Mental health concerns during the COVID-19 pandemic as revealed by helpline calls.

Mental health is an important component of public health, especially in times of crisis. However, monitoring public mental health is difficult because data are often patchy and low-frequency1-3. Here we complement established approaches by using data from helplines, which offer a real-time measure of 'revealed' distress and mental health concerns across a range of topics4-9. We collected data on 8 million calls from 19 countries, focusing on the COVID-19 crisis. Call volumes peaked six weeks after the initial outbreak, at 35% above pre-pandemic levels. The increase was driven mainly by fear (including fear of infection), loneliness and, later in the pandemic, concerns about physical health. Relationship issues, economic problems, violence and suicidal ideation, however, were less prevalent than before the pandemic. This pattern was apparent both during the first wave and during subsequent COVID-19 waves. Issues linked directly to the pandemic therefore seem to have replaced rather than exacerbated underlying anxieties. Conditional on infection rates, suicide-related calls increased when containment policies became more stringent and decreased when income support was extended. This implies that financial relief can allay the distress triggered by lockdown measures and illustrates the insights that can be gleaned from the statistical analysis of helpline data.

Monitoring consumption Switzerland: data, background, and use cases.

Monitoring Consumption Switzerland is a public-private partnership between the University of St. Gallen and the payment companies Worldline and SIX that processes and publishes payment data on transactions in Switzerland processed by Wordline/SIX in real time. This paper provides background information on this novel source of data and presents their attributes, aggregation and granularity, and their interpretability. The paper presents several use cases that show the strengths of the data, and it alerts future users of the data to possible challenges. The paper also discusses the project's impact and provides an outlook.

Saving the world from your couch: the heterogeneous medium-run benefits of COVID-19 lockdowns on air pollution

In Spring 2020, COVID-19 led to an unprecedented halt in public and economic life across the globe. In an otherwise tragic time, this provides a unique natural experiment to investigate the environmental impact of such a (temporary) ‘de-globalization’. Here, we estimate the medium-run impact of a battery of COVID-19 related lockdown measures on air quality across 162 countries, going beyond the existing short-run estimates from a limited number of countries. In doing so, we leverage a new dataset categorizing lockdown measures and tracking their implementation and release, extending to 31 August 2020. We find that domestic and international lockdown measures overall led to a decline in PM2.5 pollution by 45% and 35%, respectively. This substantial impact persists in the medium-run, even as lockdowns are lifted, there is, however, substantial heterogeneity across different types of lockdown measures, different countries, and different sources of pollution. We show that some country trajectories are much more appealing (with fewer COVID-19 casualties, less economic downturn and bigger pollution reductions) than others. Our results have important policy implications and highlight the potential to ‘build back better’ a sustainable economy where pollution can be curbed in a less economically costly way than during the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 financial support to small businesses in Switzerland: evaluation and outlook.

We analyse small businesses' recourse to public support measures during the COVID-19 crisis using a survey of 1011 self-employed workers and small business owners in Switzerland. We find that "objective" measures of lockdown affectedness and economic structure explain fairly well how businesses availed of support measures to cover labour costs. Recourse to government-backed corona loans, however, appears to be driven to a larger extent by behavioural idiosyncrasies across firms. Specifically, previously indebted businesses took out corona loans more readily than those who had been debt-free before the pandemic. Since uptake is not well in line with firm fundamentals, we propose making loan repayments contingent on future profits. This will more effectively target and sustain businesses that are in trouble today but would be viable in the absence COVID-19.