Category: Psychological and Sociological Impact
Soft Pants: The Postpandemic Benefit That’s Here to Stay
NYT Less than three weeks into the March 2020 lockdowns in New York City, my boyfriend turned to me with a revelation he was having while in the snug living room that had become our co-working space, wine bar and prison chamber. A finance lawyer who used to wear suits, he lately had found himself […]
May 30, 2023
You definitely don’t wish you were here: Postcards in the age of covid
Washington Post For someone who never actually tested positive for the coronavirus, Clarissa Ferraris sure has a house full of it. The virus is on hundreds of postcards that the Columbia, Md., collector has amassed over the last three years. There are postcards of health-care workers battling the spiky globular virus, of cityscapes emptied by the pandemic, of […]
May 23, 2023
‘Worse than what we thought’: New data reveals deeper problems with the Bureau of Prisons’ Covid response
STAT The incarcerated people at Federal Medical Center Devens should have been some of the first to receive the Covid vaccines, back when they first came out in December 2020. At the time, the country was prioritizing high-risk people in high-risk settings, like older Americans in nursing homes. So Devens seemed a better candidate than […]
May 23, 2023
Families of Those Lost to Covid Wrestle With Mixed Emotions as Emergency Ends
NYT More than 1.1 million Americans have died of Covid. An official end to the health emergency has landed in complicated ways for those affected most acutely. Shannon Cummings, 53, has tried to push forward after her husband, Larry, a college professor, died of Covid-19 in March 2020. She flew from her home in Michigan to Southern […]
May 16, 2023
Social connectedness and resilience post COVID-19 pandemic: Buffering against trauma, stress, and psychosis
Psychiatry Research Communications
May 9, 2023
Covid-19 has reduced diverse urban interactions
MIT Mobility-related data show the pandemic has had a lasting effect, limiting the breadth of places people visit in cities. The Covid-19 pandemic has reduced how often urban residents intersect with people from different income brackets, according to a new study led by MIT researchers. Examining the movement of people in four U.S. cities before […]
May 2, 2023
The Pandemic’s Surprising Effect on Suicide Rates
The Atlantic Suicide rates typically go down in times of crisis. Why? In March 2020, my partner, Amie; our 2-year-old son, Ratna; and I, who usually live in Kansas City, Missouri, were visiting Kerala, India, about to be in the throes of the country’s first COVID outbreak. When it became clear that Kerala was going […]
Apr 25, 2023
Trapped With COVID
The Atlantic Inside the Louisiana State Penitentiary, we faced a new kind of enemy. The first prisoner to die was 69 years old, a wheelchair-using former printing-press operator who called himself Cap. He’d arrived at the penitentiary from Orleans Parish in the winter of 1978 with a life sentence for murder. He was overweight and […]
Apr 11, 2023
Greater traditionalism predicts COVID-19 precautionary behaviors across 27 societies
Nature People vary both in their embrace of their society’s traditions, and in their perception of hazards as salient and necessitating a response. Over evolutionary time, traditions have offered avenues for addressing hazards, plausibly resulting in linkages between orientations toward tradition and orientations toward danger. Emerging research documents connections between traditionalism and threat responsivity, including […]
Apr 11, 2023
1.5 Million People in Japan Are Living as ‘Recluses’ After Covid
Bloomberg About 1.5 million people of working age in Japan are estimated to be living as recluses, with some 20% citing the Covid pandemic for their withdrawal, a government survey showed. Hikikomori, as they are called in Japanese, are defined as those who rarely leave their room or house, and only to shop at a […]
Apr 4, 2023