COVID’s Long Shadow: Social Repercussions of Pandemics

IMF Blog, February 3, 2021

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Epidemics historically have cast long social and political shadows—from the Plague of Justinian and the Black Death to the 1918 Influenza Epidemic—shaping politics, subverting social order, and sometimes causing social unrest.
Example: In 1832 the cholera pandemic in Paris killed 20,000 of the city’s 650,000 population, concentrated in the city center among poor workers; the epidemic heightened class tensions and contributed to the Paris Uprising of 1832.
Epidemics can reveal or aggravate pre-existing societal fault lines, such as inadequate social safety nets, lack of trust in institutions, perceptions of government indifference, incompetence, or corruption, and can lead to ethnic or religious backlashes or worsened tensions among economic classes.

IMF staff developed a "Reported Social Unrest Index" based on press coverage of social unrest to create a consistent, monthly measure of social unrest.
Coverage: the index provides data for 130 countries from 1985 to the present.
Validation: spikes in the index align closely with narrative descriptions of unrest in case studies, suggesting the index captures real events rather than shifts in media sentiment or attention.
Research fills a gap where quantitative evidence linking epidemics and social unrest has been scant and limited to specific episodes.

Countries with more frequent and severe epidemics experienced greater unrest on average (finding based on the Reported Social Unrest Index).
Short-term dynamics:
- During and immediately after a pandemic, social scarring in the form of unrest may not appear quickly due to impediments to communication and transportation needed to organize major protests.
- Public opinion may favor cohesion and solidarity in times of duress.
- Incumbent regimes may use emergencies to consolidate power and suppress dissent.
- The COVID-19 experience to date is consistent with these patterns: the number of major unrest events worldwide has fallen to its lowest level in almost five years.
- Notable exceptions during COVID-19 include the United States and Lebanon, though largest protests there relate to issues that could be exacerbated, but not directly caused by COVID-19.
Long-term dynamics:
- Over time, the risk of riots and anti-government demonstrations rises following epidemics.
- Evidence shows a heightened risk of a major government crisis—an event that threatens to bring down the government—typically occurring in the two years following a severe epidemic.

If history is a predictor, unrest may reemerge as the pandemic eases.
The threats of unrest are larger where the crisis exposes or exacerbates pre-existing problems, including:
- lack of trust in institutions,
- poor governance,
- poverty,
- inequality.

Source: COVID’s Long Shadow: Social Repercussions of Pandemics — Philip Barrett, Sophia Chen, Nan Li; February 3, 2021.