Was lockdown worth it? community perspectives and experiences of the Covid-19 pandemic in remote southwestern Haiti

Abstract

Public experiences of COVID-19 pandemic lockdown differed dramatically between countries and socio-economic groups. Low-income countries raise unique empirical and ethical concerns about (1) the balance between benefits and social harms and (2) how explanatory disease models and everyday life realities influenced the experience and interpretation of lockdown itself. In this paper, we present qualitative data on community perceptions and experiences of the pandemic from a remote area of Haiti, with a focus on the 2020 lockdown. We conducted in-depth interviews with 30 community leaders in Grand’Anse Department, southwest Haiti, at two time periods: May 2020 and October–December 2021. We divide our results into five sections. First, our analysis showed that lockdown was widely considered ineffective at controlling COVID-19. Despite the lack of testing, community leaders believed most of the local population had caught COVID-19 in the first half of 2020, with limited reported mortality. Public concern about the pandemic largely ended at this time, overtaken by other socio-economic and political crises. Second, we found that popular explanations for the low fatality rate were related to various coping strategies: the strength of people's immune systems, use of natural prophylactic folk teas, beliefs about the virus, spiritual protections and the tropical weather. Third, we found that lockdown was widely seen to have not been appropriate for the Haitian context due to various challenges with compliance in the face of socio-economic vulnerability. Fourth, we found strong negative feelings about the social consequences of lockdown measures, which lasted from March–August 2020, including adverse effects on: food security, household income, education, health, and psychosocial well-being. Finally, these perceptions and experiences reinforced popular ideas that lockdown had been imposed by elites for financial and/or political gain, something that was also reflected in the discourse about the low vaccine acceptance rate. Our study showed that pandemic respiratory virus response in Haiti should better balance restrictive non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) with existing socio-economic vulnerability. Local socio-behavioral dynamics and risk perceptions decrease the overall effectiveness of NPIs in fragile states and alternatives to lockdown, such as shielding the most vulnerable, are likely to be a more appropriate strategy.