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In Their Own Words, Americans Describe the Struggles and Silver Linings of the COVID-19 Pandemic

The outbreak has dramatically changed americans’ lives and relationships over the past year. we asked people to tell us about their experiences – good and bad – in living through this moment in history..

Pew Research Center has been asking survey questions over the past year about Americans’ views and reactions to the COVID-19 pandemic. In August, we gave the public a chance to tell us in their own words how the pandemic has affected them in their personal lives. We wanted to let them tell us how their lives have become more difficult or challenging, and we also asked about any unexpectedly positive events that might have happened during that time.

The vast majority of Americans (89%) mentioned at least one negative change in their own lives, while a smaller share (though still a 73% majority) mentioned at least one unexpected upside. Most have experienced these negative impacts and silver linings simultaneously: Two-thirds (67%) of Americans mentioned at least one negative and at least one positive change since the pandemic began.

For this analysis, we surveyed 9,220 U.S. adults between Aug. 31-Sept. 7, 2020. Everyone who completed the survey is a member of Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel (ATP), an online survey panel that is recruited through national, random sampling of residential addresses. This way nearly all U.S. adults have a chance of selection. The survey is weighted to be representative of the U.S. adult population by gender, race, ethnicity, partisan affiliation, education and other categories.  Read more about the ATP’s methodology . 

Respondents to the survey were asked to describe in their own words how their lives have been difficult or challenging since the beginning of the coronavirus outbreak, and to describe any positive aspects of the situation they have personally experienced as well. Overall, 84% of respondents provided an answer to one or both of the questions. The Center then categorized a random sample of 4,071 of their answers using a combination of in-house human coders, Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service and keyword-based pattern matching. The full methodology  and questions used in this analysis can be found here.

In many ways, the negatives clearly outweigh the positives – an unsurprising reaction to a pandemic that had killed  more than 180,000 Americans  at the time the survey was conducted. Across every major aspect of life mentioned in these responses, a larger share mentioned a negative impact than mentioned an unexpected upside. Americans also described the negative aspects of the pandemic in greater detail: On average, negative responses were longer than positive ones (27 vs. 19 words). But for all the difficulties and challenges of the pandemic, a majority of Americans were able to think of at least one silver lining. 

Both the negative and positive impacts described in these responses cover many aspects of life, none of which were mentioned by a majority of Americans. Instead, the responses reveal a pandemic that has affected Americans’ lives in a variety of ways, of which there is no “typical” experience. Indeed, not all groups seem to have experienced the pandemic equally. For instance, younger and more educated Americans were more likely to mention silver linings, while women were more likely than men to mention challenges or difficulties.

Here are some direct quotes that reveal how Americans are processing the new reality that has upended life across the country.

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About Pew Research Center Pew Research Center is a nonpartisan fact tank that informs the public about the issues, attitudes and trends shaping the world. It conducts public opinion polling, demographic research, media content analysis and other empirical social science research. Pew Research Center does not take policy positions. It is a subsidiary of The Pew Charitable Trusts .

4 Ways That the Pandemic Changed How We See Ourselves

A fter more than two years of pandemic life , it seems like we’ve changed as people. But how? In the beginning, many wished for a return to normal, only to realize that this might never be possible—and that could be a good thing. Although we experienced the same global crisis, it has impacted people in extremely different ways and encouraged us to think more deeply about who we are and what we’re looking for.

Isolation tested our sense of identity because it limited our access to in-person social feedback. For decades, scientists have explored how “the self is a social product.” We interpret the world through social observation. In 1902, Charles Cooley invented the concept “the looking glass self.” It explains how we develop our identity based on how we believe other people see us, but also try to influence their perceptions , so they see us in the way we’d like to be seen. If we understand who we are based on social feedback, what happened to our sense of self under isolation?

Here are four ways that the pandemic changed how we see ourselves.

When lockdown started, our identities felt less stable, but we adjusted back over time

In crisis, our self-concept was challenged. A December 2020 study by Guido Alessandri and colleagues, which was published in Identity: An International Journal of Theory and Research , measured how Italians reacted to the first week of the COVID-19 lockdown in March 2020 by evaluating how their self-concept clarity—the extent to which they have a consistent sense of self—affected their negative emotional response to the sudden lockdown.

Self-concept clarity represents “how much you have [clearly defined who you are] in your mind … not in this moment but in general,” explains Alessandri, a psychology professor at the Sapienza University of Rome. While generally people have high self-concept clarity, those with depression or personality disorders usually experience lower levels. “The lockdown threatened people’s self-concept. The very surprising result was that people with higher self-concept clarity [were] more reactive” and experienced a greater increase in negative affect than those with lower self-concept clarity.

In Alessandri’s study, people eventually returned to their initial stages of self-concept clarity, but it took longer than expected due to the shock and distress of the pandemic. This reflects a concept called emotional inertia , where emotional states are “resistant to change” and take some time to return to a baseline level. At the beginning of the pandemic, we questioned what we believed to be true about ourselves, but since then, we’ve adjusted to this new world.

Many people were forced to adopt new social roles, but the discomfort they felt depends on how important that role is to them

Our identities are not fixed; we hold several different social roles within our family, workplace, and friend groups, which naturally change over time. But in isolation, many of our social roles had to involuntarily change , from “parents homeschooling children [to] friends socializing online and employees working from home.”

As we adapted to a new way of life, a study published in September 2021 in PLOS One found that people who experienced involuntary social role disruptions because of COVID-19 reported increased feelings of inauthenticity—which could mean feeling disconnected from their true self because of their current situation. It was challenging for people to suddenly change their routines and feel like themselves in the midst of a crisis.

But the study also uncovered that “this social role interruption affects people’s sense of authenticity only to the extent that the role is important to you,” says co-author Jingshi (Joyce) Liu, a lecturer in marketing at the City campus of the University of London. If being a musician is central to your identity, for example, it’s more likely that you would feel inauthentic playing virtual shows on Zoom, but if your job isn’t a big part of who you are, you may not be as affected.

To feel more comfortable in their new identity, people can start accepting their new sense of self without trying to go back to who they once were

Over the last two years, our mindset and control over the roles we occupy in many facets of life helped determine how virtual learning and remote work affected us. “We are very sensitive to our environment,” Liu says. “[The] disruption of who we are will nonetheless feed into how we feel about our own authenticity.” But we can do our best to accept these changes and even form a new sense of self. “[If] I incorporated virtual teaching as a part of my self-identity, I [may not] need to change my behavior to go back to classroom teaching for me to feel authentic. I simply just adapt or expand the definition of what it means to be a teacher,” she adds. Similarly, if you’re a therapist, you can expand your understanding of what consulting with patients looks like to include video and phone calls.

During the pandemic, many people have made voluntary role changes, like choosing to become parents, move to a new city or country, or accept a new job. Previous research by Ibarra and Barbulescu (2010) shows that although these voluntary role changes may temporarily cause a sense of inauthenticity, they eventually tend to result in a feeling of authenticity because people are taking steps to be true to themselves or start a new chapter. “The authenticity will be restored as people adapt to their new identity,” Liu says.

Our identities have changed, so it’s important to be authentic with how we present ourselves online and offline

We have more power than we may realize to navigate a crisis by accepting that it’s OK to change. But it’s important to act in a way that’s true to ourselves. “People have a perception of the true self … They have some idea of who they truly are,” Liu says. “When you lend that to the [looking glass self], I think people would feel most inauthentic when they are performing to others in a way that is inconsistent with how they are [thinking and feeling internally],” which can happen on social media.

In isolation , when we didn’t have access to the same level of social feedback as normal, social media in some cases became a lifeline and a substitute for our self-presentation. The pandemic inspired people to take space away from the Internet and others to become increasingly dependent on it for their social wellbeing. “[Our unpublished data shows] that time spent on social media increased people’s sense of inauthenticity, perhaps because social media entails a lot of impression management [and] people are heavily editing themselves on these platforms,” Liu says.

With all that we’ve experienced, many of us have fundamentally changed as people. “In the same way which the first lockdown required us to [self-regulate] and adhere to new social norms, these changes that we’re experiencing now require another self-regulation effort to understand what is happening,” Alessandri says. “We don’t expect that people will simply get back to their previous [lives]—I don’t think this is possible. I think we have to negotiate a new kind of reality.”

The more we accept that we are no longer the same people after this crisis, the easier it will be for us to reconcile who we are now and who we want to become.

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A Year of Trauma and Resilience: How the Pandemic Changed Everything

New York Times readers describe the ways the pandemic first hit them and upended their lives, in their own words.

By Sarah Mervosh

It dawned on us when the grocery stores ran out of toilet paper.

When we lost work, risked our lives on the job or finally gave in and bought an office chair for home.

It dawned on us when we canceled long-dreamed-of weddings. When we graduated high school from our backyards, without a stage. When we gave birth — masked and alone.

It dawned on us when our aunts died and our children died and our parents died and we realized, with sudden, crushing clarity, that Covid-19 “was not going to be a disease that happened to ‘other people.’”

Across the United States and around the globe, nearly everyone experienced a moment when the coronavirus pandemic truly hit home for them. One year later, as the pandemic carries on, having claimed more than 2.6 million lives worldwide, we asked our readers : When did the pandemic become real for you? Nearly 2,000 people responded.

Their answers, which have been lightly edited and condensed for clarity, are a journey through time. It has been a year of trauma and resilience. No one has been spared, yet some have borne burdens far more profound than others.

Still, our stories connect us: each of us human, each of us just trying to survive a pandemic that changed us and the world.

A year ago…

everything changed.

Some changes were big.

Some subtle.

But for each of us, there was a moment when the pandemic became real.

When I asked a stranger on the street where she found the toilet paper she was carrying.

Heidi Fliegauf, 53, Boston

When my toddler grandson tried to feed me a blueberry through the cellphone screen.

Alice Gilgoff, 74, Rosendale, N.Y.

When I had no place other than a cemetery to take my child for fresh air and distance from people.

Ellie Dunn, 44, Queens, N.Y.

The night before my second round of chemo. I got a call saying my husband couldn’t attend because of new visitor restrictions.

Amelia Hartman, 34, Minneapolis

Seeing our county judge on TV with the governor. That’s when I knew things were going to change, especially in our small town.

Stevi Grose, 41, Cynthiana, Ky.

No more outings, meals, singing or games with Alzheimer’s clients. And no more paycheck. I started long-distance walking to ease anxiety and cope with loneliness and misplaced guilt.

Janice Randall, 64, Vashon Island, Wash.

Our favorite ice rink in Madrid being used as a morgue.

Joni Costello, 42, Madrid

When the food pantry I oversee saw an increase in need of more than 350 percent.

Natalie Nites, 26, Key Largo, Fla.

When I began wiping down everything in sight and wearing the same few outfits every single day.

Jolene Conder, 59, Brentwood, Calif.

I wrote my granddaughter a six-page letter reviewing our time together and what it meant to me in case I never saw her again.

Virginia Graves, 71, Rockport, Mass.

When I could no longer go over to my dad’s house. (My parents are divorced.)

Elizabeth Knight, 15, Clarksville, Tenn.

When they closed schools indefinitely. As a teacher, this was a really surreal experience.

Robin Freeman, 43, Marietta, Ga.

At every stage of life, milestones were upended.

First breaths…

final words…

and everything in between.

It was a year of togetherness.

And moments spent painfully apart.

Nothing during this entire pandemic felt so real as when I lay sobbing in my hospital bed not 24 hours after giving birth to my first child. My mother told me on the phone that the Canadian border agents were not letting her through the Toronto airport from the United States to come be with me.

Kelley Sykes, 27, Toronto

When we realized that we should go to the courthouse to get married on our lunch break because our wedding would be canceled and my then fiancée would lose her health insurance if she got furloughed.

Alex Herrin, 28, Nashville

My baby girl, Paloma, was born on March 11, 2020. Most of our family didn’t meet her in person.

Clary Montgomery, 33, Austin

When my college graduation was canceled. Like many first-generation college students, it was heartbreaking for me to accept that my parents would never get to see me walk across that stage after everything they have sacrificed for me.

Gabby Gil, 22, Charlotte, N.C.

We had to cancel our baby’s first birthday party.

Megan Denniston, 36, Brooklyn, N.Y.

Graduating from my backyard really drove the point home.

Julia Klopfer, 22, Boston

On a Saturday, we joyfully married — in an office, with just our parents. Seven days later, my grandma died without a funeral.

Emma Johnson, 26, St. Paul, Minn.

When my wife who had fought breast cancer for a year and beaten it contracted Covid at the end of August and then the cancer came back. She was gone by Sept. 14. Having lost the love of my life and best friend I have lost interest in everything.

Michael Boyajian, 62, Fishkill, N.Y.

My dad went into hospice care for renal failure. My husband and I became his de facto nurses. Dad died April 16. Just two of us could attend his graveside service.

Michael Hawkins, 63, Lake Oswego, Ore.

Few places were unchanged.

