Policy response matters: A textual analysis highlights indirect Covid-19 impacts in Israel

Covid-19 heralded a prolonged global crisis with wide-ranging impacts still unfolding. Understanding their dynamics is crucial for building societal resilience for future crises. Existing studies focus on pre-determined pandemic impacts, with little comparison of their societal significance. This study bridges these gaps through an exploratory, grounded approach, inducing real-time impacts from diverse published sources using qualitative and quantitative methods. We assessed a purposefully-random sample of pandemic-related publications by media, government agencies, and civil society organizations in Israel, between January 2020-April 2021. A thematic analysis of 908 publications identified 32 pandemic impacts across four key areas: economic, social, health, and national governance, and 14 additional themes that reflect aspects in which the impacts were referenced. A content analysis revealed foci dominated by economic and social impacts, particularly on business, employment, the financial market, and the healthcare system. Key featured themes included policy, social distancing, and crisis mishandling. Economic impacts emphasized businesses, social impacts emphasized education, health impacts emphasized the healthcare system (surpassing morbidity and mortality); and governance concerns emphasized the political system. Findings indicate that the effects of responses to Covid-19 were more prominently featured than direct health impacts, signaling their considerable societal significance. In Israel, findings highlight the societal toll of strict infection containment measures. Our preliminary synthesis supports these findings, revealing an interconnected cascade of accumulating impacts. The key role of policy response measures in mitigating/exacerbating them underscores the need for a whole-systems approach in crisis response and monitoring, with particular attention to indirect, policy-related impacts.