Physical and mental health issues during the COVID-19 lockdown by gender: a survey of the Andalusian population in Spain

Abstract

The COVID-19 outbreak brought a period of health and economic crisis worldwide, with experts disagreeing on how long it will last. In this context, we have analysed the influence that the lockdown in Spain, one of the most restrictive in the world, had on individuals in terms of their physical and mental health conditions. In order to study this issue, a sample of 2,950 secondary data from Andalusia, the most populated Spanish region (with 8.5 million inhabitants in 2020), was collected during the lockdown period using stratified random sampling (with the province and the degree of urbanisation as stratum, and individuals as units of analysis). The methodology employed for this purpose was time fixed-effects estimates, enabling us to control by many unobservables which are the same within-individuals between-years, although still obtaining conditional associations. Specifically, this study is novel to the extent that it employs recent data to analyse the consequences of the lockdown on the physical and mental health of the Andalusian population using time fixed-effects, which fulfils the gap in the literature for this issue and region. We found that the state of physical health of the Andalusian population does not seem to have deteriorated due to the lockdown. However, mental health may have declined by 0.38 points due to the lockdown, especially in the case of women, whose mental health seems to have been harmed additionally by 0.10 points. These results may indicate that policy measures should be aimed at a better management of a pandemic situation and at providing psychological help for persons whose mental health was negatively affected during the lockdown and find it difficult to recover.