Our homes became crowded with work.

Millions of children were forced to learn online.

For many, a deep sense of emptiness remained.

When I was laid off from my job.

Jamie Harbeck, 38, Arlington, Va.

When I realized I became an unemployment statistic.

Amy Goggin, 41, Troy, N.Y.

When we had to lay off all our employees. No events meant no income. We drank Coronas. We laughed. We cried. We hoped this would not last too long. We have yet to be able to hire even half of them back.

Katwyn Liberti, 50, Orlando, Fla.

I moved to working remotely in our laundry room.

Brady Fopma, 42, Sioux Falls, S.D.

Taking calls from the bathtub to hide from my daughter.

Elis Hackmann Pereira, 35, Burlington, Ontario

The second I walked through the red door of my hospital’s Covid I.C.U. There were about 10 patients, and most were face down and already on continuous dialysis. The wind was knocked out of me. I didn’t know if it was due to the N95 mask or the gravity of the situation.

Mary Keckeisen, 24, Dallas

“Take home everything. Empty your lockers. You won’t be coming back.”

Max Kim, 16, Carmel, Ind.

I never graduated. I never went to senior prom. I hardly got to say goodbye to my best friends before going to college. Bye-bye, normalcy. And bye-bye, childhood and ignorant bliss.

Jess Sauer, 19, Kennett Square, Pa.

Never in my long life had my church been closed to me. I felt utterly abandoned even though I knew it was the right thing to do. This tile helped me survive the pandemic.

Lynn Hoins, 84, Riverton, Utah

When I noticed signs of emptiness outside in the world, whether it was the shelves at stores or a normally crowded train station with not a soul in sight.

Daya Devanathan, 30, Chicago

The silence. No car engines revving as neighbors headed for work. The absence of scraping scooters and giggles of kids as they walk the few blocks to our neighborhood school. The sounds marking the usual hustle and bustle of our daily lives were just gone.

Jennifer Jacoby, 68, Arlington, Mass.

The last night our grandkids spent here. I’ve lain on their beds crying more than once since then.

Stephanie Schuler, 64, Edmonds, Wash.

It was a year of heroism.

Resilience.

My son was born. We pulled my older son from school. Panic attacks daily in the shower. Postpartum anxiety engulfed my life.

Megan Leder, 35, Aurora, Colo.

As a recovering alcoholic, my husband was sober for about 10 months. In March, all group meetings were canceled. He held on for about a month and a half, but the isolation became too much to bear and we are back to suffering the effects of his alcoholism.

Kathy, 66, Florida

When my usually bright and sunny 10-year-old son started having panic attacks. Death is all around him and I can’t completely protect him. Ten is too young to come to the realization that one’s parents are fallible in this way.

Carey Sue Barney, 46, Winchester, Mass.

When I contracted Covid despite taking as many precautions as I could. I cried for the rest of the day. I felt so powerless.

Kelley Schlise, 20, Madison, Wis.

I spent a month recovering from horrendous symptoms, watching daily reports about how African-Americans, like me, in my age range, with hypertension, were dying. I live alone, so I had to struggle alone, recover alone, hoping not to die alone.

Kimwa Walker, 49, Durham, N.C.

I waved goodbye to my significant other as I was wheeled into the E.R. I thought I had bronchitis. It turned out to be Covid-19. I wouldn’t see him again — except through a plate glass door — for five and a half months.

Kathy Glascott, 73, Kissimmee, Fla.

When Covid took my great-aunt in Maryland, left, (who was wild and vivacious) and then her brother in the U.K. less than two weeks later. Attending her Zoom funeral was entirely too real.

Kimberly Parkinson-St. Jean, 36, Newark, N.J.

When my father passed away from it.

Molly McLaughlin, 47, Cleveland Area

When my son died in May 2020 in New York City. He was 54 years old.

Robert Castro, 83, Merrick, N.Y.

My aunt died. She was the 34th reported Covid death in Connecticut. That was the day that I learned that Covid was not going to be a disease that happened to “other people.”

Bill Wight, 62, Kingsport, Tenn.

The last time I held my father’s hand.

Lisa Dean-Erlander, 52, Boise, Idaho

Photo credits: Deirdre Bell, Piper Smith, Erin Hughes, Antonino Clemente Mayra Nolan, Jess Sauer, Kelley Sykes, Helene Rutledge, Emma Johnson, Kyley Pulphus, Megan Denniston, Benny Chan, Kate Wasson, Alicia Pike-Green, Megan Langley-Cass, Veronica Torres, Christina Kratlian, Felicity Nicholson, Jackie Doughty, Sasha Hizon.

Aidan Gardiner and Steven Moity contributed reporting. Asmaa Elkeurti and Fahima Haque contributed research.

Sarah Mervosh is a national reporter based in New York, covering a wide variety of news and feature stories across the country. More about Sarah Mervosh

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Three Years Later: How the Pandemic Changed Us

From routines to deep losses, the global health crisis altered lives of staff and faculty

Since her father’s death from COVID-19 in 2021, Alexy Hernandez’s days have become emotional minefields. Any small thing can be a gut punch, reminding her of what’s lost.

Perhaps it’s a football highlight, since she and her father, Josue, shared a love of the sport. Coffee has become complicated since her dad always got a kick out of pictures she sent of the creative designs left in her latte foam.

Or maybe it will simply be the small pieces of her daily routine — getting into work in the morning, coming home at night — experiences that warranted a quick text to her dad, who always wrote back with love and encouragement.

“He was my best friend, my biggest supporter, my biggest cheerleader,” said Hernandez, 28, a clinical research coordinator with the Department of Population Health Sciences . “I am who I am because of him.”

The pandemic changed the way most of us lived. We learned how to work remotely or gained new appreciation for human connection. And, for the loved ones of the roughly 1 million Americans who died from the virus, life will forever feel incomplete.

While the worst of the pandemic may be behind us, its effects linger. According to a Gallup poll , 53 percent of U.S. adults don’t expect their life to ever be the same as it was before the pandemic.

“We all felt this,” said Rachel Kranton, the James B. Duke Professor of Economics who, early in the pandemic, contributed to Project ROUSE , an independent Duke faculty research study that looked at how staff and faculty at Duke coped with changes to life, work, and well-being.

Project ROUSE showed that the pandemic had profound effects on everyone, including that, during the pandemic’s first year, roughly 40 percent of nearly 5,000 study respondents were at risk of moderate or severe depression.

As the pandemic’s difficult early days fade, Kranton said that other changes will likely endure, such as a willingness to connect in new ways, reassess careers, or build lives with more flexibility.

“I think there’s probably a new normal, and I think that new normal includes both good things and bad things,” Kranton said.

Hernandez’s life won’t be the same after her father’s death, but she is moving forward.

She’s learned not to stress about trivial things and thinks often about how she can make her father proud. Nothing, she said, can be taken for granted.

“Losing my dad has completely changed how I view and interact with the world and has given me more clarity on what I value,” said Hernandez, who has worked at Duke for four years.

We asked staff and faculty to share how the pandemic changed their lives, and here’s what some colleagues shared.

‘I’ve learned from students’

“It’s a new normal. You’ve got to deal with what you’ve got to deal with. Teaching markets and management, I’ve tried to move on and try to keep things fun. I like to make my courses interactive. So whether that’s changing materials or adding new things to a class, I’ve had to adapt. A lot of new stuff I’ve learned from students, whether it’s using polls, or Kahoot, or other activities. You’ve got to keep things fresh. The world is changing, you’ve got to change with it.”

George Grody, 64, Lecturing Fellow of Markets & Management, Trinity College of Arts and Sciences

Value of Life

“I appreciate more than ever before, not only the value of life, but a strong appreciation for others in the respiratory field and healthcare. I have been a respiratory therapist 33 years, and I’ve worked at Duke 35 years. Many have come and some have gone from this world. It’s devastating when you’ve worked so hard on patients, and they don’t make it out. Nothing can replace the value of life and what it means. Life is so important, and each and every day that you work with your patients is important. This all taught me a lot about what it means to really care for your patients, and it taught me a great deal of humility in caring for those who needed me.”

Pamela Bowman, 63, recently retired Respiratory Care Practitioner, Duke Regional Hospital

Out of the Quiet

“Though it’s crazy to say, my life started to flourish during the pandemic in more ways than one. I went back to school at the beginning of the pandemic at Durham Technical Community College to study business. I got in the best shape of my life by focusing on clean eating, and I lost 35 pounds. I started earning more money by taking a job at Duke. The pandemic was a time for me to quiet down the noise around me. Personally, I was able to shut out the world, decide what I really wanted out of life, and for myself, and start making those things happen. Ever since things started getting back to how they were pre-pandemic, those progressions I’ve made slowly started to derail. I gained back the 35 pounds I lost once the world started to open up again, and it’s just been harder to do everything I was doing to better myself every day. I went into a bit of a depression, but now I’m finally coming out of it. I’m back down 20 pounds. I’m learning how to cope with things and get back to being able to do those things that progressed for me and made me happy, even though I’m not able to get the same quietness I once had.”

Sadie Horton, 27, Staff Assistant, Academic Support, Fuqua School of Business

Cherish Loved Ones

“My mom, Johnnie Mae Snipes, was put on hospice on Jan. 11, 2021, and she passed away on January 20, 2021, at age 83. Me and my sisters were holding her hand, and, needless to say, we lost the strongest woman we ever knew. Our queen was gone. My mother had six daughters, 17 grandchildren, 44 great grandchildren and seven great, great grandchildren. My mother passed away from dementia and COVID. The past few years have taught me to never take anything for granted and to cherish your loved ones. It also has showed me how the world can change in one day. But one thing I know for sure that will never change is God is still in charge.”

Clara Bailey, 58, Staff Assistant, Department of Medicine, Oncology

‘I don’t go anywhere without my mask’

“When Dr. Anthony Fauci came out and said we need to wear masks in public, I did it. I’m claustrophobic, so when I first started wearing the cloth masks, I would have panic and anxiety attacks, particularly at the grocery store. Over time, I got used to it, and I started feeling safer by wearing my mask. Now, I don't think I will ever go into another crowded event without a mask. As a woman, we have our purses. We don’t go anywhere without our purses. Now, I don’t go anywhere without my mask. Since wearing my mask, I haven't caught a cold, let alone anything else. It's a piece of cloth, no big deal.”

Sandy Ouellette, 62, Access Specialist, Consultation & Referral Center

Rethinking What’s Most Important

“During the pandemic, my wife got a new job in Virginia, and because I’ve been working remote since March 2020, it made it easy to move with her because, in the past, somebody would have had to quit their job, find a new job, and do all kinds of stuff. Personally, the pandemic has made me rethink what’s most important in life, such as making sure to set aside time for family and friends. Now, I get to spend more time with my wife. We can do house projects, take our dogs out and explore. Now that our parents are getting older, we try to take advantage of any time we can spend with them. The pandemic made spending time with people who are important to you a little extra important because they’re what helped me get through.”

Christopher Morgenstern, 39, Administrative Manager, Cardiology

‘180-degrees different’

“My wedding, honeymoon, and bachelorette party were all canceled due to COVID, so my husband, Brent Durden, and I got married in our backyard with just our parents. We were going to wait several years to start a family so we could travel but decided to seize the day during quarantine after buying a house. Now, we have a beautiful 18-month-old daughter, Eliana. As tragic as the losses we experienced as a country and community have been through this pandemic, my entire world is 180-degrees different than it was before COVID, and it makes me so grateful to have the family that I do.”

Tricia Smar, 36, Education and Training Coordinator, Duke Trauma Center

‘I’m fulfilling my bucket list’

“I have terminal prostate cancer. I live one day at a time. They gave me 18 months to live about six years ago. During the pandemic, I retired to fulfill my bucket list only to find disappointment. I made all sorts of plans, but everything was shut down so my plans were shot. I returned to work. I have a love for nursing and have no regrets coming back to patient care. I missed interacting with people. I missed my coworkers, I missed the patients. Now I travel, and I'm fulfilling my bucket list, but I always look forward to coming back to Duke for both my own care and to care for our patients.”

Doug Buehrle, 68, Clinical Nurse, Apheresis, Duke University Hospital

Savor Small Moments

“I learned to make the best out of a horrific situation. My kids, Derek and Joshua, were 5 and nearly 3 when COVID hit. In the clinical research field, we had to scramble to see which trials could keep going and which ones would have to go on pause. We had to be very flexible to work around each other’s schedules and everyone’s kid’s schedules. But I got to spend a lot more time with my kids than I ever would have if COVID didn't hit, so I'm grateful I was able to do it. We got to spend time going to the park and flying kites since the playgrounds were closed. We went hiking and exploring since the museums were closed. Those were memories I am thankful to have made, and I'm hoping they don't fade.”

