Lockdown led to happiness rebound after wellbeing plunged with onset of pandemic

The coronavirus outbreak caused life satisfaction to fall sharply, but lockdown went a long way to restoring contentment—even reducing the 'wellbeing inequality' between well-off professionals and the unemployed, according to a new study. Researchers from Cambridge's Bennett Institute for Public Policy used a year's worth of data taken from weekly YouGov surveys and Google searches to track wellbeing in the British population before and during the pandemic. They say it is one of the first studies to distinguish the effects of the pandemic from those of lockdown on psychological welfare, as it uses week-by-week data, rather than monthly or annual comparisons. The proportion of Britons self-reporting as 'happy' halved in just three weeks: from 51% just before the UK's first COVID-19 fatality, to 25% by the time national lockdown began.