essay on life after pandemic breakout

Elizabeth Lesser Shares How She Lifted Herself Out of Pandemic Despair

The cofounder of the Omega Institute admits that even as a teacher of mindfulness, sometimes, she is her own worst student.

When it became apparent that a virus was spreading around the globe, my first reaction was one of disbelief: We’ll surely eradicate this before it turns into a pandemic! Soon enough my disbelief morphed into fear, and then horror and grief for those who were sick and dying in Asia, Europe, and slowly, steadily...everywhere. Along with those feelings came a strange kind of optimism, a faith that we all might learn something important. Like when I watched videos of people in Italy under lockdown standing on their balconies holding candles and singing songs of hope into the darkened streets. Or as travel ceased and traffic stood still and the world got a little quieter, the air a little cleaner—I could almost hear the trees breathing sighs of relief.

In the early spring of 2020, when the pandemic took hold here in the United States and life as we knew it ground to a halt, I wondered, even with the trauma and loss, could this be the Great Slowdown we needed? People retweeted the quote “Mother Nature has sent us to our rooms.” Could that message portend a teachable moment? Maybe doing less, and doing with less, would reveal the value of enough instead of chasing after more, more, more. Maybe now we’d start to truly appreciate the people whose work keeps us alive and well: the farmers, truckers, grocery baggers; the staff who work in our hospitals; the home health aides who care for our parents; the daycare instructors and school teachers who safeguard our children’s future. And maybe, just maybe, the pandemic would finally confirm for us thick-headed humans this plain truth: What happens to even just one of us affects all of us.

My grand optimism began to waver as the weeks of isolation became months and Covid-19 cases doubled, then tripled. Schools closed. Hospitals ran out of masks and ventilators; millions of people got sick, and hundreds of thousands died. People lost their jobs, their homes, their loved ones, their mental health, their way of life. Almost no individual, community, or business was untouched by fear or pain or loss, including my own nonprofit center, which for 40 years had been teaching people to meditate, to heal, to spin trauma into the gold of growth.

.css-meat1u:before{margin-bottom:1.2rem;height:2.25rem;content:'“';display:block;font-size:4.375rem;line-height:1.1;font-family:Juana,Juana-weight300-roboto,Juana-weight300-local,Georgia,Times,Serif;font-weight:300;} .css-mn32pc{font-family:Juana,Juana-weight300-upcase-roboto,Juana-weight300-upcase-local,Georgia,Times,Serif;font-size:1.625rem;font-weight:300;letter-spacing:0.0075rem;line-height:1.2;margin:0rem;text-transform:uppercase;}@media(max-width: 64rem){.css-mn32pc{font-size:2.25rem;line-height:1;}}@media(min-width: 48rem){.css-mn32pc{font-size:2.375rem;line-height:1;}}@media(min-width: 64rem){.css-mn32pc{font-size:2.75rem;line-height:1;}}.css-mn32pc b,.css-mn32pc strong{font-family:inherit;font-weight:bold;}.css-mn32pc em,.css-mn32pc i{font-style:italic;font-family:inherit;} “What happens to even just one of us affects all of us.”

As 2020 came to a close, I began to wonder if my dream of the Great Slowdown was becoming a sorrowful nightmare: the Great Meltdown. As a teacher of mindfulness, sometimes I am my own worst student; life during lockdown tested me greatly, and watching the news or doom-scrolling through social media didn’t help. I began to flunk out of inner-peace school, started reacting to stress in decidedly unenlightened ways, yelling at the TV or exploding in anger during interminable Zoom meetings.

I gave in to despair when we had to let go of another staff member at work, or when I couldn’t see my kids, who live in far-flung places. I had stopped accessing my “balcony brain”—that part of myself that can calmly observe any situation, pause before reacting, and make wise, compassionate decisions. I was spending more time in my “basement brain,” heeding the vigilant, volatile caveman within. Eventually, my burnout caught up with me, and I landed in the emergency room with a gastrointestinal issue. It was then that my darling husband suggested I try some of my own medicine—the stuff I have written several books about. “You know,” he said gently, “things like meditation and exercise. Things for your trauma and grief. Things for your soul.” Duh!

So here’s what I did. I turned to the words of some of my greatest teachers. I keep a basket of their quotes on my desk. I’m always adding to it—beautiful lines from poets, mind-blowing bits from scientists, motivation from activists, quiet wisdom from spiritual leaders. I often choose one to guide me through the day. This time, I decided that whatever quote my hand touched first would serve as my GPS back into what I call the four landscapes of the human journey: mind, body, heart, and soul.

The first words I picked gave me goosebumps: “Today’s mighty oak is yesterday’s nut that held its ground.” The phrase is attributed to Rosa Parks, and I felt as though she had reached down from the heavens to remind me that everything I needed was already within me. I could be that little acorn again and reroot and rise strong. I knew how to do that. I had done so before in other difficult times. I had held my ground in the shattered aftermath of divorce and come out the other side a stronger and more empathetic person. I had rooted myself in my inner strength when I was my sister’s bone marrow donor. And when we lost her, I found in those ashes the true heart of friendship. Here I was again, trying, like so many of us, to reemerge from the pandemic with lessons learned, inner strength, and something of value to offer.

I followed Mrs. Parks’ guidance and went back to the tools that never fail me: Meditation to activate my “balcony brain” and lift the veil from my clouded mind. Exercise to reclaim my body and physical vitality. The simple prayer of putting my hand on my heart and feeling flooded with forgiveness and tenderness, hope and gratitude. Walks in nature and dips back into my favorite spiritual texts to reconnect with my all-knowing soul. As I felt my strength returning, I was reminded how despair and negativity can spread like a virus, too. When they do, taking the soul’s vaster view and being an agent of uplift feels almost revolutionary. Doing so is an act of sanity and an offering of healing.

Historically, pandemics have jump-started innovation or they have slid humanity backwards into oppression. This is our era; we get to choose. Life after Covid-19 does not have to be a Great Meltdown, or a Great Slowdown. Maybe, just maybe, it will be a Great Wake-up—a global event that breaks us open and waters the seeds of our best selves. Because each one of us can be that acorn, holding our ground, lifting our sights, and, together, becoming a forest of mighty oaks.

Elizabeth Lesser is the author of Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, The Human Story Changes as well as the bestselling Broken Open: How Difficult Times Can Help Us Grow and Marrow: Love, Loss & What Matters Most . She is the cofounder of Omega Institute, has given two popular TED talks, and is a member of Oprah Winfrey’s Super Soul 100.

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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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Life after COVID: most people don’t want a return to normal – they want a fairer, more sustainable future

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Stephan Lewandowsky receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 964728 (JITSUVAX). He also receives funding from the Australian Research Council via a Discovery Grant to Ullrich Ecker, from Jigsaw (a technology incubator created by Google), from UK Research and Innovation (through the Centre of Excellence, REPHRAIN), and from the Volkswagen Foundation in Germany. He also holds a European Research Council Advanced Grant (no. 101020961, PRODEMINFO) and receives funding from the John Templeton Foundation (via Wake Forest University’s Honesty Project).

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We are in a crisis now – and omicron has made it harder to imagine the pandemic ending. But it will not last forever. When the COVID outbreak is over, what do we want the world to look like?

In the early stages of the pandemic – from March to July 2020 – a rapid return to normal was on everyone’s lips, reflecting the hope that the virus might be quickly brought under control. Since then, alternative slogans such as “ build back better ” have also become prominent, promising a brighter, more equitable, more sustainable future based on significant or even radical change.

Returning to how things were, or moving on to something new – these are very different desires. But which is it that people want? In our recent research , we aimed to find out.

Along with Keri Facer of the University of Bristol, we conducted two studies, one in the summer of 2020 and another a year later. In these, we presented participants – a representative sample of 400 people from the UK and 600 from the US – with four possible futures, sketched in the table below. We designed these based on possible outcomes of the pandemic published in early 2020 in The Atlantic and The Conversation .

We were concerned with two aspects of the future: whether it would involve a “return to normal” or a progressive move to “build back better”, and whether it would concentrate power in the hands of government or return power to individuals.

Four possible futures

In both studies and in both countries, we found that people strongly preferred a progressive future over a return to normal. They also tended to prefer individual autonomy over strong government. On balance, across both experiments and both countries, the “grassroots leadership” proposal appeared to be most popular.

People’s political leanings affected preferences – those on the political right preferred a return to normal more than those on the left – yet intriguingly, strong opposition to a progressive future was quite limited, even among people on the right. This is encouraging because it suggests that opposition to “building back better” may be limited.

Our findings are consistent with other recent research , which suggests that even conservative voters want the environment to be at the heart of post-COVID economic reconstruction in the UK.

The misperceptions of the majority

This is what people wanted to happen – but how did they think things actually would end up? In both countries, participants felt that a return to normal was more likely than moving towards a progressive future. They also felt it was more likely that government would retain its power than return it to the people.

In other words, people thought they were unlikely to get the future they wanted. People want a progressive future but fear that they’ll get a return to normal with power vested in the government.

We also asked people to tell us what they thought others wanted. It turned out our participants thought that others wanted a return to normal much more than they actually did. This was observed in both the US and UK in both 2020 and 2021, though to varying extents.

This striking divergence between what people actually want, what they expect to get and what they think others want is what’s known as “ pluralistic ignorance ”.

This describes any situation where people who are in the majority think they are in the minority. Pluralistic ignorance can have problematic consequences because in the long run people often shift their attitudes towards what they perceive to be the prevailing norm. If people misperceive the norm, they may change their attitudes towards a minority opinion, rather than the minority adapting to the majority. This can be a problem if that minority opinion is a negative one – such as being opposed to vaccination , for example.

In our case, a consequence of pluralistic ignorance may be that a return to normal will become more acceptable in future, not because most people ever desired this outcome, but because they felt it was inevitable and that most others wanted it.

Ultimately, this would mean that the actual preferences of the majority never find the political expression that, in a democracy, they deserve.

To counter pluralistic ignorance, we should therefore try to ensure that people know the public’s opinion. This is not merely a necessary countermeasure to pluralistic ignorance and its adverse consequences – people’s motivation also generally increases when they feel their preferences and goals are shared by others. Therefore, simply informing people that there’s a social consensus for a progressive future could be what unleashes the motivation needed to achieve it.

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Life after lockdown: how do we best recover from the pandemic?

