Image: Francis Mariani / Flickr
Sarah Burgard, Lucie Kalousova

 

Recessions often improve population health, but COVID-19 may be different.

As the economic devastation of the COVID-19 pandemic is becoming painfully evident—already some seventeen million workers have filed for unemployment benefits in the United States—questions are arising about how the emerging recession will further impact population health. Though many as-yet-unanswerable questions remain, we are likely to see a mix of negative and positive health consequences. 

Thanks to a revival of research and debate in the wake of the Great Recession, we know that recessions lead to short-term improvement in life expectancy at the population level, but also to declining well-being for those individuals who experience labor market, housing, and asset shocks. However, never in living memory have we faced this one-two punch of a massive health crisis triggering an economic one. Predictions based on past experience must tread cautiously if we are to make the best use of existing scholarship and policy strategies to mitigate the population health consequences of the coming recession.

 
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