Kristin Byrne, 41, Clinical Research Coordinator, Hematology

‘Packed up my car with as much as I could fit into it’

“I graduated from nursing school at George Fox University in Oregon about a month after lockdown happened. I have a grandmother in High Point, so I started applying to hospitals in North Carolina, and Duke turned out to be the best option. In October of 2020, I packed up my car with as much as I could fit into it, and I drove across the country with my dad. I left my family, friends, my church back in Portland, and I’ve had to build an entirely new life here. My first nursing job was working for the medical-surgical float pool at Duke University Hospital, which basically staffed the COVID-19 floors for a while. I was thrown into the thick of it, and I really had to stay on my toes all the time. It was really hard, and it was really a dark period in my life, until I started to get my feet settled. I just started to put myself out there out of my comfort zone, and I started inviting people to do things with me. I found Bright City Church too. Over time, I started to find those little sparks of hope, when you send a patient home instead of the ICU. I’ve learned a lot from my nursing career, and I’ve learned a lot about myself and how to take care of myself.”

Lauren Berky, 25, Clinical Nurse, Internal Staffing Resource Pool

‘More Openness to Change’

“I think COVID has opened the clinical community to change more than ever before. Sharing data has replaced hoarding data. Technology has come so far, and we had a hard time getting people to change the way they think about data. I think COVID opened their minds that we need other ways of dealing with data, particularly that the patient needs to be the centerpiece of everything that we’re doing. Some people have said to me, that five years ago we’d have been laughed at for some of the things we’re trying to do. But now, everybody is at least willing to have the conversation.”

William Edward Hammond, 88, Professor of Biostatistics and Bioinformatics, Family Medicine and Community Health

‘Never take tomorrow for granted’

“I am much more committed to ‘living in the moment,’ appreciating what I have, and looking inward. At home, I find joy with my husband. I walk much more. I cook at home almost all the time. And, maybe most important, I appreciate the beautiful natural environment around our home on Morgan Creek in Chapel Hill, where husband, David, and I began walking nearly every afternoon in January 2021. I’ve learned to never take tomorrow for granted. To appreciate friendships and family and the place where we are, now. To be OK with less ‘running around.’  To not take progress for granted, and to realize that things can get worse.”

Anne Mitchell Whisnant, 55, Director, Graduate Liberal Studies, and Associate Professor of the Practice, Social Science Research Institute

Bittersweet Milestones

“COVID was honestly a bittersweet time. My father-in-law, Mark, the president of North Georgia Technical College, passed away from COVID on September 13, 2020. Then in January 2021, my husband, Andrew, and I found out we were pregnant with our first child, Lilly, after a very long time. We thought we couldn’t have kids, so that was quite the surprise. When she was born on October 21, 2021, the joy of having her was indescribable. She just turned a year old, and I know she’ll never know her grandfather, and he’ll never know her. We want her to be happy and healthy and treat others the best way possible, and we’ll continue to tell her about her Papa when we can. We can’t wish Mark back because he’s not coming back. We’re living in the reality knowing that we can’t change it; it’s something Ecclesiastes calls our lot in life. COVID-19 brought out the worst for so many families, including ours, but it also brought so much good.”

Marissa Ivester, 34, Fellowship Program Coordinator, Office of Pediatrics

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How covid-19 changed lives - voices of children.

UNICEF Georgia asked children and young people around the country how they are coping with the new normal, and how their lives have been affected.

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Being a school student can sometimes be challenging, but the COVID-19 pandemic has made getting an education, and life in general, even more difficult for young people in Georgia.

With schools closed, lessons are being held remotely. All sports, school activities, and events have been cancelled. Friendships and relationships have been transported to live chats and video calls.

Mate Dvalishvili, 15 years old, Kutaisi

The COVID-19 pandemic has radically changed my life. When I used to go to school, by the end of the day I would be exhausted – mentally as well as physically – and as a result, I did not have trouble falling asleep. Now, I don’t get tired enough during the day, so I can’t sleep at night, and I wake up late in the morning. That’s why I am sometimes late for, or even miss, video classes.

Before, I used to wake up at 8 a.m., and by 9 a.m. I was already at school. After classes I went to a tutor, then to play sports. When I came home, I did homework and hung out with my friends, if we had free time. I went to bed sometime between 11 p.m. and midnight. Now, I get up at noon, or even as late as 1 or 2 p.m. When the weather is good, I may go out to ride my bicycle with my family members, but the rest of the time I’m at home playing online games and watching films. I go to bed at 1 or 2 a.m., and at times, I am video-chatting with my friends until 3 or 4 a.m., sometimes until morning.

The teachers are trying to teach our classes like they did in school, but still, I can’t say that online classes are as interesting as they were in person. At least now, I have a bit less homework to do. I was more active during classes while in school, there was more interaction. The programmes that we use for online classes cannot replace school. In order to make online learning effective, they should develop a special online programme that could be adapted to school teaching. At the same time, teachers should be familiar with using the programme.

For me, the hardest thing in the new reality is the new reality itself: doing nothing (for almost 2 months), and the immense lack of communication with my friends in real life. It is not unbearable, but it is very difficult.

Keta Tkhilaishvili, 10 years old, Batumi

My life has changed completely since my school was closed. Before, I spent most of the day at school with my classmates. Now, this is my free time.

When I went to school, my schedule was really full. I got up early, prepared for school, and I also had extra classes like German, chess, circle dancing, and so on.

Now my schedule is organized according to the self-isolation rules. I wake up at 10 a.m., I have breakfast, and then I have my online classes. I spend my free time as I wish, then I prepare my lessons. Sometimes I watch classes on TV. I am at home all the time. Since I have plenty of time now, I try to balance out working and free time on my own.

Interaction with my classmates in school is what I miss the most from before. When I went to school, I had more homework, but the lessons were way more engaging and interesting, I could concentrate better. Online schooling is something very new. At times, I struggle with online group studying because I don’t understand what the teacher is saying because of the Internet connection and other technical problems. But it’s interesting too. I learned how to do homework electronically and search for information on the Internet. Before, I thought that the Internet was only for playing and entertainment.

I want to go back to school soon, and before that happens, I want to be able to communicate on the Internet without interruptions.

Sandro Turabelidze, 11 years old, Village Jimastaro, Imereti

During the pandemic I had to switch to distance or online school. I don’t find learning online difficult, it is easy. Before the class is over, teachers give us an assignment, we do the homework, take a photo of the exercise book, and send it to the teacher. During the next lesson the teacher tests our knowledge. When I have free time, I play with my sister at home. I no longer visit my neighbors. I play by myself in the yard, I try to stay isolated. To spend time with my friends, I call them, we talk to each other, and play online. I go out to the yard for 5-10 minutes only, to play something by myself, like ride the bicycle, or play ball by myself, and then I go back inside as I try to avoid contact with neighbors.

Elene Iashvili, 11 years old, Kvitiri

I live in the village of Kvitiri and I go to the Kutaisi Chess school. I had great plans this year. I was so excited to participate in the Georgia, Poti, Racha, and Tkibuli chess tournaments. Traveling around the country during tournaments is so much fun. We would go to the sea to relax after the game in Poti, and we would cozy up and enjoy the fresh air in the evening in Racha. In Tkibuli, we got to go to the swimming pool. Now, I play online chess games with a computer. Online chess tournaments are held for adults only. They are very rarely held for children my age. I also play with my grandfather, but it is very difficult for a child chess player to develop during quarantine.

I was very sad at the beginning, but my friends and I found a solution together. We created a chat and communicate via that chat very often. We named the chat “girls” but later we added boys to the group as well. These relationships are very helpful.

We became tied to our computers after the schools closed. Online classes can’t replace in-school classes. At school they explain the content in more detail. And also, many of my classmates can’t attend online classes. They may have the Internet, but don’t have a personal telephone or laptop. It would be unfair if they have problems because of this.

During self-isolation, I got interested in taking photos. I go out to the yard, take photos of the flowers. Now the strawberries have ripened. I try to take joyful photos to cheer up people who are locked inside. Having a relationship with nature is one way to keep spirits up.

Luka Turabelidze, 10 years old

I am in the fourth grade and have been studying online for 2 months now. Online learning is not hard at all.

I spend my free time riding my bicycle, and playing with my ball. I am lucky to have a yard, we don’t have to stay inside the house all the time. But, we don’t visit others and no one comes to visit us. That is why I am a bit bored. Also, I miss my classmates. I do talk to them on the phone, but meeting them and playing is a totally different thing. My mother and father are saying that the pandemic will go away soon and we will be able to live our lives like before. I hope that we will be able to go to the river and have a good time this summer.

Nana Samkharadze, mother of Tekla and Lile Machavariani

Tekla and Lile are having a good a time as possible during the pandemic. We try to keep up with their education – they are 4 and 5 years old – and we are teaching their age-specific skills as much as we can. We learn letters, numbers, addition and subtraction, and most of the time we play. We come up with different things. The girls have even made a small flower alley. The entire house is filled with their toys. So, we are having fun together and trying to make sure that the children do not feel the pandemic and its effects. It’s good that they have each other, they would probably be much more bored if they were alone.

Giorgi Kapchelashvili, 17 years old, Kutaisi

The recent changes have affected me very deeply. Staying at home for such a long time is bad for one’s health. Most of the time I am on the computer. I miss real life communication with others a lot.

Before, I woke up at 8 a.m., now I wake up in the afternoon. I play on my phone while still in bed. Next, I have “breakfast” and again – telephone. The exception is the three days a week when online classes start at 10 a.m., and I have to wake up early.

I think one can receive a good education through distance learning, if willing. But real school was more interesting, because discussions with friends helped me to better understand the content. I love mathematics very much, and I miss going to the math teacher.

Although, I have found one upside – I’m in a band, I play an electric guitar. During this quarantine I have improved my playing technique considerably. I have also improved my English language skills. My sister is an English teacher and has helped me with my English.

Amiko Turabelidze, 12 years old

I love TV school programmes, and I watch them often. I personally like distance learning very much, because I have more free time. Now, I can spend more time riding my bike, drawing, and listening to music. I also help my grandfather in the vineyard. I communicate with friends on the Internet, but we cannot see one another and talk. I hope everything will be alright and we will see each other soon.

Nika Khelaia, 13 years old

Initially, I was afraid that online classes would be difficult, but it doesn’t seem as hard as I expected. In a way, it’s even easy. Currently, anatomy is the most interesting subject for me, because I am going to become a doctor, specifically, a surgeon. I usually take part in a lot of competitions, and I hope to be able to participate again starting in September.

I spend my free time with my brother, I ride my bicycle, and spend time outside. I have a younger brother – he’s 2 years old – and I try to keep him entertained. I give my parents a hand so that they have time for household chores.

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Home — Essay Samples — Nursing & Health — Covid 19 — How the COVID-19 Pandemic Changed Our Lives

How The Covid-19 Pandemic Changed Our Lives

• Categories: Covid 19

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Published: Sep 7, 2023

Words: 783 | Pages: 2 | 4 min read

Table of contents

Remote work: a new normal, online learning: education in a new era, social distancing: navigating isolation, mask-wearing: a symbol of solidarity, adapting and coping: strategies for resilience, 1. flexibility and adaptability, 2. prioritizing mental health, 3. supporting vulnerable populations, 4. promoting resilience through education.

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Living Through a Crisis: How COVID-19 Has Transformed the Way We Work, Live, and Research

1 Microsoft Research, 1 Microsoft Way, Redmond, WA 98052 USA

Kori Inkpen

2 King’s Business School, King’s College London, Bush House, 30 Aldwych, London, WC2B 4PH UK

Geraldine Fitzpatrick

3 Institute for Visual Computing & Human Centered Technology (HCI Group), TU Wien, Argentinierstrasse 8, 193-5, 1040 Vienna, Austria

Naomi Yamashita

4 NTT Research Labs / Kyoto University, 2-4 Hikaridai, Keihanna, Kyoto, 6190237 Japan

5 KAIST, 291 Daehak-ro Yuseong-gu, Daejeon, 34141 Republic of Korea

The COVID-19 pandemic abruptly changed all aspects of our lives, including the way we worked, how we socialized with friends and family, and how communities functioned. As many were instructed to stay physically separated at home, businesses, educational institutions, and other social institutions had to adapt to this new reality, often turning to video calling applications and other online collaboration technologies. Unlike previous crises, the global scope of the pandemic meant that nearly every country was affected and enacted policies that changed the way the entire population lived and worked. Many people lost their job due to shutdowns to prevent the spread of the pandemic. Many of those who continued to work had to figure out how to do their job working remotely from home. People in essential services also had to learn to work in new ways, avoiding physical contact or being close to others, aspects that are typically considered critical for the accomplishment of everyday activities.

This abrupt change in the landscape of work prompted fundamental changes in our entire lives. People had to quickly re-negotiate new ways of being together at home, which now served as an office, a classroom, a family space, and an extended social gathering place. Changes prompted by the crisis in the way we live, work, and stay socially connected, will undoubtedly affect how we will do so in the future, even after the pandemic subsides. Understanding these changes, learning from them, and exploring new directions is critically important. This special issue collects together empirical work, methodological examplars, and conceptual insights provoked by this unprecedented event.