I t was October 2020 when I realised I was going to have to ask for help. I’ve always been anxious, but thanks to the pandemic, I developed debilitating health anxiety. A dire winter was coming and any respite we’d had over the summer felt like it was slipping away. I couldn’t get to sleep and when I finally did, I had nightmares. My stomach churned and my hands shook so badly I had to give up caffeine. I developed a chronic reflux cough and, on more than one occasion, got into such an irrational spiral about it being Covid that I had to book a PCR test just to be able to function.

“One of the most diabolical things about this pandemic is the on and on-ness of it all,” says Amanda Ripley, author of The Unthinkable: Who Survives When Disaster Strikes – and Why . “Humans can withstand a lot of turmoil and instability if they can recover.” Prior to Covid, Ripley studied people who survived tornadoes and terror attacks, emergencies for which the mental health consequences are much better understood than the long, slow-burn, seemingly endless one we find ourselves living through.

As Ripley knows, this is not the first disaster humans have had to live through, so are there things we can learn from other disasters about what they do to our brains, relationships and communities? And, more importantly, how to make things better?

“There’s a tremendous amount we can learn from how we’ve responded to previous emergencies,” say Dr Brandon Kohrt, professor of psychiatry at George Washington University, who works in Liberia, Uganda and Nepal, dealing with the mental health aftermath of everything from Ebola to earthquakes. “Many low- and middle-income countries, like South Africa, India and Uganda, immediately rolled out mental health and psychosocial plans in February, March and April 2020. They had experienced prior disasters, but these approaches could be just as beneficial in high-resource places like the US and UK,” he tells me, and I can’t help wondering, do we in the Global North think of ourselves with such superiority that we find it hard to learn from the experiences of the Global South?

“With population-wide trauma, a war or a terrorist attack, we heal socially,” says Kohrt. “Being together when the awful thing happens and then healing together is really crucial. People who come together in that healing process tend to do better than those who either self-isolate as a response to distress or are ostracised. So I think what’s happened with Covid is that although the stress isn’t necessarily as acute or sudden as an earthquake or an explosion, the isolation we all experienced in the context of stress and trauma is eating away at us psychologically.”

Not everyone who experiences a disaster will develop a mental health problem: people survive trauma well all the time, but “between 5 and 10% of people who’ve been through traumatic events such as a terrorist attack will go on to develop clinical levels of PTSD,” says Dr Sarita Robinson, who studies the psychobiology of survival at the University of Central Lancashire.

Around one in five people who experience a humanitarian emergency will go on to develop a mental health problem (prevalence of common mental health problems in the global population is about 1 in 10), and rates of serious mental health disorders, such as schizophrenia, increase from 2-3% to 3-4%. “Research from 2018 suggested mental health problems double in emergency settings. I wouldn’t be surprised if that turned out to be the result of the pandemic, too,” says Ashley Nemiro, senior adviser for the global MHPSS Collaborative , which helps people working in crises.

The psychological challenges of Covid are huge, but many practitioners feel they aren’t being addressed at all. Willem van de Put is co-founder of the Mental Health in Complex Emergencies course. “Covid has made things worse and, to the chagrin of leaders in global mental health, everybody is saying we should do something but, basically, absolutely nothing is happening. Governments are not willing to address it.” Investment in mental health is so low that, as Nemiro puts it: “Every country is a developing country when it comes to mental health services.”

Research this year by the Centre for Mental Health , a thinktank, suggests that 8 million British adults and 1.5 million children will need mental health support in the next 10 years as a direct result of the pandemic. Office for National Statistics data already shows rates of depression doubling since the pandemic began, but it isn’t being evenly felt, says Leila Reyburn of mental health charity Mind . “The people who’ve been impacted the most and are continuing to feel that impact are people who had pre-existing mental health problems, people of colour, those living in deprivation and young people.”

“In the UK, we have a system based on late intervention and crisis response,” says Andy Bell from the Centre for Mental Health. “Only a third of people with common mental health problems get support. We don’t offer it quickly and we tend to wait until people’s needs are so severe that they need specialised treatment.”

But work by Kohrt and colleagues shows that early intervention is effective, especially for common mental health problems, such as depression and anxiety – and that it doesn’t always have to be carried out by highly trained professionals. He implements a community-level post-emergency support programme called Problem Management Plus, first developed by the World Health Organization in Pakistan and Kenya in 2015, which he then successfully trialled in Nepal (with similar programmes now running all over the middle- and lower-income world).

Through the programme, anyone with a high-school education can be trained in just a few weeks to deliver psychological support to those who need it, often embedded in places where people seek help for problems with housing or employment, rather than specifically for mental health. Clients get five weekly 90-minute sessions, usually one-to-one, or longer sessions in a small group, and are taught stress-management skills, breath control, problem solving, how to overcome inertia and how to develop a social support network. The final session is about how not to relapse.

“We’re taking interventions that were developed for earthquakes, floods or war, which we’ve used for years, and using them in New York City right now,” Kohrt says. “It doesn’t have to be by psychiatrists or psychologists in a specialised clinical location.”

Similar early intervention projects do exist in the UK, but they’re few and far between. A coalition of charities, including the Children and Young People’s Mental Health Coalition , Mind , YoungMinds and the Children’s Society , is currently trying to push government to “Fund the Hubs’’ and create a network of informal community support centres for children and young people, to which they can self refer. One such hub, the Nest, is already up and running in the London borough of Southwark – and 78% of its users say their wellbeing has improved.

This won’t shock you, but the ongoing nature of the pandemic really isn’t good for us. “Our brains operate in a very different way when they experience prolonged threats: you’re constantly on edge and alert, and that shrinks our ability to empathise with others,” says Kohrt. “We become much more focused on a very tight-knit group, and everybody else seems a threat. What’s most challenging about the pandemic is that even family members became threats – especially pre-vaccines. If kids are going to be a threat to their grandparents’ health or vice versa, suddenly we’re on alert even with people who should be helping us.” This disrupts our ability to be empathic in general. “We become more prejudiced, we become more stigmatising, we become more discriminating.” And if we’re discriminating against our loved ones, imagine how much worse our broader societal discrimination and stigmatisation is.” Which explains quite a lot about now, doesn’t it?

Some of us may find it harder to regulate our emotions, too, says Kohrt, something I can identify with. “We call it ‘self-regulation’, but it’s always a mix of self-regulation and regulation with others. Total reliance on self-regulation of emotions doesn’t work. We’ve evolved to constantly regulate our emotions with our peers.” But even if you were locked down with your family, that might not have helped. “Family units are connected to many other people as well, and if they don’t have contact with extended family, friends, peers, then that family’s own emotional regulation gets disrupted.”

“In humanitarian emergencies, one of the biggest things we do is make sure people have a sense of control and agency,” says Nemiro. “Often that is taken away when their social fabric is destroyed – and the pandemic did the same thing.” While schools, churches and community centres weren’t reduced to rubble, as they might have been in other disasters, they became so hard to access that they might as well have vanished. “Lack of social connection, lack of community and feeling out of control all break down mental health,” says Nemiro.

“The first thing we need is to realise that we have to repair the social fabric,” says Amanda Ripley. “People come to me all the time saying: ‘We don’t know what to do – our church, our school, our town is exploding with conflict.’ There’s so much pent-up frustration, alienation and sadness that has not been dealt with – we will find a target of convenience. After every disaster, there’s a short golden hour of solidarity [rainbows in windows! Clap for carers!] followed by a deep valley of division. Repairing the social fabric needs to be an explicit mission.”

Luckily, the repairs can be simple. “Say I’m a head teacher and I’m going to have parents come to an event in person. Afterwards, I don’t just let everybody go – these are opportunities for connection and we are in a deficit situation – so I serve drinks and snacks outside for half an hour afterward.” So is the casual socialising that we previously thought so little of – the school plays, the church fêtes – more important than we noticed at the time? “Those things are not just pleasant and fun: they’re investments in your future sanity and wellbeing. The way you build community resilience is through knowing each other so that we don’t assume the worst, so that it gets a little harder to demonise each other, and that prepares us for the next disaster,” says Ripley.

Bruce Daisley, former VP of Twitter, has written a book about resilience, Fortitude . “Police and firefighters who were in the thick of the events of 9/11 have been well researched and generally the closer they report being to their colleagues, the better protection to their mental health they felt,” he says. “Resilience is social strength, and social connectedness helps us recover better from operations, prevents us from falling into depression and generally improves wellbeing.”

“A huge part of emotional regulation requires positive interactions with others, including touch – if you look at other species, the way that that’s done is through grooming and other non-sexual touch among group members. We’ve had so little opportunity for that,” says Kohrt. Connecting when we’re in distress is even more powerful. “If I’m not the one in distress, I can help you regulate your distress,” he says. “There’s a feedback loop between the helper and the helpee with neurobiological changes that are health-promoting for both, to the point where helping others probably reduces our inflammatory responses and improves our antiviral responses.”

If we remain in Ripley’s valley of division, though, then “we’re vulnerable to conflict entrepreneurs,” she says. “It is incredibly easy to turn us against each other, whether you’re a politician, pundit or social-media platform. We need to know that and remind ourselves that we don’t want to be played this way. We’re not going to be chumps.”

One way to offset that particular danger as well as helping us to cope with the aftermath of an emergency is to deliberately tell ourselves a story of the experience which allows us to have agency within it. “Reappraisal is one of the main ways we manage our emotions as humans, and it’s probably one of the most sophisticated tricks of the mind,” says Ripley. “Are there stories we can tell ourselves that are true, but also leave us some hope? Yes there has been real suffering and hardship, but maybe you or your child showed remarkable resilience in finding a way to adapt or to be with that loss and still create new things.”

Ripley suggests spending 15 minutes writing your own story of the pandemic, but as though you were a benign third party, observing (you can also do this with kids). “With writing there’s a kind of organisation of the experience that happens in the brain, that you don’t have the space to do when you’re in a disaster that keeps going on and on. Writing a story can create that space and since there’s not enough space for recovery in this type of slow disaster, we have to create it.”

Coincidentally, I recently tried something similar, inspired by an article by Daisy Dowling in the Harvard Business Review . Rather than a story, she encourages us to list our achievements throughout the pandemic – which could include not snapping all your child’s pencils in an impotent rage while home schooling, or cooking 654 dinners in a row since March 2020, as well as more traditional wins. It was an uplifting way to look back and reframe the shitshow of the last two years.

Does writing a story give the emergency a longed-for ending, too? “The brain wants an ending because the brain needs psychological certainty,” says Ripley. “There is no end, but by repeatedly creating a narrative that has a conclusion maybe we could give it an end.”

