A Review of Sustainable Development Goal 3 Indicators in European Countries Before the COVID-19 Pandemic

A Review of Sustainable Development Goal 3 Indicators in European Countries Before the COVID-19 Pandemic

Nuray Tezcan
Copyright: © 2022 |Pages: 21
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-7998-8674-7.ch012
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Abstract

In recent years, achievement of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) has been one of the most important issues for countries throughout the world. In the SDG framework, Sustainable Development Goal 3 (SDG3) is devoted to “ensure healthy lives and promote well-being for all at all ages.” However, the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic, which has been experienced since the beginning of 2020, has deeply affected countries in all respects. Accordingly, the health systems of countries have come to the point of collapsing. This situation has been bringing about setback to meet the targets of SDG3. The purpose of this study is to determine the status of SDG3 indicators in European countries before the COVID-19 pandemic. For this purpose, firstly, countries are clustered based on their health indicators given in the Europe Sustainable Development Report 2020 using cluster analysis. Having classified similar countries, each cluster has been examined by considering the effects of COVID-19 pandemic.
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Background

From the beginning to the present, COVID-19 pandemic negatively affects the lives of the people. With respect to maternal and child health, childhood immunization programs have been disrupted in many countries, almost 380 million children were deprived of school meals because of lockdowns and child labour has increased during the pandemic. Thousands of women postponed doctor's checkups or could not access contraceptive services due to the fear of being exposed to the pandemic. This situation caused thousands of unintended pregnancies. Also, it is expected that deaths from communicable diseases will increase in the world, and deaths from malaria will rise by 100% due to the lack of health services in sub-Saharan Africa (UN, 2020a).

In the literature, there have been several studies regarding the negative effects of the pandemic on health. During lockdown periods, many people have some mental health problems such as depression, anxiety symptoms, acute stress, or sleep disorders. Santini and Koyanagi (2021) found that about 30% of the European population who are older than 50 years experienced a mental health problem during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sommerlad et al. (2021) investigated whether a relationship between social relationships and depressive symptoms based on a sample from the United Kingdom and they found that there is a negative relationship between these variables. Another study related to mental health is conducted by Sonderskov et al. (2020). They determined that the COVID-19 pandemic has negative effects on Danish people and moreover females have been affected more than males from the outbreak. McCracken et al. (2020) conducted a similar study for another Nordic country, Sweden. They revealed that COVID-19 symptoms, general health status, history of mental health problems, worries about family and friends’ health, and also financial worries are the significant variables affecting the mental health of the people.

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