For decades, CSCW researchers have considered the use of various technologies to support distributed work, from shared file folders to share information with a team to video-mediated systems to support synchronous activities over distance. These studies frequently raised concerns about the limitations of these technologies, not only related to general concerns like privacy, but also with regard to how they seemed to constrain the most mundane aspects of collaborative work, such as how people establish mutual awareness, and how they are able to communicate and coordinate effectively. However, within weeks people who may never have used these systems before had to undertake their day-to-day activities through these systems. This reaction was simultaneously a sudden adoption of technology, an adaptation of work and life practices to what the technology supported, and an opportunity to explore novel ways of staying connected while being required to stay physically remote. This special issue drew from a diverse range of research along those dimensions.

For example, although prior to the pandemic the number of people who had used, Skype and other video-mediated systems like Google Hangouts, were growing steadily, the crisis meant that for some this kind of technology, principally Teams and Zoom became a core feature of their work, with every meeting held in this way. Alongside the use of video for formal activities, many organisations sought to draw on the technology to also support informal interaction and maintain sociability. Researchers in CSCW have long considered the nature, advantages and disadvantages of video-mediated technologies and identified a tension in trying to design systems that support both formal and informal activities. The pandemic provides a resource, albeit an unwelcome one, to observe and analyse these tensions in practice.

The use of these technologies have also had an impact on other more specialised work activities, particularly ones that rely not just on talk and a head and shoulders image of colleagues, for example those where touch and embodied action is critical. These domains and new uses of the technology have the potential to shine new light on our understanding of collaboration, interaction and practice whether these are within general settings like meetings or for more specialised activities.

This issue therefore covers different domains. For example, social welfare services experienced a sudden increase in the number of people who needed those services, while at the same time navigating how to provide those services within the constraints of public health guidelines that limited physical contact. With the sudden shift to video calling for connecting over distance, there was also an opportunity to explore sharing other signals over distance to stay closely connected. As another domain, software development companies and software engineers, whose work is tightly coupled and interdependent, also needed to find new ways to re-establish common ground and collaborate at a distance, often through trial and error despite their technical affinity.

Furthermore, the research included in this special issue was situated in different geographic regions, including Europe, Middle East, Africa, Asia, Australasia and North, South and Central America, providing an international view of how companies, individuals and teams re-negotiated work and life in response to the crisis.

CSCW researchers themselves were also affected by the crisis. Studies with human participants were limited and constrained, prompting data collection to be undertaken in particular ways. The papers in this special issue reflect these research challenges as they describe the methods and approaches that were utilised during this crisis, including online surveys, iterative short polls, participant diaries, and online interviews.

Even the process of pulling this special issue together was affected by the pandemic response. Our original call for participation expected the due date (December 2020) to be after the crisis resolved and we all had a chance to reflect back on what happened. That timeline seems absurd as we continue to operate under the lingering effects of the pandemic as of this writing in summer 2022. We especially want to thank the authors for continuing to do research under pandemic circumstances, to all the reviewers, who found time in their disrupted schedules to give feedback, and the Journal for guiding us through an unexpectedly long and complicated process. We hope this collection of articles helps the community reflect on what we learned from a CSCW perspective through research on the COVID-19 pandemic response and shares how we as a research community are responding to its ongoing effects.

Publisher’s Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Read these 12 moving essays about life during coronavirus

Artists, novelists, critics, and essayists are writing the first draft of history.

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The world is grappling with an invisible, deadly enemy, trying to understand how to live with the threat posed by a virus . For some writers, the only way forward is to put pen to paper, trying to conceptualize and document what it feels like to continue living as countries are under lockdown and regular life seems to have ground to a halt.

So as the coronavirus pandemic has stretched around the world, it’s sparked a crop of diary entries and essays that describe how life has changed. Novelists, critics, artists, and journalists have put words to the feelings many are experiencing. The result is a first draft of how we’ll someday remember this time, filled with uncertainty and pain and fear as well as small moments of hope and humanity.

At the New York Review of Books, Ali Bhutto writes that in Karachi, Pakistan, the government-imposed curfew due to the virus is “eerily reminiscent of past military clampdowns”:

Beneath the quiet calm lies a sense that society has been unhinged and that the usual rules no longer apply. Small groups of pedestrians look on from the shadows, like an audience watching a spectacle slowly unfolding. People pause on street corners and in the shade of trees, under the watchful gaze of the paramilitary forces and the police.

His essay concludes with the sobering note that “in the minds of many, Covid-19 is just another life-threatening hazard in a city that stumbles from one crisis to another.”

Writing from Chattanooga, novelist Jamie Quatro documents the mixed ways her neighbors have been responding to the threat, and the frustration of conflicting direction, or no direction at all, from local, state, and federal leaders:

Whiplash, trying to keep up with who’s ordering what. We’re already experiencing enough chaos without this back-and-forth. Why didn’t the federal government issue a nationwide shelter-in-place at the get-go, the way other countries did? What happens when one state’s shelter-in-place ends, while others continue? Do states still under quarantine close their borders? We are still one nation, not fifty individual countries. Right?

Award-winning photojournalist Alessio Mamo, quarantined with his partner Marta in Sicily after she tested positive for the virus, accompanies his photographs in the Guardian of their confinement with a reflection on being confined :

The doctors asked me to take a second test, but again I tested negative. Perhaps I’m immune? The days dragged on in my apartment, in black and white, like my photos. Sometimes we tried to smile, imagining that I was asymptomatic, because I was the virus. Our smiles seemed to bring good news. My mother left hospital, but I won’t be able to see her for weeks. Marta started breathing well again, and so did I. I would have liked to photograph my country in the midst of this emergency, the battles that the doctors wage on the frontline, the hospitals pushed to their limits, Italy on its knees fighting an invisible enemy. That enemy, a day in March, knocked on my door instead.

In the New York Times Magazine, deputy editor Jessica Lustig writes with devastating clarity about her family’s life in Brooklyn while her husband battled the virus, weeks before most people began taking the threat seriously:

At the door of the clinic, we stand looking out at two older women chatting outside the doorway, oblivious. Do I wave them away? Call out that they should get far away, go home, wash their hands, stay inside? Instead we just stand there, awkwardly, until they move on. Only then do we step outside to begin the long three-block walk home. I point out the early magnolia, the forsythia. T says he is cold. The untrimmed hairs on his neck, under his beard, are white. The few people walking past us on the sidewalk don’t know that we are visitors from the future. A vision, a premonition, a walking visitation. This will be them: Either T, in the mask, or — if they’re lucky — me, tending to him.

Essayist Leslie Jamison writes in the New York Review of Books about being shut away alone in her New York City apartment with her 2-year-old daughter since she became sick:

The virus. Its sinewy, intimate name. What does it feel like in my body today? Shivering under blankets. A hot itch behind the eyes. Three sweatshirts in the middle of the day. My daughter trying to pull another blanket over my body with her tiny arms. An ache in the muscles that somehow makes it hard to lie still. This loss of taste has become a kind of sensory quarantine. It’s as if the quarantine keeps inching closer and closer to my insides. First I lost the touch of other bodies; then I lost the air; now I’ve lost the taste of bananas. Nothing about any of these losses is particularly unique. I’ve made a schedule so I won’t go insane with the toddler. Five days ago, I wrote Walk/Adventure! on it, next to a cut-out illustration of a tiger—as if we’d see tigers on our walks. It was good to keep possibility alive.

At Literary Hub, novelist Heidi Pitlor writes about the elastic nature of time during her family’s quarantine in Massachusetts:

During a shutdown, the things that mark our days—commuting to work, sending our kids to school, having a drink with friends—vanish and time takes on a flat, seamless quality. Without some self-imposed structure, it’s easy to feel a little untethered. A friend recently posted on Facebook: “For those who have lost track, today is Blursday the fortyteenth of Maprilay.” ... Giving shape to time is especially important now, when the future is so shapeless. We do not know whether the virus will continue to rage for weeks or months or, lord help us, on and off for years. We do not know when we will feel safe again. And so many of us, minus those who are gifted at compartmentalization or denial, remain largely captive to fear. We may stay this way if we do not create at least the illusion of movement in our lives, our long days spent with ourselves or partners or families.

Novelist Lauren Groff writes at the New York Review of Books about trying to escape the prison of her fears while sequestered at home in Gainesville, Florida:

Some people have imaginations sparked only by what they can see; I blame this blinkered empiricism for the parks overwhelmed with people, the bars, until a few nights ago, thickly thronged. My imagination is the opposite. I fear everything invisible to me. From the enclosure of my house, I am afraid of the suffering that isn’t present before me, the people running out of money and food or drowning in the fluid in their lungs, the deaths of health-care workers now growing ill while performing their duties. I fear the federal government, which the right wing has so—intentionally—weakened that not only is it insufficient to help its people, it is actively standing in help’s way. I fear we won’t sufficiently punish the right. I fear leaving the house and spreading the disease. I fear what this time of fear is doing to my children, their imaginations, and their souls.

At ArtForum , Berlin-based critic and writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen reflects on martinis, melancholia, and Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo’s 2018 graphic novel Retreat , in which three young people exile themselves in the woods:

In melancholia, the shape of what is ending, and its temporality, is sprawling and incomprehensible. The ambivalence makes it hard to bear. The world of Retreat is rendered in lush pink and purple watercolors, which dissolve into wild and messy abstractions. In apocalypse, the divisions established in genesis bleed back out. My own Corona-retreat is similarly soft, color-field like, each day a blurred succession of quarantinis, YouTube–yoga, and televized press conferences. As restrictions mount, so does abstraction. For now, I’m still rooting for love to save the world.

At the Paris Review , Matt Levin writes about reading Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves during quarantine:

A retreat, a quarantine, a sickness—they simultaneously distort and clarify, curtail and expand. It is an ideal state in which to read literature with a reputation for difficulty and inaccessibility, those hermetic books shorn of the handholds of conventional plot or characterization or description. A novel like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is perfect for the state of interiority induced by quarantine—a story of three men and three women, meeting after the death of a mutual friend, told entirely in the overlapping internal monologues of the six, interspersed only with sections of pure, achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a day’s procession and recession of light and waves. The novel is, in my mind’s eye, a perfectly spherical object. It is translucent and shimmering and infinitely fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest disturbance. It is not a book that can be read in snatches on the subway—it demands total absorption. Though it revels in a stark emotional nakedness, the book remains aloof, remote in its own deep self-absorption.

In an essay for the Financial Times, novelist Arundhati Roy writes with anger about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anemic response to the threat, but also offers a glimmer of hope for the future:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

From Boston, Nora Caplan-Bricker writes in The Point about the strange contraction of space under quarantine, in which a friend in Beirut is as close as the one around the corner in the same city:

It’s a nice illusion—nice to feel like we’re in it together, even if my real world has shrunk to one person, my husband, who sits with his laptop in the other room. It’s nice in the same way as reading those essays that reframe social distancing as solidarity. “We must begin to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don’t do is also brilliant and full of love,” the poet Anne Boyer wrote on March 10th, the day that Massachusetts declared a state of emergency. If you squint, you could almost make sense of this quarantine as an effort to flatten, along with the curve, the distinctions we make between our bonds with others. Right now, I care for my neighbor in the same way I demonstrate love for my mother: in all instances, I stay away. And in moments this month, I have loved strangers with an intensity that is new to me. On March 14th, the Saturday night after the end of life as we knew it, I went out with my dog and found the street silent: no lines for restaurants, no children on bicycles, no couples strolling with little cups of ice cream. It had taken the combined will of thousands of people to deliver such a sudden and complete emptiness. I felt so grateful, and so bereft.

And on his own website, musician and artist David Byrne writes about rediscovering the value of working for collective good , saying that “what is happening now is an opportunity to learn how to change our behavior”:

In emergencies, citizens can suddenly cooperate and collaborate. Change can happen. We’re going to need to work together as the effects of climate change ramp up. In order for capitalism to survive in any form, we will have to be a little more socialist. Here is an opportunity for us to see things differently — to see that we really are all connected — and adjust our behavior accordingly. Are we willing to do this? Is this moment an opportunity to see how truly interdependent we all are? To live in a world that is different and better than the one we live in now? We might be too far down the road to test every asymptomatic person, but a change in our mindsets, in how we view our neighbors, could lay the groundwork for the collective action we’ll need to deal with other global crises. The time to see how connected we all are is now.

The portrait these writers paint of a world under quarantine is multifaceted. Our worlds have contracted to the confines of our homes, and yet in some ways we’re more connected than ever to one another. We feel fear and boredom, anger and gratitude, frustration and strange peace. Uncertainty drives us to find metaphors and images that will let us wrap our minds around what is happening.

Yet there’s no single “what” that is happening. Everyone is contending with the pandemic and its effects from different places and in different ways. Reading others’ experiences — even the most frightening ones — can help alleviate the loneliness and dread, a little, and remind us that what we’re going through is both unique and shared by all.