Samaritans can be contacted on 116 123 or email [email protected]. You can also contact Mind at 0300 123 3393

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THE NEW MAP OF LIFE

AFTER THE PANDEMIC

It is said that culture is like the air we breathe. We don’t notice it until it’s gone.

The COVID-19 pandemic is bringing into focus a once invisible culture that guides us through life. Seemingly overnight, we experienced profound changes in the ways that we work, socialize, learn, and engage with our neighborhoods and larger communities.

For a short time, before new routines and practices replace familiar old ones, we can see with greater clarity the positive and negative aspects of our former lives. The suddenness and starkness of this transformation allows us to examine daily practices, social norms and institutions from perspectives rarely allowed.

The fragility of the global economy becomes glaringly apparent as critical supply chains faulter, unemployment surges, and markets vacillate. Tacit assumptions about health care systems become clear as we see how they function, fail to function, and have long underserved large parts of the population. Just as sure, sheltering in place allows us to appreciate precious details of our lives that we have taken for granted: the appeal of workplaces, the comfort of human touch, dinner parties, travel, and paychecks. Indeed, through ambivalent eyes we also recognize ways that life is better as we shelter in place.

The premise of the New Map of Life:™ After the Pandemic project is that we have a fleeting window of time that affords us an unprecedented opportunity to examine our lives.  Going forward, life will be different and by compiling the insights we have today we can inform and guide the culture that will inevitably emerge from our collective experience. Your insights can contribute to the reshaping of social norms, systems, and practices that shape our collective futures.

Since the founding of the Stanford Center on Longevity, we have advocated for a major redesign of life that better supports century-long lives. More recently, we undertook the New Map of Life ™ initiative, which focuses on envisioning a world where people experience a sense of purpose, belonging, and worth at all stages of life. As tragedies unfold before our eyes, we aim to capture the lessons they teach. With your help, we can compile current insights, fleeting thoughts and deeper reflections about the ways we live now so that going forward we bolster, modify and reinvent cultures that improve quality of life for ourselves, our children, and future generations.

The opinions, beliefs, and viewpoints expressed by the various authors on this website do not necessarily reflect the opinions, beliefs and viewpoints of the Stanford Center on Longevity or official policies of the Stanford Center on Longevity. 

Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

How Life Could Get Better (or Worse) After COVID

How do pandemics change our societies? It is tempting to believe that there will not be a single sector of society untouched by the COVID-19 pandemic . However, a quick look at previous pandemics in the 20th century reveals that such negative forecasts may be vastly exaggerated.

Prior pandemics have corresponded to changes in architecture and urban planning, and a greater awareness of public health . Yet the psychological and societal effects of the Spanish flu, the worst pandemic of the 20th century, were later perceived as less dramatic than anticipated, perhaps because it originated in the shadow of WWI. Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud described Spanish flu as a “ Nebenschauplatz ”—a sideshow in his life of that time, even though he eventually lost one of his daughters to the disease. Neither do we recall much more recent pandemics: the Asian flu of 1957 and the Hong Kong flu from 1968.

Imagining and planning for the future can be a powerful coping mechanism to gain some sense of control in an increasingly unpredictable pandemic life. Over the past year, some experts proclaimed that the world after COVID would be a completely different place , with changed values and a new map of international relations. The opinions of oracles who were not downplaying the virus were mostly negative . Societal unrest and the rise of totalitarian regimes, stunted child social development, mental health crises, exacerbated inequality, and the worst economic recession since the Great Depression were just a few worries discussed by pundits and on the news.

Other predictions were brighter—the disruptive force of the pandemic would provide an opportunity to reshape the world for the better, some said. To complement the voices of journalists, pundits, and policymakers, one of us (Igor Grossmann) embarked on a quest to gather opinions from the world’s leading scholars on behavioral and social science, founding the World after COVID project.

The World after COVID project is a multimedia collection of expert visions for the post-pandemic world, including scientists’ hopes, worries, and recommendations. In a series of 57 interviews, we invited scientists, along with futurists, to reflect on the positive and negative societal or psychological change that might occur after the pandemic, and the type of wisdom we need right now. Our team used a range of methodological techniques to quantify general sentiment, along with common and unique themes in scientists’ responses.

The results of this interview series were surprising, both in terms of the variability and ambivalence in expert predictions. Though the pandemic has and will continue to create adverse effects for many aspects of our society, the experts observed, there are also opportunities for positive change, if we are deliberate about learning from this experience.

Three opportunities after COVID-19

Scientists’ opinions about positive consequences were highly diverse. As the graph shows, we identified 20 distinct themes in their predictions. These predictions ranged from better care for elders, to improved critical thinking about misinformation, to greater appreciation of nature. But the three most common categories concerned social and societal issues.

1. Solidarity. Experts predicted that the shared struggles and experiences that we face due to the pandemic could foster solidarity and bring us closer together, both within our communities and globally. As clinical psychologist Katie A. McLaughlin from Harvard University pointed out, the pandemic could be “an opportunity for us to become more committed to supporting and helping one another.”

Similarly, sociologist Monika Ardelt from the University of Florida noted the possibility that “we realize these kinds of global events can only be solved if we work together as a world community.” Social identities—such as group memberships, nationality, or those that form in response to significant events such as pandemics or natural disasters—play an important role in fostering collective action. The shared experience of the pandemic could help foster a more global, inclusive identity that could promote international solidarity.

2. Structural and political changes. Early in the pandemic, experts also believed that we might also see proactive efforts and societal will to bring about structural and political changes toward a more just and diversity-inclusive society. Experts observed that the pandemic had exposed inequalities and injustices in our societies and hoped that their visibility might encourage societies to address them.

Philosopher Valerie Tiberius from the University of Minnesota suggested that the pandemic might bring about an “increased awareness of our vulnerability and mutual dependence.”

Fellow of the Royal Institute for International Affairs in the U.K. Anand Menon proposed that the pandemic might lead to growing awareness of economic inequality, which could lead to “greater sustained public and political attention paid to that issue.” Cultural psychologist Ayse Uskul from Kent University in the U.K. shared this sentiment and predicted that this awareness “will motivate us to pick up a stronger fight against the unfair distribution of resources and rights not just where we live, but much more globally.”

3. Renewed social connections. Finally, the most common positive consequence discussed was that we might see an increased awareness of the importance of our social connections. The pandemic has limited our ability to connect face to face with friends and families, and it has highlighted just how vulnerable some of our family members and neighbors might be. Greater Good Science Center founding director and UC Berkeley professor Dacher Keltner suggested that the pandemic might teach us “how absolutely sacred our best relationships are” and that the value of these relationships would be much higher in the post-pandemic world. Past president of the Society of Evolution and Human Behavior Douglas Kenrick echoed this sentiment by predicting that “tighter family relationships would be the most positive outcome of this [pandemic].”

Similarly, Jennifer Lerner—professor of decision-making from Harvard University—discussed how the pandemic had led people to “learn who their neighbors are, even though they didn’t know their neighbors before, because we’ve discovered that we need them.” These kinds of social relationships have been tied to a range of benefits, such as increased well-being and health , and could provide lasting benefits to individuals.

Post-pandemic risks

How about predictions for negative consequences of the pandemic? Again, opinions were variable, with more than half of the themes were mentioned by less than 10% of our interviewees. Only two predictions were mentioned by at least ten experts: the potential for political unrest and increased prejudice or racism. These predictions highlight a tension in expert predictions: Whereas some scholars viewed the future bright and “diversity-inclusive,” others fear the rise in racism and prejudice. Before we discuss this tension, let us examine what exactly scholars meant by these two worries.

1. Increased prejudice or racism. Many experts discussed how the conditions brought about by the pandemic could lead us to focus on our in-group and become more dismissive of those outside our circles. Incheol Choi, professor of cultural and positive psychology from Seoul National University, discussed that his main area of concern was that “stereotypes, prejudices against other group members might arise.” Lisa Feldman Barrett, fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences and the Royal Society of Canada, echoed this sentiment, noting that previous epidemics saw “people become more entrenched in their in-group and out-group beliefs.”

2. Political unrest. Similarly, many experts discussed how a greater focus on our in-groups might also exacerbate existing political divisions. Past president of the Society for Philosophy and Psychology Paul Bloom discussed how a greater dismissiveness toward out-groups was visible both within countries and internationally, where “countries are blaming other countries and not working together enough.” Dilip Jeste, past president of the American Psychiatric Association, discussed his concerns that the tendency to view both candidates and supporters as winners and losers in elections could mean that the “political polarization that we are observing today in the U.S. and the world will only increase.”

These predictions were not surprising— pundits and other public figures have been discussing these topics, too. However, as we analyzed and compared predictions for positive and negative consequences, we found something unexpected.

The yin and yang of COVID’s effects

Almost half of the interviewees spontaneously mentioned that the same change could be a force for good and for bad . In other words, they were dialectical , recognizing the multidetermined nature of predictions and acknowledging that context matters—context that determines who may be the winners and losers in the years to come. For example, experts predicted that we may see greater acceptance of digital technologies at home and at work. But besides the benefits of this—flexible work schedules, reduced commutes—they also mentioned likely costs, such as missing social information in virtual communication and disadvantages for people who cannot afford high-speed internet or digital devices.

Share Your Perspective

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Amid this complexity, experts weighed in on what type of wisdom we need to help bring about more positive changes ahead. Not only do we need the will to sustain political and structural change, many argued, but also a certain set of psychological strategies promoting sound judgment: perspective taking, critical thinking, recognizing the limits of our knowledge, and sympathy and compassion.

In other words, experts’ recommended wisdom focuses on meta-cognition, which underlies successful emotion regulation, mindfulness, and wiser judgment about complex social issues. The good news is that these psychological strategies are malleable and trainable ; one way we can cultivate wisdom and perspective, for example, is by adopting a third-person, observer perspective on our challenges.

On the surface, the “it depends” attitude of many experts about the world after COVID may be dissatisfying. However, as research on forecasting shows, such a dialectical attitude is exactly what distinguishes more accurate forecasters from the rest of the population. Forecasting is hard and predictions are often uncertain and likely wrong. In fact, despite some hopes for the future, it is equally possible that the change after the pandemic will not even be noticeable. Not because changes will not happen, but because people quickly adjust to their immediate circumstances.

The future will tell whether and how the current pandemic has altered our societies. In the meantime, the World after COVID project provides a time-stamped window into experts’ apartments and their minds. As we embrace another pandemic spring, these insights can serve as a reminder that the pandemic may lead not only to worries but also to hopes for the years ahead.

