What will a winter lockdown do to our wellbeing?

We know from existing research that one of the features of the COVID-19 pandemic has been a decline in mental wellbeing. There are several reasons for that, including fear of contracting the disease, the effects of the recession, and the direct effects of lockdown policies themselves – social restrictions, and not being able to see family and friends, for example.

Here in the UK, and in many other countries in the northern hemisphere, we’re now in a second wave of the virus just as winter approaches – and that’s making many of us ask whether colder, wetter weather will make the effects of another lockdown worse.

Data sources

Our research examines the effects of local variations in the weather during the UK’s spring lockdown. We brought together data from the first three waves of Understanding Society’s COVID-19 Survey with Global Surface Summary of the Day data from the US National Centers for Environmental Information. This includes daily observations from 201 weather stations in the UK, giving mean, maximum and minimum daily temperatures and daily rainfall figures.

We also considered one of the major ways in which weather affects people’s behaviour and wellbeing: physical mobility. Even at its strictest, the UK’s lockdown allowed for one hour of outdoor activity per day, because the government explicitly designed its policy to maintain wellbeing by encouraging exercise. To measure physical mobility, we used data from Google COVID-19 Mobility Reports – anonymised and aggregated measures of mobility constructed from users’ mobile phone location histories.

Together, these measures were able to show us whether different weather conditions affected how much people visited parks or other outside spaces during lockdown, and what these weather conditions meant for their wellbeing.

Main results

Existing research, mainly looking at the US, has shown little effect of weather on mental wellbeing on average. We revisit this relationship under lockdown restrictions, when weather might have a larger impact on wellbeing if it keeps people inside. Similar to previous studies, we found no effect of weather on wellbeing in the UK from 2017 to 2019. During the spring lockdown, we saw a large drop in wellbeing. Did better weather help us cope with the lockdown? The short answer is: no. We did not find that better weather increased wellbeing during the lockdown.

This is interesting, because we found that weather had a strong effect on mobility in parks, especially during lockdown. In general, mobility in parks is larger when the temperature is high, the sky is clear (calculated using the difference between minimum and maximum temperature), and there is little or no rain. 

During lockdown, a temperature increase of 5.5°C led to an 8.2% increase in mobility. The effect of rain was rather small. An increase in rainfall of 0.1 inches (or 2.5 average days of rain) led to a decrease in mobility of 1.2%. When you consider that the median days in all regions in the wet season see at most 0.02 inches of rainfall, this would imply a decrease in mobility of just 0.2% compared to a completely dry day.

Together, these findings – a large effect of weather on mobility, but no effect of weather on wellbeing – imply a limited role of physical mobility in wellbeing.

Different phases of lockdown

We compared strict lockdown (23 March to 10 May) with the period when unlimited exercise was allowed, but before the hospitality industry was allowed to re-open (11 May to 3 July), and after cafés, pubs etc re-opened (4 July onwards).

First, looking at weather and mobility, the introduction of strict lockdown coincided with a noticeable drop in people using parks, even though they generally stayed open. When the rules were relaxed in May, mobility rose. Was this purely due to May having better weather? No. Weather affected mobility during the strict lockdown as well.

In terms of mobility, the effects of mean temperature were similar in the strict lockdown and the eased restriction period, and rainfall only reduced mobility in the lockdown periods before July 4. We concluded from these results that, although aggregate mobility patterns are different across the two halves of lockdown, the response of mobility to weather was similar.

Regarding wellbeing, we did not find any significant effect of weather on wellbeing, either during the unlimited exercise period or during the strict lockdown. We also looked at different regions, and considered people in urban areas, whose access to green space might be limited to parks. The conclusions remain the same, consistent with our main results.

What does it mean for the new lockdown?

This research doesn’t mean that the current lockdown will be a good thing. It will have benefits – slowing the spread of the disease could be particularly important in winter, for example – but there will also be costs. One of these will likely be a decrease in wellbeing which might be due to seasonal effects or rising numbers of infections.

What we have shown is that colder, possibly wetter days will not place an additional burden on wellbeing and that the lack of physical mobility only plays a minor role in this equation. For government policy, this implies that other factors that affect wellbeing should be targeted – such as finding ways to encourage social interaction which maintain physical distancing.

Read the Institute for Social and Economic Research working paper

Authors

Covid 19Health and wellbeing