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March 1, 2022

Introducing 21 Ways COVID Changed the World

The pandemic didn’t bring us together, but it did show us what we need to change the most

By Jen Schwartz

Hanna Barczyk

I n the spring of 2020 a cartoon was making the rounds on social media. It showed a city perched on a tiny island, surrounded by ocean. A speech bubble emerged from the skyline: “Be sure to wash your hands and all will be well.” Not far out at sea, a giant wave labeled “COVID-19” was about to crash over the city. Behind it was an even bigger wave marked “recession.” And beyond that one was a tower of water that threatened to swallow it all: “climate change.”

I’ve often thought of that statement, by Canadian cartoonist Graeme MacKay, in moments that seem to define our pandemic disorientation: the botched messaging, willful unpreparedness and exhausted confusion. In America, though, the cartoon didn’t play out exactly as drawn. The economy actually grew in 2021. Does that mean the damage wasn’t as bad as many predicted? That question can only be answered in the context of another superlative: the U.S. claims the highest reported number of COVID cases— as well as COVID deaths —in the world.

The past two years have been full of incongruities, paradoxes and absurdities. Consider the mRNA vaccines . Scientists formed a global hive mind  and delivered a supereffective vaccine faster than anyone thought possible. But more than a year after the shots became available, the U.S. has one of the lowest vaccination rates among wealthy countries. Some Americans think the vaccine represents a weapon of oppression, if not a literal weapon.

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The politicization of our best tool for ending the pandemic surprised everyone. Except for the behavioral scientists, misinformation researchers, sociologists, historians and speculative fiction writers who spent 2020 waving their arms ( sometimes in the pages of this magazine ), calling attention to cognitive bias, influence operations, accessibility issues  and barriers to trust. COVID was never going to be the “common enemy” that finally united Americans. As Alondra Nelson, who is now deputy director for science and society at the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, explained it to me in December 2020: “This idyllic idea of solidarity, especially in a wartime modality, is created by making an enemy of someone else.” Indeed, former president Donald Trump tried to make an enemy by blaming the virus on China. His xenophobic rhetoric has spread, feeding dangerous conspiracy theories , threatening scientific research and leading to a rise in hate crimes.

The virus provoked other reckonings and pivots—not all of them bad. Many of us who could do our jobs remotely discovered the power of owning our time . COVID concerns made it easier for European cities to install miles and miles of bike lanes, giving us a glimpse of a car-free urban future . The pandemic revealed strange hidden interdependencies; hospital demand for liquid oxygen, for example, delayed rocket launches . It also worsened inequality , increased the prevalence of depressive disorders,  added “moral injury” to the common lexicon and set back students’ learning trajectories for years to come.

Amid the noise of an ongoing emergency, it can be hard to notice troubling new trends . We should be far more concerned about the shadow of long COVID. If millions of people end up developing persistent health issues after the acute disease stage, they will likely encounter a medical system unable to do much more than shrug. As with the climate crisis , many of us avert our eyes from the specter of long COVID because its effects tend to be more insidious than dramatic, and the fixes aren’t quick or easy. Dealing with the problem requires acknowledging what was already broken. Yet for every bleak future there’s a hopeful one. Propelled by the force of patient advocates, research into long COVID could lead to new understanding of other postinfection illnesses and autoimmune disorders.

When we planned this issue, Omicron had not yet emerged. I wondered if people would be interested in stories about a pandemic that wasn’t over, even if they were over the pandemic. Would we be fearmongering to suggest that the pandemic hasn’t ended  because we haven’t vaccinated the world, leaving us susceptible to variants that are more transmissible?

We’re all over COVID. But we can’t give up and leave our collective fate to the machinations of a virus, sighing in relief when one peak crests (for those of us still unharmed) and leaning on wishful thinking that only the best-case scenarios will come to pass. Avoiding adaptation isn’t the key to reaching the endemic stage, nor will it help us prepare for the even bigger waves of climate crises . We assembled this collection of stories to reflect on how COVID has already changed our world, as well as how our world has been resistant to change—even when a virus disrupts everything, even when it shows us what we need to change the most.

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How The Pandemic Has Changed The Way We Communicate

NPR's Lulu Garcia-Navarro speaks with Amelia Aldao, a clinical psychologist in New York City, about how the pandemic has impacted the ways we communicate with one another.

LULU GARCIA-NAVARRO, HOST:

Here in the United States, some 1,700 people are still dying every day, and tens of thousands are getting infected. It's been almost a year since the pandemic changed every aspect of our lives and, in particular, the way we communicate. We asked some of you to tell us about how you've talked to the people in your life, what's worked for you over the last year and what hasn't.

JAY DANIELS: Before COVID-19, we would, you know, have our occasional phone calls where I called my parents, like, every Wednesday. And I talked to my sister every once in a while. But the pandemic has changed all that. So we've gone from infrequent communication to now every Friday night, we have a Zoom dinner where the three families can get together, and the grandkids can see each other, and we can talk and have dinner together. We don't ever miss it.

(SOUNDBITE OF MUSIC)

JESSICA LINEHAM: On Thursday, March 20, 2020, my book club was scheduled to meet. Another member suggested we get together on Zoom, something we'd never done before. The rest is history. Since then, we've met up every single Thursday. We don't talk about a book every week, but we do spend a few hours chatting, commiserating and remembering what it's like to see our friends. And while I'm looking forward to getting vaccinated and seeing them in person, I have a feeling we'll keep up our more frequent Zooms, too.

KAREN FREEMAN: I've always really loved writing handwritten letters and receiving them in the mail. So at the beginning of the pandemic, when I was missing my colleagues and friends, I gathered a bunch of postcards and started writing one to someone every day at lunch, someone I was thinking of and missing. And it was a great opportunity to connect with them. I loved receiving notes back and texts and people telling me how much it meant that I was thinking of them.

CLAIRE O'KEEFE: I teach community college, and probably the biggest change that I've witnessed is how the technologies that we rely on for remote learning have this tendency to bring new student voices into the conversation. Traditional face-to-face classes have a way of rewarding one kind of student, the one who's good at speaking extemporaneously and who is comfortable raising their hand. But now I hear from everybody, whether it's via discussion boards or the chat feature. And all of those multiple entry points have this wonderful, magical way of just blowing the class wide open.

CHRIS WELLS: My friends and I always found it hard to get together. And then the pandemic struck last March, and we found ourselves home alone. One thing that we all have in common is that we are Trekkies, meaning we love "Star Trek." And so we got together one night on Zoom and decided to watch an episode of "Star Trek: The Next Generation" together through one of the watch party services. Believe it or not, we've been getting together almost every night since then.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: That was Jay Daniels (ph), Jessica Lineham (ph), Karen Freeman (ph), Claire O'Keefe (ph) and Chris Wells (ph). While technology has been great for some people - and shoutout there to those "Star Trek" fans - there's a lot we do lose through a screen - eye contact, body language, nonverbal cues. We spoke with Amelia Aldao - she's a therapist in New York - about the future of post-pandemic communication. I asked her if we found ways to compensate for what we've lost.

AMELIA ALDAO: To be honest, no. If you actually think about it - right? - we are not necessarily making eye contact. We're looking at the person on the screen, but we're not really looking at the camera. And if we are looking at the camera, we're not actually looking at the person. And that's actually very different, right? It's sort of changing the way in which we are looking into each other. So the eye contact is off.

And I've noticed myself, my clients and also some of my friends as well that then when we go see people in real life, we get a little awkward with the whole eye contact because we're sort of forgetting how to do it outside of the small circle of people that maybe live in our household or that we see regularly. So the eye contact is a big adjustment that we're all going to be facing in the next few months, to be honest.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: So I asked people on Twitter what their experience has been with communicating during COVID, and some people had some really wonderful responses. You know, people are now handwriting each other letters as a reaction against this kind of enforced virtual world that we find ourselves in. They're playing board games virtually. They're talking with family that lives far away more often than they would otherwise. So there is, you know, something positive that we can take away from all this. Do you think we will take away some of this virtual connection when we move forward - there'll be a sort of hybrid?

ALDAO: Yeah, I absolutely think so, and I hope so as well. It is convenient to use all these technologies to communicate, and that's useful. What we're missing by doing things that are efficient - this is usually in general, right? Whenever we optimize for efficiency, we tend to lose depth, and we tend to lose connection. So I think it's going to be finding a balance between using technology so that we can do certain things more efficiently, faster, better and then find time and space to connect with people differently, one-on-one, in the sort of messiness of the real world.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: What do you tell your clients about how they should go back into the world as this pandemic and its effects end?

ALDAO: So the first thing that I tell my clients and my friends and myself and everybody who's willing to listen, to be honest, is that this is not going to be a switch that we turn on and off. Basically, approach this as a quote-unquote "exposure exercise." You know, maybe you grab a coffee with a friend one week. And then maybe two weeks later, you decide to make that into a dinner with a friend or a dinner with a friend and another friend.

So that's what I tell people - be patient. It's going to take a long time. But at the same time, you have to take agency and put yourself out there. And it's going to be awkward. It's going to be difficult. It's going to be anxiety-provoking. But it's really the only path forward. So that's how we're going to get through all of this.

GARCIA-NAVARRO: Dr. Amelia Aldao is a therapist in New York City.

Thank you very much.

ALDAO: Yeah, thank you for having me.

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How We Live Now

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To be alive is to experience stress. Or, to be more dramatic: Life is suffering. But none of us could have prepared for the stress — abject, encompassing — that 2020 would bring. In January, America began the year with the baseline anxiety that the killing of an Iranian general by a U.S. drone strike might plunge us into World War III. Things generally went south from there.

Now, as COVID-19 works its way through the country, so does another ailment. Risk factors include sudden changes in routine, social isolation, fear of getting sick or making others sick, and financial insecurity. Symptoms range from nausea to hives. To get a better picture of how the pandemic has shifted the American psyche, I spoke with therapists across the country — and every provider I asked said mental health conditions like chronic stress, anxiety, and depression have spiked since March.

Stress isn't always this expansive and threatening. But when you factor in a global health crisis that adds emotional and physical stress and subtracts many coping mechanisms, it can manifest in new, seemingly unconquerable ways. "If you've had a hard day, you can't just go out for a run or head to a friend's house," says Austin-based therapist Grace Dowd . "These things might not be safe."

Losing your hobby or a familiar routine is enough to provoke grief, but probably nothing is as profound as the loss of connection with other people, of all the nuance and support of in-person interaction. Now, deciding whether to see a friend feels a lot like being forced to make a choice between your physical and mental health.

"There are often no right answers, but the consequences [of every decision] feel so high," says Ali Mattu , a clinical psychologist in the San Francisco Bay area. "Everything feels high stakes."

There’s a cruel feedback loop to chronic stress: Anxiety can trigger physical symptoms, like nausea or a sore throat, which can create new anxieties about catching the virus and/or contributing to a pandemic. Like body, like mind: All of this persistent, mounting stress in our everyday lives can exacerbate existing mental health conditions, or trigger new ones.

Jessica Harris, a therapist based in Maryland, says she’s seeing more cases of anxiety and depression among her clientele; plus, people who have been sick themselves or lost a loved one to COVID-19 are showing signs of trauma. According to Mattu, chronic stress is also known to impact physical health, even compromising the immune system. And the strain is worse for Black Americans during yet another public referendum on police violence and systemic racism.

Ednesha Saulsbury , a therapist at Be Well Psychotherapy in New York City, reports that many of her Black clients are dealing with PTSD symptoms, anxiety, hypervigilance, and avoidance since the death of George Floyd in May.

Apologies if reading this has so far created more anxiety in your own life, but we promise, there is good news: Stress has spiked for most of us, but therapists say personal growth has too. For example, some people are taking stock of their lives and rearranging priorities to match their values. Dowd says a crisis of this scale can enable people to pull the trigger on major life decisions they had been putting off, such as moving in with a partner, quitting a job they hate for a more satisfying one, or getting married or divorced. She chalks this up to people having ongoing feelings of restlessness and being "stuck."

"The pandemic is the great accelerant," she says, citing a strange blend of boredom and anxiety that can fast-track plans to fruition. A sense of hopeful desperation amid a complete absence of certainty is also leading people to rekindle old spiritual practices, or start new ones. Mindfulness practices , meditation, and yoga — especially practiced first thing in the morning as a tone-setter for the inevitably stressful day ahead — help people be more present, even taking the edge off anxiety symptoms, Saulsbury says.

More good news: Therapy has become a bigger priority than ever. Early on in the pandemic, that wasn’t necessarily the case: Saulsbury says numerous clients dropped out of therapy due to financial insecurity or the lack of privacy in tiny New York apartments (at least one of her patients had to conduct therapy in the bathroom). But several months in, the tide has turned. Now, she says, more people are willing, even desperate, to talk through their problems.

