ABSTRACT
Previous cross-national research finds markedly elevated psychological distress during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic; however, distress-elevation among New Zealanders was mild. This trend is puzzling because New Zealand confronted distressing health and economic uncertainties resembling those in other countries. Additionally, New Zealand's March/April 2020 COVID-19 lockdown was among the world's most stringent, requiring strict social isolation with domestic cohabitants for an unspecified period of time and with unknown effectiveness. Here, we use Bayesian multilevel mediation models to systematically test previously theorised mechanisms of health, economic, political, and social concern on pandemic distress in a nationally diverse panel sample during the first 18 days of New Zealand's lockdown against within-participant baselines from the previous year (N = 940). We observe that health concerns were not markedly elevated and that the maintenance of health satisfaction buffered people from greater distress. There was more variation in economic concern; however, sustained satisfaction with standards of living and future security prevented greater distress. Although satisfaction with the government and institutional trust rose precipitously, these gains did not diminish distress. However, distress mitigation occurred from a greater sense of neighbourhood community. Surprisingly, reduced fatigue, a byproduct of the stringent lockdown, proved to be an even more powerful distress buffer; the magnitude of this buffering suggests that fatigue reduction is an important horizon for public mental health research. Finally, most of the distress that New Zealanders experienced can be explained by challenges to personal relationship satisfaction. Overall, these results clarify how mental health was sustained and challenged during a stringent pandemic lockdown across a demographically diverse population, with insights for the present and future pandemics.