About the Authors

Igor Grossmann

Igor Grossmann, Ph.D. , studies people and cultures, sometimes together, and often across time. He is an associate professor of psychology at the University of Waterloo, where he directs the Wisdom and Culture Lab.

Oliver Twardus

Oliver Twardus is the lab manager for the Wisdom and Culture lab and an aspiring researcher. He will be starting his master’s in neuroscience and applied cognitive science in September 2021.

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What will life be like after the coronavirus pandemic ends.

Experts predict the social consequences of COVID-19

A New York University professor holds class over Zoom in April. Remote learning could become more common, a sociologist predicts.

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By Bruce Bower

December 18, 2020 at 6:00 am

As 2020 blessedly clangs to a close, it’s tempting to wonder where we’re headed once the pandemic is history. In the spirit of year-end curiosity about COVID-19’s possible long-term effects, Science News posed this question to a few scholars: What major social changes do you see coming after the pandemic? As baseball’s Yogi Berra once said, “It’s tough to make predictions, especially about the future.” The following forecasts, edited for length and clarity, aren’t written in stone and aren’t meant to be. But they raise some provocative possibilities.

Historian, Tulane University Author, The Great Influenza: The Story of the Deadliest Pandemic in History

What happens in the next six months will have a disproportionate impact on what happens in the more distant future. If vaccines are very effective, if immunity lasts for a few years, if therapeutic drugs come online that are highly effective and if we have broad usage of cheap rapid antigen tests that can assure people that others around them are safe, I would foresee relatively few changes other than the really obvious ones, such as more work from home, teledoc services and a decimation of small business.

If the virus remains a threat, changes could be pretty profound, all stemming from a de-densifying, if there is such a word, of life in general. This trend would affect where and how people live and work, the housing market, commercial real estate practices and the interior design of buildings. There would be more cars and less mass transit.

Katherine Hirschfeld

Medical anthropologist, University of Oklahoma Author, Gangster States: Organized Crime, Kleptocracy and Political Collapse

The changes that I think are most likely include increasing political division and increased economic inequality in the United States and elsewhere, with the basic science of epidemiology and public health attacked and undermined by conspiracy theories spread on social media. If an effective vaccine is developed and becomes widely available in 2021, then the pandemic will contract, but the social environment will still support new disease outbreaks. There is no reason to assume that a post-COVID world will be a post-pandemic world.

If this sounds unusually grim, it may be due to my years of research exploring post-Soviet conflicts, when many multicultural countries fell apart in warring factions that triggered epidemics of easily preventable diseases.

Anna Mueller

Sociologist, Indiana University Bloomington 2020 SN 10: Scientist to Watch

The pandemic has shown us how online teaching can be a tool that makes the classroom more accessible, particularly for students with disabilities. In the past, I’ve had students who sometimes struggled to attend class because they were coping with anxiety or living with significant pain. They needed my empathy and flexibility with class attendance but still missed the classroom experience. I now realize how easy it is to turn on a camera and pop on a microphone so they can join from the comfort of their homes.

Given the number of families that have lost jobs or income due to the pandemic, we’re going to see an increase in children who have experienced deprivation, insecurity and traumatic stress. These challenges early in life can have lasting consequences for physical and mental health, and for academic achievement. Without active steps to help affected children and their families, this will have a long-term tragic effect on U.S. society.

Mario Luis Small

Sociologist, Harvard University Author, Someone to Talk to: How Networks Matter in Practice

COVID-19 has shown that a lot, though by no means all, of higher instruction can happen online. Parents and students will likely ask how much of the on-campus experience is truly needed and demand alternatives. And when the virus is under control, I suspect that companies, organizations, governments and individuals will take a look at their travel practices and decide to cut back, although many of us will yearn to engage in the physical contact that is part of social interaction.

I wonder what new strategies people will have learned to fight loneliness and avoid isolation, which of them will last after the pandemic ends and how those strategies will affect our sense of being part of the collective.

Christopher McKnight Nichols

Historian, Oregon State University Author, Promise and Peril: America at the Dawn of a Global Age

We could see a dramatic rise in leisure activities and collective gatherings post-pandemic, including live music concerts and sports events. That’s what happened in the 1920s as societies emerged from the 1918 [influenza] pandemic and World War I. In the United States, the rise [in popularity and national prominence] of professional baseball and college football occurred. In Europe, professional soccer expanded. We’re not having fun together right now.

It’s an open question whether social behaviors we took for granted, such as hand shaking and hugging, will endure.

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COVID-19: Where we’ve been, where we are, and where we’re going

One of the hardest things to deal with in this type of crisis is being able to go the distance. Moderna CEO Stéphane Bancel

Where we're going

Living with covid-19, people & organizations, sustainable, inclusive growth, related collection.

The Next Normal: Emerging stronger from the coronavirus pandemic

We Asked 10 People To Imagine Life After The Pandemic. Here's What They Said

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• Cloe Axelson

As more and more people get vaccinated, the number of COVID-19 infections and deaths are finally declining. We know this pandemic won’t last forever.

But — what happens next? Do we just pick up where we left off in March 2020? Or have things changed in a fundamental way?

We asked 10 people to imagine life after the pandemic.

What will work look like after COVID? What about parenting? Friendship? Faith? Will our understanding of public health change, as epidemiologists race to get ahead of the next pandemic?

The truth is, nobody knows exactly what comes next. Uncertainty continues to reign. But for the first time in a long time, it feels like we can reasonably contemplate the future — we are no longer locked in the “perpetual present.”

Read through each contributor's short essay below, or jump around to different topics using this navigation:

• Friendship | Joanna Weiss
• Health | Sandro Galea
• Aging | Julie Wittes Schlack
• Parenting | Sara Petersen
• Faith | Taymullah Abdur-Rahman
• Education | Neema Avashia
• Work | Julie Morgenstern
• Community | Roseann Bongiovanni
• Creativity | Desmond Hall
• Climate | Philip Warburg

I’m Ready To Double Down On The Joys Of Physical Friendship

In the beginning, we had Zoom, and it was fine: virtual happy hours and online game nights that kept friendships alive when we had to be physically apart. But the pandemic separation couldn’t last.

In late spring, I took my first illicit walk with friends; we wore masks and glanced sideways to see if we’d be shamed. By summer, we were venting our frustrations during walks around a pond, holding birthday dinners outdoors, taking socially-distanced selfies with the timers on our phones. When winter came, we layered up like ice fishermen and huddled around fire pits on 30-degree nights.

I want to double-dip in the guacamole. I want to sip your cocktail to see if I like it, too. Joanna Weiss, Editor, Experience Magazine

We’ve needed each other, and that’s good to know. One of the hardest things about COVID has been the way it rendered friendship dangerous — so many transmissions springing from in-person gatherings, as friends came together despite the directives. You can condemn all of those people as cavalier about public health. Or you could see their lapses as a feature of humanity.

We’ve learned, this past year, that connection isn’t the same when it’s remote. And while many of us have broken the rules at least once or twice, we should acknowledge the lengths we’ve gone to see each other in relative safety.

When the COVID threat is gone, I predict that we’ll double down on the joys of physical friendship. I want to live dangerously with my besties. I want to double-dip in the guacamole. I want to sip your cocktail to see if I like it, too. I want to scream together into a karaoke microphone. I’ll pick the first song: “With a Little Help From My Friends.” --   Joanna Weiss ,  Editor, Northeastern University's  Experience magazine

We Need To Think About 'Health' In A New Way

In some ways, COVID-19 will be remembered as a triumph of biomedical science. We developed safe and effective vaccines — something that usually takes a decade or more — in less than a year. And, despite a number of stumbles, improved therapeutics reduced mortality from the virus in hospitals more than fourfold in a matter of months.

But COVID-19 provided, even more memorably, a terrifying and revealing view of our failure to create a world that generates health.

Once this pandemic ends, we’ll undoubtedly be having more conversations about how to prevent future pandemics, and ensure a healthier future. But will we be thinking about health in a bigger sense?

Fundamentally, health is not health care. Sandro Galea, Dean, Boston University School of Public Health

Fundamentally, health is not health care. Decades of underinvestment in healthy environments, adequate education, safe workspaces and livable wages resulted in a country that was unhealthy and vulnerable to the ravages of a novel virus. The U.S. has had the highest per capita rate of COVID-19 infections throughout the pandemic.

This moment should teach us that avoiding the next pandemic will require us to rethink how we approach health, so there are no haves and have nots. It’s recognition that we cannot be healthy, unless we build a world with safe housing, good schools, livable wages, gender and racial equity, clean air, drinkable water, a fair economy.

It’s time to change how we think about health. --   Sandro Galea ,  Dean, Boston University, School Of Public Health

The Pandemic Deepened The Lessons Of Aging

My husband and I are in our late 60s. Fed, housed, and able to freelance, we’ve weathered the past year with gratitude and relative ease. But like many of our peers, the pandemic has intensified our feelings about how we want to live the rest of our lives, in intentional community. Our choices feel quite personal, but they are representative of emerging trends.

In a post-pandemic future, we can expect to see the biggest change in where and with whom the elderly live. With 40% of all fatalities, the virus’s impact on residents of nursing homes has been earth-shaking, fueling people’s desire to age in place or live in settings where mutual aid is the norm. Stunned by the isolation of the pandemic, most of the new recruits to our co-housing community have been people over 60. Local programs supporting in-home care are on the rise, and state and federal programs paying family caregivers are also likely to expand.

Technological advances will also pave the way for aging in place. Telehealth is more widely accepted, and devices like smart speakers will soon notify loved ones if you call out for help. Indeed, the pandemic has highlighted our intergenerational interdependence. With schools and daycares closed, working parents have moved in with their parents so that they can help mind the kids, and many adult children, having been deprived of the ability to see their quarantined loved ones, are determined to pre-empt that scenario in the future.

Don’t take your family and friends for granted. Protect your health. Accept that you’re going to die and live accordingly. Julie Wittes Schlack, Writer, Retired Marketing Executive

Will market volatility make it less likely that people will retire? Or will the COVID-induced knowledge of our own vulnerability fuel our urgency to pursue what we value versus what we’re paid for? I don’t know. But I do know that COVID has deepened the lessons that aging inevitably bestows: Don’t take your family and friends for granted. Protect your health. Accept that you’re going to die and live accordingly. --   Julie Wittes Schlack , Writer

Mothers Continue To Hold Up A Broken System

I never harbored any illusions about living in a culture that values mothers. From day one, my experience as a mom has been peppered with moments of rage and periods of existential crisis. I love the love of motherhood, but the work of mothering is mostly unsupported and un-respected. The nonstop parenting, teaching, cooking, cleaning that mothering has entailed during the pandemic has confirmed that this type of labor is also, for me, largely a drag.