Everyone has a different story, but a common theme in session is self-compassion. People beat themselves up about not achieving at work the way they did pre-pandemic, or for being "bad friends" or "bad partners," which creates a sense of ongoing, low-level guilt. Both Dowd and Saulsbury say they focus on normalizing disappointment and grief — these are, as they say, unprecedented times — and encouraging people, in general, to take it easier on themselves.

By Aliza Kelly

By Sophie Saint Thomas

With all the unexpected pain and confusion 2020 brought, it’s easy to view the year as a wash. But Saulsbury says she doesn’t see it that way and neither do an astounding number of her clients. "I talk to a lot of people who say 2020 helped them sit with their feelings in a way they hadn’t before, to figure out what they wanted, and to figure out what’s important to them," she says. "So many people have lost their lives. It makes sense that we’re thinking about ours in a different way." Or, in other words: After a long night, dawn is inevitable. — Ashley Abramson is a writer in Minneapolis.

In a June interview , Stanford University economist Nicholas Bloom estimated that the COVID-19 pandemic had caused the layoffs of 3 in 10 Americans, asked 2 out of 10 to risk their lives for "essential" business, and pushed the grateful others to the gauzy line between work-life balance. As organizations in our society — corporations, universities, government agencies — whittle down budgets, American workers feel pressure to make themselves as indispensable as possible. For those who previously worked office jobs (even as that adjective becomes less and less useful) that pressure is more than likely bearing down on them at their kitchen table or bedroom desk. A study published this past summer that observed 3.1 million employees found that workdays under lockdown had become almost an hour longer on average — and that was just a couple of months into what’s sure to be a lasting shift.

Lasting, because this whole setup is... actually working pretty well. So are we: A May survey by Global Workplace Analytics and workplace consulting firm Iometrics found that around 80 percent of employees believe they’re more productive when working from home (and 70 percent of managers say it’s either the same or better). Seventy-six percent want to work from home at least one day a week even after the pandemic is sorted out, and most would prefer at least two days at home, with fewer than 10 percent itching to return to their cubicle full-time.

But having your home suddenly transformed into your workspace can create problems for those of us hoping to delineate, instead of blur, our work-life balance. In the before times, most people were expected to work during the hours when they were in the office. When your office is also your house, does that mean you’re on the clock 24/7? Working from home might mean you are less distracted by corporate responsibilities, but most companies are ill-equipped to unburden their employees of their home responsibilities, which did not magically vanish when they were asked to turn their living room into a Zoom set. 

"You're forced to engage in multiple roles," explains Tessa West , an associate professor in the psychology department at New York University. "You’'e a mother, you're a spouse, you're taking care of a dog, you're also trying to work — chronic stress really piles up." (According to a report from Boston Consulting Group, parents in the U.S. are spending nearly twice as much time managing chores and schooling, with mothers devoting 15 more hours per week on average than fathers.)

One way to attempt some sort of physical barrier between work and nonwork hours is to carve out a home office, even if it’s just a corner of a room. Remote work support is something Anita Kamouri , vice president and cofounder of Iometrics, is adamant that companies need to provide for remote employees: "You can't just be sitting at a kitchen table for eight hours a day." California, Iowa, Massachusetts, Montana, New York, Pennsylvania, and Washington, D.C., all have labor laws that say companies must pay for "necessary expenditures" for employees to do their jobs from home, though what counts as "necessary" varies widely depending on your position — and has likely changed since the pandemic.

Once that company-funded (best of luck!) home office is set up, it's on employees to manage their own time. West and Kamouri agree that flexible workers who are good at multitasking and don't get distracted by "chronic uncertainty" will most easily thrive in our new reality. Their suggestion is as straightforward as it is effective: Make a daily schedule. It's the only way to keep yourself on track and ensure your work time doesn't entirely bleed into your personal time.

But even with the most rigid of boundaries, a crisis of this scale amplifies the idea of "work" beyond what you do for money. For essential and employed contingents , its associated stress can take on monstrous new forms: the fear of getting sick, of losing a paycheck, of losing a home. At this moment, work transcends what we do for money. It's how we get through each day. — Kara McGrath is Allure.com’s deputy editor.

On the second day of June, Instagram was swarmed with black squares in the name of solidarity, which, oddly enough, made a spectacle of a movement, but not in the best light (or filter, rather). Pitch-black boxes — intended to express solidarity with the Black Lives Matter campaign in response to the killings of Breonna Taylor, George Floyd, and Ahmaud Arbery — flooded the platform, effectively drowning out the voices of organizers and protesters.

The BlackLivesMatter hashtag, and indeed parts of the movement, fell victim to a mass gesture of performative activism, which gave nothing to the minority forced to social distance during one of the most significant political times in their lives. What we have known about social media became heartbreakingly clear: People were interested in change, but they were more interested in appearing interested.

#BlackoutTuesday did nothing to relieve the traumas of racism . It did ignite a discussion about what constitutes protest. Social media is reactionary. It prioritizes immediate user responses to everything from cute cat videos to racial injustice and socioeconomic inequity. The Movement for Black Lives has helped illuminate centuries of deeply entrenched American racism. It is impossible to respond and synthesize that quickly. Hiring a graphic designer to crank out a social post containing a Black hand "standing together" with a white one is not enough. The Black community has to be seen, heard, and, in some cases, hired to work toward actual change. Everybody lives on the internet. But the work happens in the real world. — Jennet Jusu is a writer and graphic designer in Brooklyn.

It’s 4:45 p.m. on a Wednesday. Specifically, it’s 4:45 p.m. on the 29th Wednesday I've spent working from home. My gaze floats to the bar cart in my living room-slash-office. I wonder if I'm still technically on the clock, but then remember there no longer is a clock. Some days I wake up at the crack of dawn and crash by sundown; other days I struggle to be up and dressed for a Zoom call at 9 a.m., but then work well into the evening. So if time is merely a construct, does that mean happy hour is now... any hour? (Reader, I poured myself a glass of Good Clean Wines ' red.)

According to data from Drizly, an online platform through which you can order all manner of alcohol straight to your door, the answer is yes. During 2019, 63 percent of orders were placed between 3 p.m. and 7 p.m. But this year, just 54 percent of orders were placed during those typically "happy" hours. And from early morning to late night, the orders were much, much larger: The average value of a single order increased by nearly 50 percent between April and June as lockdowns took hold across the country. Drizly experienced a 136 percent increase in customers during that same quarter.

Those numbers suggest a U-turn in the way we collectively drink. Before the pandemic, the sober-curious movement — the premise of which is controlled, conscious consumption — was on an upward trajectory, fueled by social media-friendly initiatives like Dry January and Sober October. Of course, it's hard to say how people are consuming in the confines of their own home, even if we can track when and how much alcohol is delivered to their doorstep. But people were certainly talking a lot about only drinking a little.

Based on an informal poll of my friends and my feeds, that talk has largely ceased. It's no secret that people experiencing acute stress may be more likely to seek out substances like alcohol that might help them deal with it. And when stress is accompanied (and perhaps caused) by a warping of the very concept of time, well, as many of us have learned, that likelihood increases. "I think it's a combination of stress and autonomy. Without our normal routine to rely on, we might see ourselves behave in new, out-of-character ways," says Ursula Whiteside , a clinical psychologist with the University of Washington in Seattle and CEO of NowMattersNow.org. "A lot of the time, we stay on track because we have somewhere to be and something to do, but so much of that structure is gone."

And even when there’s a Zoom meeting at 3 p.m., if you turn off your webcam, you're pretty much on your own. "Alcohol consumption is something that's so personal and at the same time ingrained in many, many aspects of life, ranging from celebration to devastation," says Hilary Sheinbaum , a New York City-based writer and author of The Dry Challenge. "I've talked to friends who have consumed more alcohol in the past few months than ever before; [but] on the other hand, some have been drinking less because they have fewer opportunities to [do so] in social situations."

If you are in the former camp, consider exploring online resources provided by the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism . "In general, any increase in drinking during the pandemic could be a cause for concern," says George F. Koob , the organization’s director, "particularly if the increase stems from an attempt to cope with the stress and anxiety associated with the crisis."

The urge to sip something as the sun sets over your home office might best be satiated by a new wave of nonalcoholic and lower-ABV (alcohol by volume) beverages, all of which still have feel-good vibes. There’s Ghia , the nonalcoholic aperitif launched by former Glossier executive Mélanie Masarin , which packs botanicals like elderflower, ginger, and rosemary extracts into one aesthetically pleasing bottle. Recess peddles what is essentially souped-up sparkling water, bursting with buzzy ingredients like hemp extract (for calming) and ginseng (for focus). The brand Kin ’s "euphoric" cocktails are dosed with nootropics, compounds that may support cognitive function.

Lower-ABV options include hard kombucha from brands like Kombrewcha and Jiant , and Wild Arc Farm ’s piquette, a fresh, fizzy take on white wine (with a lot less of the white wine). Cheers! There’s something for everybody. — Dianna Mazzone is Allure’s senior beauty editor.

Global events have always influenced the way humans groom, usually in unpredictable ways. During WWII, beauty was a propaganda tool . Women were urged to wear makeup as a sign of patriotism, a way to maintain their femininity while working jobs that were traditionally filled by men, and as a means to lift the spirits of husbands and brothers and male strangers fighting overseas. Global hardships always impact the beauty industry and, in return, how we take care of ourselves.

For the first time in decades, the beauty industry is poised to shrink 15 percent overall , undoing years of growth in a fraction of that time. In March we were instructed on what was essential to live; beauty was not on the list. Malls, department stores, and stand-alone beauty retailers turned off their lights. Local, neighborhood beauty supply stores, which often carry essential supplies beyond synthetic hair and lip gloss, also closed. As we prepared to limit trips to the grocery store, we took stock and used what we had in our beauty cabinets. We canceled our hair appointments. We had to reorient ourselves.

Theresa Schneider, an account manager in Cincinnati, and one of many who had to sever her aesthetic rituals, is adjusting how she takes care of herself in a virtual work world where she's still expected to look presentable for Zoom meetings. "Through these video experiences, I've had to become comfortable ‘in the skin I’m in,'" she says. "But I miss chatting it up with my hairdresser and the amazing shampoo head and neck massages. They are not the same when you do it yourself."

Salons are feeling her absence. Soaring online sales for nail polish and hair color suggest that people are primping in private. Salons are trying their best (many, if not all, working at reduced capacity), but finding it impossible to forecast their futures. Some Black women, in particular, have taken this opportunity to play at home and experiment with styles they rarely had time to try in the not-so-distant past. Samira Ibrahim, a marketing consultant in Los Angeles, used to get braids done every two to three months, but is doing her natural hair for the first time in a long while. "To be honest, I think a lot of it has to do with the respectability politics of workplaces," she says of having the space to reconsider her hair. "I've been way more relaxed." (She's referring to her hair, but still — what a phrase to say in 2020!)

With the notable exceptions of eye and brow makeup, cosmetics sales are down across the board ; prestige brands alone are seeing a 55 to 75 percent revenue loss , according to McKinsey. What people are buying: the appearance of wellness. Luxury retailer Violet Grey describes its best-sellers as "natural" makeup. People want to look good, but now have time to redefine and, maybe, embrace what "looking good" means for them.

A recent boom in plastic surgery might suggest something else: that people are more insecure than ever after gazing at themselves for hours on end. But it's important to note that this spike occurs after a suspension of elective procedures. If you rescheduled every social event you had to cancel in March, April, and May, you might be seeing a boom in your personal life. This is all to say, it remains to be seen how literally the face of beauty will change when things approach normal again.

"I'm okay not wearing makeup when I do go into the office, shopping, out to dinner," my mother told me recently. "I look just fine without it!" When I was growing up, my mom was a licensed hairstylist. Experimenting with beauty products was a way of life. Knowing my mother, an older version of myself, feels content without wearing makeup on Zoom calls surely means I can do the same. The message feels clear: Take me as I am. We'll see if it sticks. — Darian Symoné Harvin is a writer in Los Angeles.

Humans are not Earth's best tenants. We probably don't even crack the top 10. But in a general effort to clean up the place, we began to use information that environmentalists and climate scientists had been sharing with us for years. Then a pandemic happened. In some ways, the planet is one of the few entities that has seen a major upside: As flights were canceled and cars remained in park, air pollution fell to unprecedented levels around the world.

"I've lived in New Delhi my whole life and there's never been a blue sky," said Indian beauty editor Vasudha Rai when Allure checked in with her in the spring. "Now I sit in my garden, look at that blue sky, inhale and exhale." As the world has eased restrictions, reopening slowly, most of its inhabitants have kept the radius of their travel shrunken significantly . More families are choosing a bubble lifestyle (living and socializing with a small, core group of people who agree on the same terms of quarantine) and enjoying the privileges of shared living. A September McKinsey poll found that post-pandemic, those surveyed anticipated walking and biking more than they had prior to the coronavirus and eschewing air travel for car travel. (That said, the airline industry — one of the major antagonists in the climate crisis — is expected to recover .)

