Having most of the population holed up inside is bad for long-term economic growth too. Ineffectual internet-schooling replacing normal in-person schooling for more than a short time period would be particularly devastating to long-term economic growth.
There's quite a lot of data that points to a decline in many places... literacy scores are lower, math scores are lower, etc.
The effects appear to be quite bad, and haven't yet recovered in many places (especially among lower income groups). This will take some more time to distill with more accuracy, but lockdowns and remote schooling almost certainly had a negative impact.
Well, mental illnesses skyrocketed. That messes up economy bad, long term in hard-to-calculate ways since people are not simply dropping dead and disappearing from economy. No they are still around, more or less successfully trying to integrate back, but requiring a lot of support resources that would be otherwise used in other cases, ramping up the medical costs, maybe even losing jobs, failed mortgages and so on.
There you have it, one long term bad economical effect. There are many others, maybe even more significant.
I don't think a rise in mental illness is entirely attributable to lockdowns. There are several ways this pandemic can affect mental state, such as:
- COVID infection, virus messing with your brain
- Disappointment from believing COVID is man made (regardless of whether true or not)
- Death of someone close, remember that 1.1 million people have died from COVID in the United States alone
- Disappointment that the lack of care for the vulnerable exposed a survival of the fittest nonchalance where some of the most able among us couldn't be bothered to breathe through an n95 to avoid a however negligible chance of someone dying
