downright miserable. The world as we knew it was changing and we did not want that. Despite how tightly we tried to cling to our shreds of sanity, we soon began to feel stressed out and dejected, especially as students.
Even though online school was an exciting new experience at the start, it soon morphed into something most of us dreaded. An extra hour or two of sleep was not worth the burning eyes, headaches, mental exhaustion that online school brought. Social interaction is essential for humans; we began to crave personal relationships and the contact of our friends and family.
Another impact of the lockdown was brief emails or notices informing individuals all over the country that “we’re sorry but your services are no longer required.” Companies began laying off their workers in the thousands and unemployment rates across Sri Lanka skyrocketed: following the curfew-level lockdown implemented in Sri Lanka between March and June 2020, overall unemployment increased to above 6% in the second quarter.
Statistics indicate that the total number of jobs in the economy contracted by 160,996 in the first quarter of 2020. As a result, Sri Lanka’s economic growth jolted to a halt and measures taken by the government to preserve foreign reserves has resulted in further restrictions to importations and investments, which in turn have an impact on economic growth.
This meant countless people across the country now had to think of other ways to put food on the table for their families and different methods to scrape together money for rent. It can be easily said that the worst affected by the lockdown were those struggling economically before the pandemic even started spreading.
A last impact of the lockdown, even though there are countless more to list, was the drastic effect on family lifestyle. Parents would suffer extreme psychological distress due to unstable financial circumstances as they would fall asleep every night dreading the possibility of a layoff email finding its way into their inbox the next morning. Children would succumb to adverse emotional responses such as stress, worry, helplessness, anxiety and depression as schools remain closed and their lives were turned upside down.
Most of us were unable to escape this overwhelming negativity that made our lives almost nightmarish at times when we truly thought we could not see an end.
As the lockdowns drag on, as the pandemic persists to be prevalent, all we can hope is to accept our new daily routines and try to make our lives as normal as possible. Just because we are faced with different “normals” does not mean our days have to be negative. Spending time with your family, Hangouts calls with your friends, extra hours of sleep are all positives of lockdown. And it is these positives that will help us through the very last part of this lockdown and onto brighter days.
Session XIV of SLMUN will be held on the 6th and 7th of November 2021 at the Bandaranaike Memorial International Conference Hall (BMICH), Colombo, Sri Lanka. Registrations for delegates, admins and IPC delegates are now open until the 15th of October 2021.
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