Although the beauty of motherhood is widely celebrated on Instagram and elsewhere, our primary value lies in our ability to raise the next generation of workers and consumers. As the pandemic has shown, mothers’ needs don’t really seem to matter. Our needs don’t impact the bottom line.

The pandemic calcified my fury that mothers are expected to hold up the whole of a very broken system, while being given nothing in return. Sara Petersen, Writer

The pandemic calcified my fury that mothers are expected to hold up the whole of a very broken system, while being given nothing in return. In the past year, we’ve seen a flurry of essays and reporting showing that women and mothers have been disproportionately burdened with the impossible task of keeping society afloat (the latest New York Times series is appropriately titled, “ The Primal Scream .”) The coverage is affirming and necessary, but not a single mother I know has been surprised about any of the awful statistics or heartbreaking personal stories.

When this is over, I’m looking forward to no longer being the sole provider of all things to my kids. But I also wonder if the tidal wave of momentum inspired by the pandemic will carry us through to something better than think-pieces.

We need equal and fair pay for mothers. We need humane prenatal and postnatal care, and paid parental leave legislation. We need to reform our racist health care system that has led to countless Black mothers’ deaths. We need to end the debate on whether women’s reproductive rights are actual rights. And we need to radically rethink our capitalist system, which uses mothers and other care workers to uphold the primary concerns of buying and selling, while denying them adequate compensation — or even cultural respect for their indispensable work.

I wonder if women’s rage will coalesce into action. I hope so. --  Sara Petersen , Writer

The Pandemic Forced Us To Take Faith Into Our Own Hands

I spent many nights in the last year contemplating God’s wisdom and purpose, while fielding the despair and weariness of many Muslims who sought my counsel. They wanted to know, was COVID a pandemic or the plague, and what was the difference? Was it God’s wrath or God’s cleansing? Was there a collective spiritual remedy to make it all go away?

As we begin to see a light at the end of the tunnel, I wonder if and how our faith as Americans has changed.

It was no coincidence that the height of the pandemic in Massachusetts last spring struck during the Holy days of all three Abrahamic faiths. Easter, Passover and Ramadan came and went in our homes. We had to learn to celebrate without the pomp of public worship. People who attended church, temple and mosque — but never took it upon themselves to utter their own personal prayers — were forced to petition God themselves.

God forced us to stop our schedules to give us a moment to take faith into our own hands... Taymullah Abdur-Rahman, Imam

I watched my own teenage children reluctantly read the Quran aloud at home for the Eid Holidays (without the help of the entire mosque). As life returns to normal, I suspect we’ll have a deeper appreciation for our respective worship-communities and the spaces of comfort they provide us.

I also think the goals of the American faithful have shifted slightly. We want a little less of the world now, and more authentic connections with real people. God forced us to stop our schedules to give us a moment to take faith into our own hands — and for the most part we did.

Now I believe God will allow us to embrace one another again, both literally and figuratively. --  Taymullah Abdul-Rahman , Imam, Massachusetts Department of Correction

I Worry Education In A Post-COVID World Won't Change Enough

My greatest fear is that K-12 education in a post-COVID world will not change enough. As an 8th grade teacher, the past 12 months have completely changed how I approach my work.

In-person, Ms. Avashia was all about urgency and rigor and content, content, content. Pandemic-teaching Ms. Avashia moves much more slowly with her students.

Now, I focus my efforts on deep learning, instead of coverage of pages of standards. Each day, we work through one meaningful task, instead of trying to speed through three or four. We play more in class — using riddles or visual puzzles, telling jokes in the chat, changing our Zoom profile pictures, to make each other laugh. I’ve even dressed up in costumes multiple times this year just to bring kids some moments of humor.

Teaching during the pandemic has pushed me to be so much more human with my students, and to teach into their humanity. And that, at its core, is completely different from how education has traditionally been structured in our society.

I believe deeply in the democratic cornerstone of public education. But we have never succeeded in fulfilling its promise for all of our students, particularly those students most impacted by racial and economic injustice in our country.

Our school buildings have been sites of over-policing of students’ bodies, of adultifying and criminalizing adolescent behavior, of reducing student learning down to what can be demonstrated on standardized tests.

We have an opportunity to walk away from those practices forever. To build educational settings that are grounded in students’ humanity, and designed with their voices, needs and interests at the center. To ensure that our schools are structured and staffed to prioritize relationship-building, robust mental health services and targeted academic supports. We can affirm the notion that schools are cornerstones of both our democracy and our communities, by fully funding the work that we as a society are asking them to do.

We can affirm the notion that schools are cornerstones of both our democracy and our communities... Neema Avashia, Teacher, Boston Public Schools

We can do all of this. We should do all of this. The question is: Will we? --  Neema Avashia , Teacher, McCormack Middle School

COVID Forced Companies To Be More Flexible. Will They Harness The Lessons Learned?

The “culture of time” at many companies wasn’t healthy before the pandemic. Some organizations were trying to address bad habits (no time to think, everything-gets-done-by-meetings culture), before new problems like Zoom fatigue and FOLO (Fear Of Logging Off) took hold.

The pandemic accelerated a comeuppance about how the workplace can and should evolve. I think the lessons we learned this year will almost certainly lead to greater flexibility in the long term.

This year proved that a lot of work can be done remotely. It also made clear the handful of things better done in person — bonding, mentoring and new relationship building. Companies will need to bring people together regularly to ensure the kismet that happens in 3D.

The pandemic accelerated a comeuppance about how the workplace can and should evolve. Julie Morgenstern, Author, Productivity Expert

Every worker needs time and space for quiet work, time and space for meetings, and time and space for informal and more casual communication. This was true pre-pandemic, and it’s still true. Future workspaces are likely to reflect these needs: large library-like areas where people can go to do their thinking (like the quiet car on a train); lots of formal and informal meeting areas; and administrative spaces to deal with email and chat with coworkers.

Back-to-back meetings — 7 to 10 Zooms a day — is not an effective way to work. It leaves no time to think, or to actually do the work generated in those meetings.

Companies seem to have finally learned that their employees are whole people. Work is part of their lives, and their lives beyond work are essential and valuable to their well-being. In our post-COVID world, I suspect the role of chief people officer and chief wellness officer will evolve, and be seen as a critical role for a healthy organization.

COVID forced organizations to change. It forced them to be more flexible, and that experience highlighted what went missing in a 100% remote environment. The job of leaders is now to stop, reflect and embrace what we discovered in the last year, and consciously build workplaces and workspaces that harness those lessons, to enable companies to achieve their goals and workers to feel fulfilled. --   Julie Morgenstern , Productivity Expert , Author

We Must Do Right By The Communities, Including Chelsea, That Suffered The Most

I’ve lived in Chelsea my whole life, but I don’t remember my community ever being in the news as much as it was during the first peak of the pandemic. With the highest infection rate in Massachusetts — and blocks’ long lines of people waiting for food — Chelsea was on display for the world to see. Even my family in Argentina saw news reports of our city being slammed by the raging pandemic.

During those difficult days, people opened up their hearts for the residents of our community. Those of us involved in addressing the coronavirus pandemic in Chelsea, received an outpouring of support through donations, volunteering, well wishes and prayers for recovery and hope.

Other low-income, ethnically and racially diverse communities like Chelsea faced the same wrath. Years of structural oppression and racism leading to health, environmental and economic disparities, have made the effects of COVID-19 so much more pronounced.

My post-pandemic hope is that the hearts and minds of those outside of these cities remember how much communities like Chelsea have sacrificed. Will you remember us in six months? Six years? Sixteen years from now?

Will the people of Massachusetts continue to have communities like Chelsea in their hearts and minds? Roseann Bongiovanni, Executive Director, GreenRoots

Will the people of Massachusetts continue to have communities like Chelsea in their hearts and minds? Will you reflect on our disproportionate environmental and industrial burdens, poor public transportation, food insecurity, housing instability and low wages for essential workers? Will others say, “We can shoulder a little bit of the burden, so it’s not all on the backs of low-income communities of color?”

We must learn from the past year, and from the reasons for Chelsea’s soaring infection rates. We must pass laws to protect environmental justice communities. We must say “no” to new toxic facilities. We must prioritize the health and well-being of all people, but particularly those who have faced oppression, discrimination and racism, which caused these health disparities. --   Roseann Bongiovanni , Executive Director, GreenRoots

Will Art Remain The Unifying Force It’s Always Been?

I’m sitting behind my screen, fractured from the world.

I don’t feel the need to see other people as much as I did earlier in the pandemic. Has something happened to me on a molecular level? Is the isolation hitting other writers and artists the way it’s hitting me?

We already live in a world of separate platforms. News broadcasts spin the same events in different ways for different people. The platforms dictate what we see based on what the platforms think we want to see. They strut the arrogance of knowing us better than we do. And now the pandemic has further alienated all of us.

I hope the isolation we’ve endured this year won’t stunt our ability to connect to each other. Desmond Hall, Novelist, Visual Artist

This worries me, because I love when artists create the specific that’s felt universally. I wrote a book about a boy and his family in rural Jamaica . So far it has resonated in other parts of the world. But if we continue to be so isolated will we be too separated to partake in varied experiences?

It was only a short while ago when some Hollywood execs deemed a movie like “Black Panther” was too ethnic to have widespread appeal. They doubted that the specific had universality. The film proved them wrong, but what if we continue to grow apart, divided? Will some art be discarded as irrelevant because large swaths of people can’t relate, can’t see the universality?

I believe in art as a unifying force, as a medium that reveals our commonalities and reasons to strive together. I hope the isolation we’ve endured this year won’t stunt our ability to connect to each other. --  Desmond Hall , Author, Visual Artist  

Behavior Change Won't Be Enough To Avert Climate Catastrophe

With more than half a million lives lost in the U.S., the COVID crisis has yielded a sobering lesson about human resistance to change, even in the face of devastating consequences.

Wearing masks in public? A no-brainer. Avoiding large indoor gatherings? Ditto. Yet when official directives and common sense have impinged on individual choice, too often they have collided with indifference, indignation and defiance.

Some wonder if there are lessons to be learned from the pandemic as we seek to avert the worst ravages of climate change. With many working remotely rather than traveling daily to their offices, reduced commuting has doubtless contributed to the past year’s drop of more than 10% in U.S. greenhouse gas emissions. It’s a pretty sure bet, though, that commuters will refill our highways, with more people than ever traveling by car for fear of infection on public transit.