We've made at least temporary (but hopefully not) lifestyle changes that reduce our Earth-warming carbon emissions, but we’ve taken a bad turn on the ocean-choking waste part of our planetary abuse. COVID-19's early days also came with an immediate dive back into the familiarity of single-use products we had finally started to avoid.

Disinfectant wipes, latex gloves, and multiple layers of packaging felt like protection against the unknown. The National Waste & Recycling Association estimated that, in some cases, individuals created as much as 30 percent more waste than pre-COVID. But as individuals worked at home, ate meals at home, hosted (virtual) events at home, we also gained a new consciousness of exactly what we consume — and just how much we send out in the trash. A newfound, conscience-soothing passion for recycling rose in some of us, sorting and sifting in the absolute, by-the-book, right way. But, as Allure has told you before and will keep repeating: Only nine percent of all plastic waste ever produced has actually been turned into something that we are able to use again (i.e., recycled).

"We have somehow twisted recycling into [being] about doing the right thing," says Tom Szaky , CEO of TerraCycle, a recycling company that prides itself of being able to recycle the unrecyclable. "The only things recycled anywhere in the world are the things that can be recycled at a profit." And, for the most part, there’s simply no market there. It's beyond time to redefine recycling not as a moral imperative but as a mercenary one — and to remember that new definition before the plastic ever makes it into your hand.

Just in the past few weeks, as of this writing, with so much more information on how the virus travels (in the air and not on surfaces, so wear your masks and socially distance, people!), there has been a recommitment to waste reduction in many areas. But for better or worse, the onus really remains on individuals for now. "Companies have no obligation to solve the waste problem that [a product] creates after it goes to the consumer," says Kate Kurera , deputy director of Environmental Advocates NY. So the choices we make matter. Wildly. Money is power. Withholding it pressures companies that are not living up to your sustainability standards to change.

Call your congresspeople and senators to ask for waste and recycling regulations. Keep an eye on the Environmental Protection Agency’s recent proposal for a National Recycling Strategy and Senator Tom Udall’s Break Free From Plastic Pollution Act . Call and write to your favorite companies and ask them to make choices more in line with a movement toward zero waste. Use those woven grocery totes. Use the ever-proliferating (and ever-more-charming) reusable, machine-washable masks. And use your voice. — Cotton Codinha is a writer in Brooklyn.

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10 ways COVID-19 changed the world

The illness has affected nearly every aspect of life.

The year 2020 was defined by the coronavirus pandemic , arguably the worst pandemic the world has seen in 100 years. COVID-19 has caused more than 75 million cases and 1.6 million deaths worldwide as of mid-December. The illness has affected nearly every aspect of life, from work and school to everyday activities like getting groceries, and even our wardrobes. 

Here are just some of the ways COVID-19 changed the world in 2020.

New vocabulary 

A number of new words and phrases entered the general lexicon in 2020. We were told we need to " social distance ," or stay six feet apart, so that we could " flatten the curve ," or slow the disease's spread in order to reduce the burden on the healthcare system. People even became familiar with relatively obscure epidemiological terms like the " basic reproduction number " (R0, pronounced R-nought), or the average number of people who catch the virus from a single infected person. And of course the name of the illness itself, COVID-19, is a new term, with the World Health Organization officially naming the disease on Feb. 11.

Wardrobe addition  

The must-have fashion item of 2020 was a small piece of cloth to put around your face. 

With medical masks in short supply at the beginning of the year, sewing enthusiasts began churning out homemade masks for their communities. Then, clothing companies and retailers got on board, adding masks to their fashion lines. Now, in many parts of the world, you can't leave your house without putting on a mask.

At first, it was unclear whether wearing cloth masks would protect against COVID-19, but as the year went on, numerous studies showed the benefits of wearing masks , for both the wearer and those around them .

Anxiety and depression

The pandemic took a serious toll on people's mental health in 2020. One study published in August by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that levels of anxiety, depression and suicidal thoughts skyrocketed amid the pandemic.

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The study could not determine the reason for the rise in mental health conditions, but factors relating to the pandemic, such as social isolation, school and university closures, unemployment and other financial worries, as well as the threat of the disease itself, may play a role, the authors said. 

Pandemic drinking 

Another insidious side effect of the pandemic was increases in alcohol consumption . A study published in October in the journal JAMA Network Open found that alcohol consumption in the United States rose 14% during pandemic shutdowns. 

Women in particular reported worrying increases in heavy drinking during the spring of 2020, according to the study.

"In addition to a range of negative physical health associations, excessive alcohol use may lead to or worsen existing mental health problems," the authors concluded.

As businesses began to open after initial lockdowns, people needed to adjust to a new normal to reduce the risk of spreading the disease from everyday activities . Businesses implemented universal mask policies. Dining switched to outdoors only. Waiting rooms became a thing of the past. You needed a reservation to go to the gym. And large gatherings and events were banned completely in many areas.

Although there is no way to ensure zero risk of catching COVID-19, officials said taking precautions could reduce the risk of spread. However, as the fall began, many areas went into lockdown again amid surging COVID-19 cases.

Rampant rumors 

From the idea that drinking bleach can kill the norovirus to a theory that the virus was created in a lab as a bioweapon, the COVID-19 pandemic has generated a flurry of misinformation. Indeed, one study, published Aug. 10 in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene , found that the pandemic has hatched more than 2,000 rumors, conspiracy theories and reports of discrimination.

Such false information can have serious consequences — the researchers of the new study found that COVID-19 related rumors were linked to thousands of hospitalizations and hundreds of deaths.

"Health agencies must track misinformation associated with ... COVID-19 in real time, and engage local communities and government stakeholders to debunk misinformation," the authors concluded.

Pandemic puppies

With orders to stay at home as much as possible, many people decided to get a furry friend during quarantine.

The coronavirus pandemic has been a boon for pet adoptions, particularly dog adoptions. Many shelters, breeders and pet stores reported a surge in applications for dogs, with the demand far exceeding supply, according to The Washington Post . Some shelters reported double the number of adoptions compared with the previous year, and needed to resort to  waitlists to handle the demand.

Not only is this good news for pets who need homes, but also for their humans, given that many studies show there are mental health benefits to pet ownership, according to NPR .

School closures 

Children seem to be largely spared from the most severe effects of COVID-19, but they can still act as spreaders of the disease. So many schools across the U.S. and the world made the decision to close in 2020, and opt for virtual learning instead. Questions around how long to remain closed and how to safely reopen were the subject of much debate. As fall arrived with a number of schools still closed, many children seemed to be falling behind in learning. Statewide polls have found that nearly 9 in 10 parents are worried about their children falling behind at school due to the pandemic closures, according to The Educational Trust . 

Lowered emissions 

Coronavirus lockdowns, which slowed the normal hustle and bustle of cities to a near halt, also appeared to dramatically lower emissions of carbon dioxide around the world. A study published May 19 in the journal Nature Climate Change found that daily global carbon dioxide emissions dropped by 17% in early 2020, compared with levels in 2019. That appears to be one of the biggest drops in recorded history. But this temporary drop is far from enough to undo the harmful effects of man-made climate change.

"Although this is likely to lead to the largest cut in emissions since World War II, it will make barely a dent in the ongoing build-up of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere," Richard Betts, Head of Climate Impacts Research at the Met Office Hadley Centre in England, said in a statement . 

New vaccine 

Developing a new vaccine normally takes years to decades. But in an unprecedented feat, researchers in the U.S. and several other countries created a coronavirus vaccine — taking it from lab bench to bedside — in just under 12 months. When 2020 began, COVID-19 and the virus that causes it, SARS-CoV-2, were unknown to science. But once the virus was identified, scientists acted quickly to begin developing a vaccine. By mid-March, early trials in humans had begun, and by late summer, the vaccines were ready for more advanced trials with thousands of participants. In December, the United States authorized two COVID-19 vaccines , from Pfizer and Moderna, after trials showed impressive results. Both vaccines used molecules known as mRNA to stimulate an immune response against the coronavirus, marking the first time that any mRNA vaccine has been authorized for use in people. The vaccines were heralded as an extraordinary scientific advancement , and the first doses were administered to healthcare workers in the U.S. in mid-December.

Originally published on Live Science.  

Rachael is a Live Science contributor, and was a former channel editor and senior writer for Live Science between 2010 and 2022. She has a master's degree in journalism from New York University's Science, Health and Environmental Reporting Program. She also holds a B.S. in molecular biology and an M.S. in biology from the University of California, San Diego. Her work has appeared in Scienceline, The Washington Post and Scientific American.

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Coronavirus

COVID-19 photo essay reflects on the day our lives changed forever three years ago

While it feels almost a lifetime ago for some, it's been exactly three years since a state of emergency was declared in Western Australia as the novel coronavirus began to send shock waves around the world. 

Already isolated by its geography, the unprecedented move cemented the state as a hermit kingdom and fundamentally changed the way sandgropers went about their daily lives. 

This picture essay illustrates a pivotal and unsettling chapter in our history, and reflects how the virus dictated the way we lived.

Panic and confusion

COVID-19 was first detected in the Chinese city of Wuhan in December 2019, but the panic didn't set in until a couple of months later when news of mass deaths overseas was beamed in to living rooms across Australia.

The virus captivated the entire world, but the threat really hit home when Australia recorded its first COVID death on March 1 — a Perth man who had been aboard the Diamond Princess cruise ship. 

Australians were given a stern warning to return home as soon as possible ahead of the country's border being slammed shut, with international arrivals forced into hotel quarantine in an effort to stop the deadly virus getting in.

The first round of COVID-19 restrictions, including gathering limits and indoor venue closures, started to give people an inkling of how much their lives were about to be turned upside down. 

Holidays and big events were cancelled, weddings went online and Rottnest Island went from the home of quokka selfies to a quarantine hub for cruise ship passengers. 

Lines curled around liquor stores as the fear of being locked down without a cold stubbie or red wine in hand was too much to bear for most, while subscriptions to streaming services went through the roof. 

Grocery store shelves were stripped bare and arguments broke out in supermarket aisles as panic buying led to a nationwide toilet paper drought.

ABC reporter Francesca Mann dared to dream when she saw a shopper walk past her with the rare commodity at a Geraldton supermarket.

"I could not believe my eyes," she said.

"I quickly walked over to the toilet paper aisle and there were about seven packs left. It felt like the most valuable item at the time, so it got the royal treatment on the way home."

Mann snapped an equally humorous shot of her pet cat Arya sprawled across her desk in the first few days of working from home. 

'Stop the spread'

The state introduced its first round of border restrictions at the end of March, restricting interstate travel to stop the virus spreading between regions and to protect vulnerable Indigenous communities. 

On April 5, 2020, the WA government implemented its harshest border restrictions yet, slamming its borders shut — not just to international arrivals, but to the east as well. 

It marked the beginning of an upsetting chapter in the state's history, leaving families divided for two years and living up to Premier Mark McGowan's promise to turn WA into an "island within an island".

The travel restrictions wreaked havoc on the tourism and events industries, but it also created a spike in domestic tourism when the state eased restrictions to allow West Australians to holiday in their own backyard. 

Sandgropers swapped their annual pilgrimage to Bali for the sublime sunsets in Broome, the chance to swim with whale sharks in Exmouth or to see the ancient gorges in the Karijini National Park.

But Perth's bustling city centre had turned into a ghost town as West Australians dutifully obeyed restrictions, which shut down the city. 

Just a few pedestrians could be spotted in Forrest Place in April, 2020. Image: Hugh Sando.

Even a trip to the beach came with reminders to practise social distancing. Image: Amelia Searson.

Trains crisscrossed the city virtually empty. Image: Hugh Sando.

The doors to restaurants, cafes and bars were shuttered. Image: Rebecca Mansell.

The state library was eerily empty. Image: Emma Wynne.

Children were cooped up inside as playgrounds closed. Image: Gian De Poloni.

Slogans like this started popping up around Perth as people banded together to face the crisis. Image: Damian Smith.

For weeks, the cruise ship Artania became the focus of a tense stand-off between the operator and Mr McGowan, who demanded it leave WA waters.

Anzac Day that year was unlike any other due to the traditional service and march being cancelled — the first time since 1942.

Veterans and families instead marked Anzac Day from the end of their suburban driveways.

By this stage, the virus dominated every aspect of our lives.

Even the security guard, Steve, who opened the door for the premier before he delivered his daily press conference, had become part of life under COVID.

Living inside the bubble

Restrictions were gradually eased in May after the virus was eliminated, allowing West Australians to continue living relatively normally for many months compared to what was happening over east.

With no community transmission, WA moved from a hard border to a controlled border in October, with authorities continually lowering and lifting the drawbridge in line with outbreaks in other states. 

On December 5, a tool was unveiled that would dramatically change the way West Australians interacted with the world around them.

The trio of snap lockdowns

But it was impossible to keep the virus out forever, with the state's 10-month coronavirus-free streak ending on January 21, 2021 when a hotel quarantine security guard tested positive.

