Social isolation in Covid-19: The impact of loneliness.
Debanjan Banerjee,Mayank Rai +1 more
TLDR
The impact of COVID-19 on loneliness across different social strata, its implications in the modern digitalized age and a way forward with possible solutions to the same are looked at.Abstract:
The world is facing a global public health crisis for the last three months, as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) emerges as a menacing pandemic. Besides the rising number of cases and fatalities with this pandemic, there has also been significant socio-economic, political and psycho-social impact. Billions of people are quarantined in their own homes as nations have locked down to implement social distancing as a measure to contain the spread of infection. Those affected and suspicious cases are isolated. This social isolation leads to chronic loneliness and boredom, which if long enough can have detrimental effects on physical and mental well-being. The timelines of the growing pandemic being uncertain, the isolation is compounded by mass panic and anxiety. Crisis often affects the human mind in crucial ways, enhancing threat arousal and snowballing the anxiety. Rational and logical decisions are replaced by biased and faulty decisions based on mere ‘faith and belief’. This important social threat of a pandemic is largely neglected. We look at the impact of COVID-19 on loneliness across different social strata, its implications in the modern digitalized age and outline a way forward with possible solutions to the same. There is no doubt that national and global economies are suffering, the health systems are under severe pressure, mass hysteria has acquired a frantic pace and people’s hope and aspirations are taking a merciless beating. The uncertainty of a new and relatively unknown infection increases the anxiety, which gets compounded by isolation in lockdown. As global public health agencies like World Health Organization (WHO) and Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) struggle to contain the outbreak, social distancing is repeatedly suggested as one of the most useful preventive strategies. It has been used successfully in the past to slow or prevent community transmission during pandemics (WHO, 2019). While certain countries like China have just started recovering from their three-month lockdown, countries like Iran, Italy and South Korea have been badly hit irrespective of these measures and those like India have initiated nation-wide shutdown and curfews to prevent the community transmission of COVID-19. Ironically however, the social distancing is a misnomer, which implies physical separation to prevent the viral spread. The modern world has rarely been so isolated and restricted. Multiple restrictions have been imposed on public movement to contain the spread of the virus. People are forced to stay at home and are burdened with the heft of quarantine. Individuals are waking up every day wrapped in a freezing cauldron of social isolation, sheer boredom and a penetrating feeling of loneliness. The modern man has known little like this, in an age of rapid travel and communication. Though during the earlier outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Spanish flu, Ebola and Plague the world was equally shaken with millions of casualties, the dominance of technology was not as much as to make the distancing felt amplified (Smith, 2006). In this era of digitalization, social media, social hangouts, eateries, pubs, bars, malls, movie theatres to keep us distracted creating apparent ‘social ties’. Humankind has always known what to do next, with their lives generally following a regular trail. But this sudden cataclysmic turn of events have brought them face to face with a dire reckoning – how to live with oneself. It is indeed a frightening realization when a whole generation or two knows how to deal with a nuclear fallout but are at their wit’s end on how to spend time with oneself. Ironically, however, it has Social isolation in Covid-19: The impact of lonelinessread more
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Who is lonely in lockdown? Cross-cohort analyses of predictors of loneliness before and during the COVID-19 pandemic.
TL;DR: Interventions to reduce or prevent loneliness during COVID-19 should be targeted at those sociodemographic groups already identified as high risk in previous research, including young adults, women, people with lower education or income, the economically inactive, people living alone and urban residents.
Journal ArticleDOI
Prevalence and predictors of general psychiatric disorders and loneliness during COVID-19 in the United Kingdom.
Lambert Zixin Li,Senhu Wang +1 more
TL;DR: Regression analyses show that those who have or had COVID-19-related symptoms are more likely to develop general psychiatric disorders and are lonelier, while women and young people have higher risks of general Psychiatric disorders and loneliness, while having a job and living with a partner are protective factors.
Journal ArticleDOI
Terror Management Theory and the COVID-19 Pandemic
TL;DR: In this article, the authors discuss the implications of awareness of death for understanding the widely varying ways in which awareness plays a role in different aspects of life, and discuss the theory's implications for understanding how people cope with death.
Journal ArticleDOI
Facing Loneliness and Anxiety During the COVID-19 Isolation: The Role of Excessive Social Media Use in a Sample of Italian Adults
TL;DR: Findings suggest that isolation probably reinforced the individuals' sense of loneliness, strengthening the need to be part of virtual communities, and the facilitated and prolonged access to social media during the COVID-19 pandemic risked to further increase anxiety, generating a vicious cycle that in some cases may require clinical attention.
Journal ArticleDOI
Economic effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship and small businesses
TL;DR: A systematic review of the literature on the effect of the COVID-19 pandemic on entrepreneurship and small businesses can be found in this paper, with a discussion of four literature strands based on this review and an overview of contributions in this special issue.
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