Air travel, too, is likely to rebound as business trips come back into vogue and leisure travelers take to the skies.

The COVID crisis has yielded a sobering lesson about human resistance to change, even in the face of devastating consequences Philip Warburg, Senior Fellow, Boston University Institute Of Sustainable Energy

Rather than placing our bets on behavioral change, we need to demand of government and industry what we cannot expect of ourselves. All levels of government must require a true gearing-up of renewable energy as our primary electricity source.

In addition, the federal government must mandate a shift to cleaner, leaner motor vehicles — a challenge bigger than simply electrifying the behemoths that now roll off our production lines. And governing bodies at all levels must embrace an unprecedented commitment to energy justice, making it possible for low-income people to make their homes more efficient, buy energy-efficient appliances, and install solar power on their rooftops and in their communities.

It would be folly to rely on new patterns of human behavior emerging from the COVID catastrophe to address climate change. We need to make an all-out investment in retooling the engines of our society. --   Philip Warburg , Senior Fellow, Boston University Institute Of Sustainable Energy

Amy Gorel, Lisa Creamer and Kathleen Burge helped with the production of this piece. The audio essay was was produced by Cloe Axelson, with help from David Greene; it was mixed by Michael Garth.

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Cloe Axelson Senior Editor, Cognoscenti Cloe Axelson is an editor of WBUR’s opinion page, Cognoscenti.

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Life after a pandemic, how quickly will we return to pre-pandemic normal.

Posted March 28, 2021 | Reviewed by Jessica Schrader

• People in the U.S. are beginning to plan for life post-pandemic.
• The normalcy bias made it difficult to accept the pandemic at first, but now it is the new normal.
• After a year of social distancing, interacting with other people might be uncomfortable at first, but we are likely to readjust quickly.

I haven’t had many pandemic dreams , but last night I dreamt I was in a crowded area and most people weren’t wearing masks. I then realized that I wasn’t wearing a mask either. I quickly reached in my purse to find it, but I had forgotten it at home. Maybe it was OK though? I was dimly aware that there was a new order in place that no longer made masks mandatory. However, I was also acutely aware of my discomfort at being surrounded by so many people, especially unmasked people—seeing so many faces at once felt wrong.

With vaccinations rapidly making their way through the U.S., a lot of people here are seeing light at the end of the tunnel. My university and my daughter’s school are planning to be in-person this fall, and friends who have been vaccinated are excitedly telling me of their air travel plans.

But how quickly will we actually feel comfortable going back to a pre-pandemic life? My sister asked me how long I thought it would take for people to be comfortable in crowds again. She thought it might take a long time. My hunch is that it will be much quicker than we think, thanks to our ability to rapidly adjust to new situations.

A year ago, I wrote about the psychological biases that affect how we reacted to the pandemic. The normalcy bias roots us in our current way of being and makes it hard for us to accept it when a huge change is occurring. But now we’ve come to terms with this unprecedented moment, and pandemic life has become our new normal. Sometimes it takes looking through old photos for me to really grasp how different my life is now than it was a few years ago.

If you had to predict how likely it was that a global pandemic would occur in your lifetime, what would your answer be? What about the likelihood it would occur in the first half of the 2000s? Post your answers in this survey and I’ll report on the results (go do it now and then come back here).

Whatever you predicted, it is likely a much larger number than what you would have reported if I had asked you to make those predictions two years ago. But now that it has happened, it almost seems as if it was inevitable (despite research utilizing statistical modeling that suggests it almost wasn’t a pandemic). This is what our minds do, how they have adapted to help us make sense of and live in the world around us.

So once we do start going back out into the world and interacting with people again, it will probably feel a little uncomfortable at first. We might have a physical reaction when someone outside our household first tries to give us a hug. And I could see myself having a bit of déjà vu from my dream last night the first time I find myself in a large unmasked crowd. But, because of how humans adapt, I expect that very shortly after we start engaging in these activities again, they will begin to feel normal and most of us will lose that discomfort. We’ve been living in a pandemic long enough that there might be a few behavioral changes that stick around. (No more handshake? Better at washing our hands? I’d love it if people actually stayed home from work when they were sick.) But time moves quickly and our memories are short as we adapt to new situations, so I expect that many of the lessons we’ve learned will quickly be forgotten as we readjust to post-pandemic life.

Amie M. Gordon, Ph.D., is a social psychologist at the University of Michigan whose research focuses on interpersonal relationships and well-being.

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A Year After Coronavirus: An Inclusive ‘New Normal’

Six months into a new decade, 2020 has already been earmarked as ‘the worst’ year in the 21st century. The novel coronavirus has given rise to a global pandemic that has destabilized most institutional settings. While we live in times when humankind possesses the most advanced science and technology, a virus invisible to the naked eye has massively disrupted economies, healthcare, and education systems worldwide. This should serve as a reminder that as we keep making progress in science and research, humanity will continue to face challenges in the future, and it is upon us to prioritize those issues that are most relevant in the 21st century.

Even amidst the pandemic, Space X, an American aerospace manufacturer, managed to become the first private company to send humans to space. While this is a tremendous achievement and prepares humanity for a sustainable future, I feel there is a need to introspect the challenges that we are already facing. On the one hand, we seem to be preparing beyond the 21st century. On the other hand, heightened nationalism, increasing violence against marginalized communities and multidimensional inequalities across all sectors continue to act as barriers to growth for most individuals across the globe. COVID-19 has reinforced these multifaceted economic, social and cultural inequalities wherein those in situations of vulnerability have found it increasingly difficult to get quality medical attention, access to quality education, and have witnessed increased domestic violence while being confined to their homes. 

Given the coronavirus’s current situation, some households have also had time to introspect on gender roles and stereotypes. For instance, women are expected to carry out unpaid care work like cooking, cleaning, and looking after the family. There is no valid reason to believe that women ought to carry out these activities, and men have no role in contributing to household chores. With men having shared household chores during the lockdown period, it gives hope that they will realize the burden that women have been bearing for past decades and will continue sharing responsibilities. However, it would be naïve to believe that gender discrimination could be tackled so easily, and men would give up on their decades' old habits within a couple of months. Thus, during and after the pandemic, there is an urgent need to sensitize households on the importance of gender equality and social cohesion.

Moving forward, developing quality healthcare systems that are affordable and accessible to all should be the primary objective for all governments. This can be done by increasing expenditure towards health and education and simultaneously reducing expenditure on defence equipment where the latter mainly gives rise to an idea that countries need to be prepared for violence. There is substantial evidence that increased investment in health and education is beneficial in the long-term and can potentially build the basic foundation of a country. 

If it can be established that usage of nuclear weapons, violence and war are not solutions to any problem, governments (like, for example, Costa Rica) could move towards disarmament of weapons and do their part in building a more peaceful planet that is sustainable for the future. This would further promote global citizenship wherein nationality, race, gender, caste, and other categories, are just mere variables and they do not become identities of individuals that restrict their thought process. The aim should be to build responsible citizens who play an active role in their society and work collectively in helping develop a planet that is well-governed, inclusive, and environmentally sustainable.

 ‘A year after Coronavirus’ is still an unknown, so I think that our immediate focus should be to tackle the complex problems that have emerged from the pandemic so that we make the year after coronavirus one which highlights recovery and acts as a pathway to fresh beginnings. While there is little to gain from such a fatal cause, it is vital that we also use it to make the ‘new normal’ in favour of the environment and ensure that no one is left behind.   

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Life after covid-19.

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(Photo by Miguel Pereira/Getty Images)

Covid-19 created a record-level disruption across several industries, forcing employers to respond at a record-level pace — including implementing remote jobs on the spot, while, as much as possible, easing employees' concerns to reduce worry and stress. Now, in a few weeks, states will reopen and many of us will return to an unrecognizable life. Leaving most of us will be wondering, what will the new normal be?

No one can predict the future, but we can see trends, and the more you are able to spot them, the better your chances are of having retaining a (good) job and securing your future. 

As long as there is no vaccine and there is no cure, the way we engage with physical product and services will change. Many will reframe from the desire to touch or be touched. In just a few months, human contact (in large parts of the world) has become one of the most feared gestures, not to mention the unthinkable scenario being in a small room with many people. 

There are now fears about what life post-COVID-19 will look like, which can take an emotional toll. It can drain one's energy and   eat away at one’s creativity and ability to stay innovative. As a result, businesses should acknowledge the long-term changes created by the spread of Covid-19 and adjust to thrive through these  turbulent times , whether it is expanding product offerings or services, learning new ways to showcase your product, such as virtually, or transforming your existing physical store into an online shop, all while exploring various marketing strategies that will retain and attract customers, even post-COVID.  

The time we are in now can remind us of World War II, in that sense, many of the innovations we enjoy today were invented during the war or right after. Crises, challenges, and constraints can be used as a driving force. 

Just six months ago, many feared losing their jobs to robots and automation. Almost overnight, we are no longer talking about that fear, or at least we're talking about it less. However, COVID19 may increase that automatization trend to eliminate human contact and minimize coronavirus risk. Soon, we will see many more ways of paying, buying without touching or being touched, and vending machines, I predict they will make a serious comeback, selling virtually everything you'll need, such as masks and food.

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The world will become "hands-free", and by that, I mean the delivery of products and services completely without physical human contact of any kind - we will not "touch and do not want to be touched".

For example. Japan has a restaurant chain named "Ichiran,” a so-called "low-interaction dining." The customers order food with as little human connection as possible. We will see more concepts like this. Be it robot coffee shops, hydromassage, etc., you name it! 

I know it can be hard to see the "light at the end of the tunnel," especially if you have lost your job or your business is closed. The future will undoubtedly be different; however, it will not be job-free, but instead, hands-free.

Therefore, companies must read the market and deliver what customers are looking for. For example, the tourism industry has adjusted drastically, offering armchair experiences that will allow us to experience destinations right from the comfort of our own homes, while also inspiring travel to these destinations as soon as travel restrictions ease.

For example, New York State, the home to many beloved attractions, is offering dozens of online events, virtual tours, webcams and live streams events. Whether it's taking a 360-degree tour of the Wild Center or the Corning Museum of Glass , visiting a cuddly animal at a zoo, browsing a world-class art collection, or practicing deep breathing in a live stream yoga class, you can basically experience an entire state and even country right from your couch!

Workplace Post-Covid 19   

Post-Covid-19, there will be an influx of new talent in the market, take this opportunity to invest in your workplace culture.

