Sydney University’s Brain & Mind Centre has carried out modelling on the national wealth impacts of COVID-19. The Centre’s modelling indicates up to $5 billion in productivity could be lost over the next five years as a result of an impending mental health crisis linked to mass unemployment.
Centre director Ian Hickie says Australia’s mental ‘wealth’ was four per cent of GDP prior to the COVID-19 outbreak, and that Australia faces its biggest loss of that national wealth since the Great Depression if effective action is not taken as soon as possible:
“The tsunami of newly unemployed and the disruption of education and training, particularly in young people, means that we are in danger of losing a whole generation of productive lives.
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