Thursday, December 16, 2021

The Lonely Plague

 In the past few days, several stories have appeared that try to capture the terrible and ongoing toll the pandemic is taking on our lives. 

First the numbers. The World Health Organization says there have been over 272 million cases with more than 5.33 million deaths and that is almost certainly an underestimate.

In the U.S. alone, over 800,000 have died. Three-quarters of them were elderly.

And as we’ve known from the beginning, this disease targets the old, the frail, the weak and the immunocompromised. According to the Times, we’ve lost one in every 100 adults aged 65 or over to the coronavirus. “Eighteen percent more older people died of all causes in 2020 than would have died in an ordinary year, according to data from the CDC.”

That is a lot of valuable “golden years” that have been lost.

Meanwhile, as Substack author Vinay Prasad has pointed out, as a society we may be pursuing anti-Covid policies that are seriously harming the youngest among us as well: 

“School closure was the greatest self inflicted wound of the pandemic,” he writes. “Sensible European nations did not close primary school at all, or only for 6 weeks, but places in the USA remained closed for more than a year. This was a net negative for the health and well-being of children, and will damage this nation for years to come.”

Prasad and others argue that ongoing restrictions such as requiring cloth masks of children, enforcing quarantines when someone tests positive for Covid (most of which prove to be ‘false positives’), and vaccine mandates are not based in science and will have lasting repercussions on the intellectual and emotional development of an entire generation of toddlers and children.

Of course, there is an obvious contradiction when any policy-maker tries to protect both the young and the old at the same time. If the young are free to remain unmasked and unvaccinated because very few of them get sick from the virus, they may be at increased risk of spreading it to the elderly, who remain uniquely vulnerable to the worst health outcomes. So you can’t actually help one group without harming the other.

Nevertheless, while there has been a disproportionately negative impact on both ends of the age spectrum, what about the great majority of people who are neither young nor old? Most people are in the middle, however you define that. For them, there is this cautionary report in the Times:

“It is still unclear how much of a threat the fast-spreading Omicron variant poses, but fear and a sudden revival of restrictions have added to an epidemic of loneliness.” 

No kidding! As many people continue to react and perhaps over-react to each new spike in cases and the inevitable scare headlines appearing in the daily press, more and more tenuous bonds of friendship are being fractured.

Perhaps this is all part of the serious mental health impact of the pandemic, as well as the deeply divided and polarized political response, which started at the top. First, the U.S. had a President who dismissed the “China virus” as “fake news;” now, the country is headed by a President who takes Covid seriously but is powerless to heal the epidemic’s long-lasting damage to our national psyche.

In my humble opinion, we’ve all simply gone a little bit crazy. I see it all around me: People getting angry over trivialities, dividing up into camps, falling for ridiculous conspiracy theories, taking actions and comments personally that were not meant to be; isolating from one another unnecessarily, and more. 

It suggests to me that the only permanent outcome of Covid-19 may be mass loneliness. I’m certainly feeling lonely. Are you? 

As Ian Bogost writes plaintively in the Atlantic, “Everyone knows the past is gone, but now the past’s future feels lost too. I hope it’s not, but I can’t shake the feeling.”

I’d like to get that future back.

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