The right workspace culture and setup can inspire and allow employees to make the most of their time in the office or home office. It is crucial to inspire and motivate your employees to be the best they can be. If they feel uninspired, they will find reasons to work less, and their work quality can decrease. Perhaps it is time for companies to allocate resources and a budget for employees' at-home workstations? How about investing in your employee's wellness? Perhaps it’s time to provide them with free meditation apps, healthy meals that can be delivered to their door, an online wellness coach, a spinning bike, to stay fit and healthy mentally and physically.

According to Oztanık and Satıroğlu co-founders at Assembly Buildings, "Workplace culture has a decisive role in shaping employee experience. As a result, employee experience has become a crucial subject. Over the last decade, we have observed how leading companies take care of their community and employees delicately. At Assembly Buildings, we combine human resources, information technology and facility management and office operations that companies can customize for their employees to create purposeful work-life destinations.” Oztanık and Satıroğlu continue, “A tailored set of physical spaces, interactive programs, service offerings, wellbeing products, [and] remote working infrastructures must be delivered both by private companies and by commercial property buildings as common practice." The founders continue, "Soon, we will see an agile mix and match portfolio approach that companies, employees, and building owners enjoy, such as an HQ office, satellite offices, and remote working options, that deliver a customized, high caliber user experience while optimizing office expenses by up to 50%."

The alteration of the customary office culture will not only boost employee confidence but can also trigger creativity that can produce results. Many employees are working from home or will look for employers that can offer flexible workplace options as many will still feel uncomfortable working in close proximity to others. 

Mental health Post-COVID-19 

The coronavirus crisis will continue to have many feeling lonely, helpless and looking for support, especially for those who have lost loved ones, may not have a job or a business to return to.  

Additionally, for many people, the general uncertainty of what lies ahead has created a heightened level of anxiety and burnout. According to a recent  survey  published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, nearly half of the people living in the United States feel the coronavirus crisis is harming their mental health .

According to Fernanda Neis and Gustavo Oliveira experts at the DeRose Meditation , “In a brief period, the pandemic may have accelerated or created challenges companies and professionals have been facing during modern times. These challenges can include the immense volume of information we deal with, hyper-connectivity, the complexity and uncertainty about the future, the speed of change, and working from home.” 

Neis and Oliveira also recommend that company leaders should provide ways for professionals to develop new skills such as self-managing their personal and professional lives in the same space, staying focused while working at home, establishing trust in virtual relationships, and handling increased levels of anxiety caused by the uncertainty of the future. 

Solving these challenges will be critical to the company's success since it will profoundly impact employee engagement, productivity and the ability to adapt to adversity. Remember, life after Covid-19 does not have to be scary. Take this time to turn challenges into opportunities and be the leader that will rise to the 'occasion'.

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Life after the pandemic

Since the outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic we have begun to analyse, forecast and speculate the impact on economies, societies, political systems, governance mechanisms, and on many more areas. We have started to imagine a world after COVID-19 through a variety of lenses based on our own understanding and experiences. The innumerable research that are being carried out on the impact of COVID-19 throughout the world have flooded our minds, and sometimes made us confused as to what life after COVID-19 would look like.  

The implications of COVID-19 on the global economy and on individual countries are becoming obvious as time goes on. The shutdown of almost all economic activities have brought miseries to economies of all strata and phases. Production and supply chains have been disrupted, exports and imports decelerated, transportation system collapsed and service sector interrupted. These have changed the lives and livelihoods of people across the world. Unemployment has soared, poverty has surged, food insecurity has increased, and above all, loss of lives is increasing by the hour.

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Barring a few, most governments have undertaken policy measures to address such a rapid and massive impact of corona pandemic at large scales. Health expenditures have been topped up to mitigate the health risks. Stimulus packages for various sectors of the economy have been announced with the objective being increase spending following the Keynesian theory to rejuvenate the economy. Relief packages are also in place in many countries to extend income and food support to the poor to save them from hunger.

These are of course immediate responses to rescue the lives of people and also pump oxygen into the economy. And, hopefully it will work sooner rather than later. Scientists and doctors have shown some rays of hope to tackle the disease. And once health is under control, human beings are smart enough to work through in reviving the economic activities and recover the lost gains to the best of their ability. At least, history has pointed out clearly how economies could get back to life after several crises in the past. The World Wars, the Great Depression, the Spanish Flu and many more examples will confirm this.

However, apart from economic recovery, will there be any changes in social, cultural and institutional norms, political systems and governance patterns? Change is a continuous process. It happens for good or for bad. Changes emanated from crises may sometimes become beneficial for humanity. What changes will COVID-19 lead to? It depends on what changes we want to see. And how we work towards that. It is not automatic. 

At the onset of COVID-19, people talked about the universal nature of this pandemic. We were reminded of how every person—rich and poor, man and woman, powerful and weak—is vulnerable to this pandemic. COVID-19 does not distinguish among race, colour, gender, location, profession, position or riches. But it has been proven wrong when immediate research in many communities in several countries showed that COVID-19 also has a bias against certain groups of people. That is why African-American were more affected in the USA or the underprivileged with weak immune system in poor countries are becoming victims of COVID-19 more than others. This bias is of course not created by COVID-19. Rather it is the outcome of the biases that have been created by government policies which favour the rich and ignores the impoverished.

A review of the ongoing discussions with respect to the situation during the post COVD-19 period indicates that there can be three possible scenarios.

First is the business as usual situation. That is, the world recovers from the COVID-19 pandemic and goes back to where we were before COVID-19—economically, socially, politically and environmentally. We continue to live in whatever good or bad circumstances we had during the pre-COVID-19 period. And we continue to accept and adjust to the existing realities that the world will continue to generate wealth, and economic prosperity of some countries and some people will continue to multiply but these privileges will not be universal.

The second situation will be such that the global economy slides so much that it takes a long time to recover. Poverty, mortality, morbidity, food insecurity and unemployment increases. All forms of inequality within and among countries accentuates. All global targets—Sustainable Development Goals, providing support to poor countries by developed countries equivalent to 0.7 percent of their gross national income, Paris climate agreement to limit the increase of global temperature to 1.5 degrees Celsius —fail to be achieved. As a result, countries become inward looking and resort to protectionism. And the effectiveness of global institutions such as the United Nations, World Trade Organisations and the like decelerates.

Third is the optimistic case. The economies around the world not only recovers but, moves further ahead. Governments invest more in areas such as health, education, technology, climate and work towards ending poverty, improving inclusivity, establishing good governance and creating democratic spaces. Cooperation among nations improves and commitments toward fulfilling the global promises get implemented. This is the situation where crisis will be turned into opportunity by global and national leaders.

What do we expect in Bangladesh during the aftermath of COVID-19? The outcome of the greatest crisis in Bangladesh's history—the Liberation War in 1971—was regaining our prized possession, that is, an independent country. We faced the crisis in unity and solidarity. And following the war we also got a progressive constitution that upholds the dignity and rights of every citizen of Bangladesh. Social justice and equality are also enshrined in our great constitution. After 49 years of our independence, we however, cannot claim that we could keep our promises to those who sacrificed their lives for the country.

Rather, the spirit of our freedom fighters is being undermined by the way some of us conduct ourselves each day and even during crisis. Politically connected people who steal relief for the flood affected people and get away with such misdeeds are also active now during COVID-19. With shame we observe when people go hungry, these people in charge of distribution of food and support have the audacity to commit such heinous crimes. With frustration we see how public representatives are nowhere to be seen to coordinate the relief work and help their voters to survive. With sadness we note how people behave with the frontline workers of this crisis who are risking their own lives and also how health workers mistreat patients by forgetting the core values of their profession. With discouragement we learn how faulty and corrupt the health procurement is and how the poor are deprived of medicines allocated for them.

And, all of a sudden, it seems everyone has become poor in Bangladesh!  The way every business—irrespective of its size and strength, is seeking stimulus packages from the government reminds us of the old story of greed, not need.

One wonders, will people change in their attitude and behaviour or keep repeating their old acts once COVID-19 recedes?

Dr Fahmida Khatun is the Executive Director at the Centre for Policy Dialogue.

জনগণের শক্তিতেই টিকে আছি, ভারতের দয়ায় নয়: ওবায়দুল কাদের

তিনি বলেন, আওয়ামী লীগের নেতাকর্মীরা মাঠে না থাকলে বিএনপি সমাবেশের নামে সন্ত্রাসী কর্মকাণ্ড চালাবে।

গরম কমলে ‘বড়’ আন্দোলনে নামবে নাগরিক ঐক্য

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The Protesters and the President

Over the past week, thousands of students protesting the war in gaza have been arrested..

This transcript was created using speech recognition software. While it has been reviewed by human transcribers, it may contain errors. Please review the episode audio before quoting from this transcript and email [email protected] with any questions.

From “New York Times,” I’m Michael Barbaro. This is “The Daily.”

Free, free, Palestine!

Free, free Palestine!

Free, free, free Palestine!

Over the past week, what had begun as a smattering of pro-Palestinian protests on America’s college campuses exploded into a nationwide movement —

United, we’ll never be defeated!

— as students at dozens of universities held demonstrations, set up encampments, and at times seized academic buildings.

[PROTESTERS CLAMORING]:

response, administrators at many of those colleges decided to crack down —

Do not throw things at our officers. We will use chemical munitions that include gas.

— calling in local police to carry out mass detentions and arrests. From Arizona State —

In the name of the state of Arizona, I declare this gathering to be a violation of —

— to the University of Georgia —

— to City College of New York.

[PROTESTERS CHANTING, “BACK OFF”]:

As of Thursday, police had arrested 2,000 students on more than 40 campuses. A situation so startling that President Biden could no longer ignore it.

Look, it’s basically a matter of fairness. It’s a matter of what’s right. There’s the right to protest, but not the right to cause chaos.

Today, my colleagues Jonathan Wolfe and Peter Baker on a history-making week. It’s Friday, May 3.

Jonathan, as this tumultuous week on college campuses comes to an end, it feels like the most extraordinary scenes played out on the campus of the University of California Los Angeles, where you have been reporting. What is the story of how that protest started and ultimately became so explosive?

So late last week, pro-Palestinian protesters set up an encampment at the University of California, Los Angeles.

From the river to the sea!

Palestine will be free!

Palestine —

It was right in front of Royce Hall, which I don’t know if you are familiar with UCLA, but it’s a very famous, red brick building. It’s on all the brochures. And there was two things that stood out about this encampment. And the first thing was that they barricaded the encampment.

