One of the established assumptions due to the pandemic is that it left a mark on the state of mind and health habits of the planet’s inhabitants, including Latin Americans.
Along with the army of infectologists and health authorities that populated the media, numerous diagnoses were also mobilized, warning about the impact of the spread of the virus and individual or domestic defensive practices on social mood and public health.
There, opinion polls played an essential role as a thermometer capable of translating some of the main predispositions and concerns of societies and allowing us to understand what happened to us.
Globally, there was minimal variation in risk behaviors such as smoking or drinking alcohol, feelings of stress barely changed, and sleep quality remained largely intact when comparing late 2018 data with late 2020 data. or 2021, at the height of the pandemic, according to a series of global surveys by the Win and Market Analysis consultancy network.
For example, more than one in four adults on the planet smoked a lot or with some regularity in 2018 and three years later, amid confinements, that percentage, instead of increasing, fell slightly. The same happened with alcohol consumption: it dropped from 43% in the pre-pandemic period to just under 38% during the Covid-19 times.
Stress has also not worsened as expected: a year and a half before the declaration of confinement it was around 30%, at the height of the quarantines it did not reach 33%, a variation close to the polls’ margin of error.
Finally, the self-perception of personal health has also not changed: it was 76% at the end of the last decade and between 77%-79% in 2020-2021.
Does this mean that in the end there was no health and psychological cost, despite the radical revolution in our practices over the two years of the pandemic?
It is obvious that yes, it did exist, and that this impact will persist in the social mood derived from the health emergency, but not for everyone – but concentrated in certain groups and as a result of exposure to certain types of experiences during the pandemic.
When examining how these indicators have varied across regions such as Latin America, the aggregate average of some of these situations repeats the overall picture.
Smoking, for example, has dropped from nearly 30% in 2018 to 20% in 2021. Drinking alcohol has dropped from 45% in 2018 to 42% three years later. Poor sleep also followed a downward, not an upward direction. The feeling of physical vigor has only slightly diminished and that of stress has increased with the pandemic, albeit subtly.
The apparent harmlessness of the pandemic on Latin American social mood and perception of physical and mental well-being hides the ruin wrought by the way certain governments managed their responses to the crisis.
When disaggregating these numbers by country, the health tragedy emerges clearly. The deterioration of the quality of health and of the conditions of personal well-being were greater in contexts where governments followed two types of standards that more strongly disorganized the daily lives of their citizens.
A pattern is linked to the magnitude and persistence of the repressive approach to the normal running of daily life. Societies that suffered the most restrictive measures such as confinement without contemplation, that were deprived of alternatives to channel anguish and that saw their face-to-face educational and social activities canceled (while the authorities themselves did not hesitate to break the rules) are the ones that register variations. abrupt changes in quality of life and personal health indicators.
In Argentina, for example, the country that for months led the index of strictness of confinements according to the report by the University of Oxford for much of 2020, the feeling of personal health fell twice as much as in Latin American countries as a whole. studied. In addition, there was a sharp increase in alcohol consumption and a doubling of the stress rate, from 22% in 2018 to 42% in 2021.
Unable to channel the anguish derived from the viral crisis, Argentines literally imploded, taking refuge in drinking and exacerbating feelings of vulnerability and anxiety, standing out among their neighbors.
In opposition to these maximum restrictions experienced by Argentines, Brazilian and Mexican citizens had much more autonomy of movement, options on how to provide for themselves, how to study and situations of sociability.
This is not a compliment to governments that have shown themselves incapable, if not openly irresponsible, of providing health protection to their countrymen.
In fact, the open contradictions and inconsistencies in the management of the pandemic by Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil exempted its citizens from repressive practices as in Argentina, Chile or Peru, but exposed them to the risks of reckless private behavior, which extended insecurity among the majority. of its inhabitants.
In this framework, Brazilians are among the few who have seen the number of sedentary people decrease between 2018 and 2021, as well as the feeling of stress, although they have increased their sleeping difficulties with the largest negative oscillation in the region.
The other adverse pattern is generated by the ups and downs of decisions with openings, closings, new openings and new closings that disorient the population and exacerbate their sense of lack of direction, insecurity and vulnerability.
The Oxford University’s government rigor index reveals that during the 2020-2021 biennium, Chile and Peru were the countries with the most remarkable ups and downs in terms of restrictions.
As a result, Chileans come to the present with the worst numbers in terms of deterioration in their perception of physical vigor and vitality. Also noteworthy are the burnout rates, which rose 17 percentage points in three years.
Peruvians, in turn, were more affected in their sleep than in their consumption of drink or tobacco, adapting to the fluctuating and confused management of the pandemic with its quarantines and liberalizations through a more sacrificed vigil.
Insomniac, stressed and with some aggravated vices, we Latin Americans are gradually leaving the pandemic in the past, but the sinuous, if not openly perverse and incompetent way in which the governments of the time treated it, will not leave us calm anytime soon.
*Translation from Spanish by Giulia Gaspar