Perth was locked down twice more in 2021 — from April 24 to April 27 after a hotel quarantine outbreak and from June 29 to July 3 after three COVID cases were detected in the community. 

Vaccine hesitancy takes hold

In October, one of the most divisive policies in WA's history was announced — mandatory vaccination for 75 per cent of the state's workforce.

Some were concerned about potential health impacts from the vaccine and felt it was impinging on people's right to have autonomy over their own bodies, while others felt it was the only way to reopen the borders and protect people from the virus. 

When the double-dose vaccination rate reached 80 per cent in December, it was announced that WA would finally reopen its border to the rest of the world on February 5, 2022.

But the joy that rippled through the community was short-lived, with WA Premier Mark McGowan performing a sensational backflip just a few weeks later at a late night press conference when he announced the reopening would be delayed.

However, it turned out the virulent strain was circulating in the community anyway, and the virus started to spread significantly for the first time in two years. 

'Let it rip'

On February 18, Mr McGowan made the announcement many had been waiting for — WA's hard border would come down on March 3 as he conceded it was no longer possible to stop the spread of the virus.

Many employers, including ABC News in Perth, quickly reverted to working from home arrangements for all but operationally critical staff to minimise the risk of spreading the virus in the workplace. 

As case numbers grew, so too did tensions between the state government and peak medical groups that warned against easing restrictions, as cracks in the hospital system deepened.

After being on the frontline of the battle against COVID, health workers began rallying for better pay, which would eventually lead to full-scale industrial action. 

As vaccination rates rose and the COVID outbreak in WA eased in April, the McGowan Government lifted most mask-wearing requirements but the Perth CBD remained a ghost town. 

Most remaining restrictions were removed in May as the triple-dose vaccination rate hit 80 per cent, but many vulnerable West Australians chose to stay home to shield themselves from the virus. 

But COVID continued to fade into the background for most, as the things that derailed our lives — lockdowns, mandatory isolation, mask and vaccine mandates— gradually became distant memories.

Living with the virus

People have learned how to live with the virus, and getting the vaccine has become about as normal as getting a yearly flu jab. 

After 963 days, WA's state of emergency finally ended on November 4, but the heartache caused by the 956 people who lost their lives, and the far-reaching impact on society and people's livelihoods, will be felt for years to come. 

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COVID 2025: How the pandemic is changing our world

Video series explores impacts of coronavirus—from health care to international relations.

Coronavirus is changing life as we know it on a daily basis. But what will our world look like in the next five years? How will the pandemic permanently reshape our lives?

In the video series “COVID 2025: Our World in the Next 5 Years,” leading scholars at the University of Chicago discuss how COVID-19 will change health care and international relations, education and urban life, and many other aspects of our lives. The series, from the producers of the  Big Brains podcast , provides new insights and understandings into the pandemic—and its long-term impacts. See the episodes below:

Facing the threat of future pandemics

How covid-19 will challenge and change cities, changing the rules of international relations, changing the face of health care, how an explosion in remote learning changes education.

The coronavirus pandemic has dramatically altered the way we think about public health in the United States and how we deliver patient care, says Assoc. Prof. Emily Landon, a leading University of Chicago infectious disease expert.

In this episode of “COVID 2025: Our World in the Next 5 Years,” Landon discusses building a robust frontline defense against future outbreaks through a dedicated corps of epidemiologists that would respond to future outbreaks by using contact tracing on smartphones. She also argues that hospitals should rethink how they use Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) while building upon technology such as telemedicine to protect and empower medical personnel.

While we have learned a lot from this pandemic, Landon suggests larger shifts in public health are needed to better protect the population against future outbreaks. She argues that we must trust our public health experts, comply with health regulations, and build a more equitable health care system that benefits everyone in order to combat COVID-19 as well as address future epidemics.

The coronavirus pandemic presents special challenges for urban areas—not only in public health but also how cities fundamentally operate, says Luis Bettencourt, a leading University of Chicago researcher in urban science.

In this episode of “COVID 2025: Our World in the Next 5 Years,” Bettencourt discusses how the pandemic has forced cities to reexamine the complex systems and networks that comprise every aspect of urban life. The worldwide shutdowns provided urban scientists with a rare glimpse into the inner workings of cities. This “X-ray” created a clearer picture of the socioeconomic disparities between neighborhoods and populations—and their devastating effects as the virus spread.

Bettencourt argues that it is imperative that we learn from this current crisis. Utilizing these insights will help policymakers and local officials create better living conditions and an infrastructure that promotes better public health, human development and sustainability.

The coronavirus pandemic has exposed just how fragile the international system is, fueling changes in alliances, institutions and the global economy, says Assoc. Prof. Paul Poast, a leading University of Chicago political scientist.

In this episode of “COVID 2025: Our World in the Next 5 Years,” Poast discusses how the pandemic is accelerating changes in international relations as nations respond by stepping away from each other rather than taking steps to tackle the crisis together. In the years ahead, these shifts could include China increasingly asserting itself as an alternative to the United States on the world stage, and a retreat by many nations, including the United States, from global institutions such as the World Health Organization. 

What’s only beginning to emerge is the potential for sweeping impacts from coronavirus on developing nations, which could have a deep impact on the global economy in the years ahead. In addition, Poast says, watch for the power of the U.S. Federal Reserve to continue to grow globally and increased evidence of the need for global political solutions rather than just advances in technology.

The coronavirus pandemic is upending health care in the United States. It could result in a series of changes, ranging from a sizable expansion in telemedicine to a dramatic shift in how we think about health care coverage, says Prof. Katherine Baicker, a leading health economist at the University of Chicago and dean of the Harris School of Public Policy.

In this episode of “COVID 2025: Our World in the Next 5 Years,” Baicker discusses how the pandemic has shown the interconnectedness of the U.S. population—and that old dividing lines between the insured and uninsured no longer make sense. The pandemic could result in support for a more robust public health care system and a variety of new tools to monitor public health, and ramp up or ramp down economic activity if needed.

At the same time, Baicker sees the potential for new measures to increase the flexibility of the U.S. health care system. They could include allowing nurses to work in different states under a single license, letting physician assistants provide expanded care, and removing liability barriers to allow medical equipment makers to increase production at times of crisis.

The coronavirus pandemic has caused the United States and other nations around the world to rush into remote learning. This sudden shift will have a sizable impact on teaching and learning long after COVID-19 crisis ends, says Prof. Randal C. Picker, a leading legal scholar at the University of Chicago Law School.

In this episode of “COVID 2025: Our World in the Next 5 Years,” Picker says that the technology and infrastructure for remote learning has been building in the United States over the last decade, making the huge push online possible. This massive shift is resulting in experimenting on a global scale, while underscoring a digital divide based on income and location that has long existed, says Picker, the James Parker Hall Distinguished Service Professor of Law.

Remote learning is a powerful tool from elementary school to professional education classes, and while Picker says it doesn’t replace the classroom, it shrinks distances and supports teaching in new and interesting ways. For example, inviting a guest speaker from Europe is a few clicks away rather than requiring air travel.

However, considerable regulatory steps are needed over the next five years to support the growth in distance learning, including addressing privacy concerns and increasing federal funding for infrastructure to increase broadband access. To close the digital divide, the federal government needs to view broadband like the U.S. Postal Service when it was first developed, concentrating on connecting all citizens rather than just communities where the service makes economic sense, Picker says.

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Classroom Q&A

With larry ferlazzo.

In this EdWeek blog, an experiment in knowledge-gathering, Ferlazzo will address readers’ questions on classroom management, ELL instruction, lesson planning, and other issues facing teachers. Send your questions to [email protected]. Read more from this blog.

Students Share How COVID Has Changed Their Lives

• Share article

(This is the final post in a two-part series. You can see Part One here .)

The new questions-of-the-week (directed toward students) is:

What is the best thing about school this year? Why?

What is the worst thing about school this year? Why?

Several students from our school shared their responses to these questions in Part One .

Here are even more:

Disrupted Plans

Pachia Xiong is a junior at Luther Burbank High School in Sacramento, Calif.:

The best thing about school this year is being able to hang out with my friends again. I think this is the best thing for me this year because I don’t have to use social media or Zoom to contact them. As the previous school year was spent through distance learning, I had little contact with my friends because I was not someone who frequented my social media back then. Now, I am able to, with ease, talk to them in person. It feels much nicer that way.

The worst thing about school this year is being unable to do everything I planned because of COVID-19. Over last year, during distance learning, I was highly hopeful of returning to school in person. Following those hopes came the goals I wanted to achieve upon our return. Some of which involved holding club events and activities that could be enjoyed by both club members and outsiders. However, the rise in COVID-19 cases put a lid over those goals, and now, everything feels as though it’s come to a stop.

‘Classes Are Easier’

Brenda Lin is a senior at Luther Burbank High School:

The best thing about this year is that most of my classes are easier because of the pandemic. For example, most of my finals for first semester were really easy because a lot of it was stress-free assignments. The teachers are more understanding about missing work and absences, and overall, I get sick less when I’m at school because I’m wearing a mask all the time. Overall, it’s a good way to end my high school years.

The worst thing about this year is that we have to be in school during the pandemic. When we were in distance learning, it was definitely a lot easier in terms of difficulty of assignments, but my motivation was very low. It is about the same in in-person school, but now, I have to worry about getting sick and bringing it back to all my family members. Not only that, but some of my teachers assign difficult assignments and require a lot of time and work to complete, and it’s not something I’m willing to do.

‘Being Able to Learn New Things’

Abby Funez is a senior at Luther Burbank High School:

The best thing about school this year is being able to learn new things every day that benefit me later on in life. This is the best thing because I am able to grow in knowledge and mature a lot more. For example, I am learning how to write essays while being timed and under pressure. This will help me in my admissions for classes in college and to be a better writer, which will benefit me long term throughout my life.

The worst thing about school this year is wearing masks. This is the worst thing because it makes it harder to hear our teachers and students within our area. In my Spanish class, my teacher is unable to hear other students even when they are standing by her because of the masks. This makes my life difficult because I miss important concepts of the lesson being taught at times.

‘Teachers Are More Lenient’

Julianna Eakle is a junior at Luther Burbank High School:

The best thing about this school year is how the teachers are more lenient of our absences or our missing assignments. For example, our principal put out an email saying that he understands if parents would like to keep us home due to our safety, for students just to continue doing our work online. My teachers were very concerned about me not attending class but did everything to help me stay on top of my grades.

The worst thing about this school year is people not having their masks over their nose and mouths. There are at least 3 teachers a day telling one of their students to put their mask over their nose and mouth. It’s a serious problem, and because of that one person, COVID cases start to spike fast.

‘We Can’t Eat or Drink Water in Class’

Van Bui is a senior at Luther Burbank High School:

The best thing about school this year is meeting new people and joining different sports like volleyball and track and field. This is the best thing because it taught me to enjoy life and take risks as I go. For example, I get to know a lot of people and hang out with them to do fun activities with, and joining different sports allowed me to step out of my boundaries and improve my health especially during these times. This makes my life better because I was always scared to talk to people and do different sports.

The worst thing about school this year is having COVID-19 going on still. This is the worst thing because I always have to wear a mask and there are limited activities that we can do in school. For example, we can’t eat or drink water in class, waking up early in the morning, and before getting fresh air, it’s blocked by wearing a mask for 8 hours straight. This makes my life worse because I find it very difficult to breathe or eat in class.

‘We Are Back in Person’

Lakeyah Roots is a junior at Luther Burbank High School:

The best thing about school this year is being able to learn in person. When we were doing distance learning, being able to learn the information being taught to me and my ability to do my schoolwork was not good. But now that we are back in person, I feel like I can do more work more efficiently and really get the help I need. Distance learning has taught me that doing school online does not suit me.

The worst thing about school is COVID cases. Students were getting sick, and that caused the class to be empty sometimes. The classroom does not feel the same when it is not filled with the students you normally see every day. It is not fun not being able to do certain activities because of COVID. It’s best to keep our distance from one another, but sometimes I miss the days when we were able to do certain class activities before COVID hit.

Seeing Friends

Joanna Medrano-Gutierrez is a junior at Luther Burbank High School:

The best thing about this school year is being able to see my friends again. This is the best thing about this school year because I haven’t seen most of them since the pandemic started. For example, I haven’t seen a certain friend since March 2020, but now, this school year, we are closer than we were before.

The worst thing about this school year is adapting back into waking up early again. This is the worst thing about the pandemic because I got so used to sleeping late and sleeping in, and then I had to get used to waking up early. For example, before I woke up at 9 a.m.-12 p.m., but now I wake up at 6 a.m.-7 a.m.

Thanks to Pachia, Brenda, Abby, Julianna, Van, Lakeyah, and Joanna for contributing their thoughts.

Consider contributing a question to be answered in a future post. You can send one to me at [email protected] . When you send it in, let me know if I can use your real name if it’s selected or if you’d prefer remaining anonymous and have a pseudonym in mind.

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