The encampment, complete with tents and barricades, has been set up in the middle of the Westwood campus. The protesters demand —

They have metal grates. They had wooden pallets. And they separated themselves from the campus.

This is kind of interesting. There are controlling access, as we’ve been talking about. They are trying to control who is allowed in, who is allowed out.

They sort of policed the area. So they only would let people that were part of their community, they said, inside.

I’m a UCLA student. I deserve to go here. We paid tuition. This is our school. And they’re not letting me walk in. Why can’t I go? Will you let me go in?

We’re not engaging with that.

Then you can move. Will you move?

And the second thing that stood out about this camp was that it immediately attracted pro-Israel counterprotesters.

And what did the leadership of UCLA say about all of this, the encampment and these counterprotesters?

So the University of California’s approach was pretty unique. They had a really hands-off approach. And they allowed the pro-Palestinian protesters to set up an encampment. They allowed the counterprotesters to happen. I mean, this is a public university, so anyone who wants to can just enter the campus.

So when do things start to escalate?

So there were definitely fights and scuffles through the weekend. But a turning point was really Sunday —

[SINGING IN HEBREW]:

— when this group called the Israeli American Council, they’re a nonprofit organization, organized a rally on campus. The Israeli American Council has really been against these pro-Palestinian protests. They say that they’re antisemitic. So this nonprofit group sets up a stage with a screen really just a few yards from the pro-Palestinian encampment.

We are grateful that this past Friday, the University of California, stated that they will continue to oppose any calls for boycott and divestment from Israel!

[PROTESTERS CHEERING]

And they host speakers and they held prayers.

Jewish students, you’re not alone! Oh, you’re not alone! We are right here with you! And we’re right here with you in until —

[WORDLESS SINGING]:

And then lots of other people start showing up. And the proximity between protesters and counterprotesters and even some agitators, makes it really clear that something was about to happen.

And what was that? What ended up happening?

On Monday night, a group of about 60 counterprotesters tried to breach the encampment there. And the campus police had to break it up. And things escalated again on Tuesday.

They stormed the barricades and it’s a complete riot.

[PROTESTER SHOUTING]:

Put it down! Put it down! Put it down!

I went to report on what happened just a few hours after it ended.

And I spoke to a lot of protesters. And I met one demonstrator, Marie.

Yeah, my first name is Marie. M-A-R-I-E. Last name, Salem.

And Marie described what happened.

So can you just tell me a little bit about what happened last night?

Last night, we were approached by over a hundred counterprotesters who were very mobilized and ready to break into camp. They proceeded to try to breach our barricades extremely violently.

Marie said it started getting out of hand when counterprotesters started setting off fireworks towards the camp.

They had bear spray. They had Mace. They were throwing wood and spears. Throwing water bottles, continuing fireworks.

So she said that they were terrified. It was just all hands on deck. Everyone was guarding the barricades.

Every time someone experienced the bear spray or Mace or was hit and bleeding, we had some medics in the front line. And then we had people —

And they said that they were just trying to take care of people who were injured.

I mean, at any given moment, there was 5 to 10 people being treated.

So what she described to me sounded more like a battlefield than a college campus.

And it was just a complete terror and complete abandonment of the university, as we also watched private security watch this the entire time on the stairs. And some LAPD were stationed about a football field length back from these counterprotesters, and did not make a single arrest, did not attempt to stop any violence, did not attempt to get in between the two groups. No attempt.

I should say, I spoke to a state authorities and eyewitnesses and they confirmed Marie’s account about what happened that night, both in terms of the violence that took place at the encampment and how law enforcement responded. So in the end, people ended up fighting for hours before the police intervened.

[SOMBER MUSIC]

So in her mind, UCLA’s hands-off approach, which seemed to have prevailed throughout this entire period, ends up being way too hands off in a moment when students were in jeopardy.

That’s right. And so at this point, the protesters in the encampment started preparing for two possibilities. One was that this group of counterprotesters would return and attack them. And the second one was that the police would come and try to break up this encampment.

So they started building up the barricades. They start reinforcing them with wood. And during the day, hundreds of people came and brought them supplies. They brought food.

They brought helmets, goggles, earplugs, saline solution, all sorts of things these people could use to defend themselves. And so they’re really getting ready to burrow in. And in the end, it was the police who came.

[PROTESTERS SHOUTING]:

So Wednesday at 7:00 PM, they made an announcement on top of Royce Hall, which overlooks the encampment —

— administrative criminal actions up to and including arrest. Please leave the area immediately.

And they told people in the encampment that they needed to leave or face arrest.

[DRUM BEATING]: [PROTESTERS CHANTING]

And so as night falls, they put on all this gear that they’ve been collecting, the goggles, the masks and the earplugs, and they wait for the police.

[DRUM BEATING]:

And so the police arrive and station themselves right in front of the encampment. And then at a certain point, they storm the back stairs of the encampment.

[PROTESTERS CHANTING]:

And this is the stairs that the protesters have been using to enter and exit the camp. And they set up a line. And the protesters do this really surprising thing.

The people united!

They open up umbrellas. They have these strobe lights. And they’re flashing them at the police, who just slowly back out of the camp.

[PROTESTERS CHEERING]:

And so at this point, they’re feeling really great. They’re like, we did it. We pushed them out of their camp. And when the cops try to push again on those same set of stairs —

[PROTESTER SHOUTS]:

Hold your ground!

— the protesters organized themselves with all these shields that they had built earlier. And they go and confront them. And so there’s this moment where the police are trying to push up the stairs. And the protesters are literally pushing them back.

Push them back! Push them back!

Push them back!

And at a certain point, dozens of the police officers who were there, basically just turn around and leave.

So how does this eventually come to an end?

So at a certain point, the police push in again. Most of the conflict is centered at the front of these barricades. And the police just start tearing them apart.

[METAL CLANGING]

[CLAMORING]

They removed the front barricade. And in its place is this group of protesters who have linked arms and they’re hanging on to each other. And the police are trying to pull protesters one by one away from this group.

He’s just a student! Back off!

But they’re having a really hard time because there’s so many protesters. And they’re all just hanging on to each other.

We’re moving back now.

So at a certain point, one of the police officers started firing something into the crowd. We don’t exactly know what it was. But it really spooked the protesters.

Stop shooting at kids! Fuck you! Fuck them!

They started falling back. Everyone was really scared. The protesters were yelling, don’t shoot us. And at that point, the police just stormed the camp.

Get back. Get back.

Back up now!

And so after about four hours of this, the police pushed the protesters out of the encampment. They had arrested about 200 protesters. And this was finally over.

And I’m just curious, Jonathan, because you’re standing right there, you are bearing witness to this all, what you were thinking, what your impressions of this were.

I mean, I was stunned. These are mostly teenagers. This is a college campus, an institution of higher learning. And what I saw in front of me looked like a war zone.

[TENSE MUSIC]

The massive barricade, the police coming in with riot gear, and all this violence was happening in front of these red brick buildings that are famous for symbolizing a really open college campus. And everything about it was just totally surreal.

Well, Jonathan, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

Thanks, Michael.

We’ll be right back.

Peter, around 10:00 AM on Thursday morning as the smoke is literally still clearing at the University of California Los Angeles, you get word that President Biden is going to speak.

Right, exactly. It wasn’t on his public schedule. He was about to head to Andrews Air Force base in order to take a trip. And then suddenly, we got the notice that he was going to be addressing the cameras in the Roosevelt Room.

They didn’t tell us what he was going to talk about. But it was pretty clear, I think. Everybody understood that it was going to be about these campus protests, about the growing violence and the clashes with police, and the arrests that the entire country had been watching on TV every night for the past week, and I think that we were watching just that morning with UCLA. And it reached the point where he just had to say something.

And why, in his estimation and those of his advisors, was this the moment that Biden had to say something?

Well, it kind of reached a boiling point. It kind of reached the impression of a national crisis. And you expect to hear your president address it in this kind of a moment, particularly because it’s about his own policy. His policy toward Israel is at the heart of these protests. And he was getting a lot of grief. He was getting a lot of grief from Republicans who were chiding him for not speaking out personally. He hadn’t said anything in about 10 days.

He’s getting a lot of pressure from Democrats, too, who wanted him to come out and be more forceful. It wasn’t enough, in their view, to leave it to his spokespeople to say something. Moderate Democrats felt he needed to come out and take some leadership on this.

And so at the appointed moment, Peter, what does Biden actually say in the Roosevelt Room of the White House?

Good morning.

Before I head to North Carolina, I wanted to speak for a few moments about what’s going on, on our college campuses here.

Well, it comes in the Roosevelt Room and he talks to the camera. And he talks about the two clashing imperatives of American principle.

The first is the right to free speech and for people to peacefully assemble and make their voices heard. The second is the rule of law. Both must be upheld.

One is freedom of speech. The other is the rule of law.

In fact, peaceful protest is in the best tradition of how Americans respond to consequential issues. But, but, neither are we a lawless country.

In other words, what he’s saying is, yes, I support the right of these protesters to come out and object to even my own policy, in effect, is what he’s saying. But it shouldn’t trail into violence.

Destroying property is not a peaceful protest. It’s against the law. Vandalism, trespassing, breaking windows, shutting down campuses —

It shouldn’t trail into taking over buildings and obstructing students from going to class or canceling their graduations.

Threatening people, intimidating people, instilling fear in people is not peaceful protest. It’s against the law.

And he leans very heavily into this idea that what he’s seeing these days goes beyond the line.

I understand people have strong feelings and deep convictions. In America, we respect the right and protect the right for them to express that. But it doesn’t mean anything goes.

It has crossed into harassment and expressions of hate in a way that goes against the national character.

As president, I will always defend free speech. And I will always be just as strong and standing up for the rule of law. That’s my responsibility to you, the American people, and my obligation to the Constitution. Thank you very much.

Right, as I watched the speech, I heard his overriding message to basically be, I, the president of the United States, am drawing a line. These protests and counterprotests, the seizing and defacing of campus buildings, class disruption, all of it, name calling, it’s getting out of hand. That there’s a right way to do this. And what I’m seeing is the wrong way to do it and it has to stop.

That’s exactly right. And as he’s wrapping up, reporters, of course, ask questions. And the first question is —

Mr. President, have the protests forced you to reconsider any of the policies with regard to the region?

— will this change your policy toward the war in Gaza? Which, of course, is exactly what the protesters want. That’s the point.

And he basically says —

— no. Just one word, no.

Right. And that felt kind of important, as brief and fleeting as it was, because at the end of the day, what he’s saying to these protesters is, I’m not going to do what you want. And basically, your protests are never going to work. I’m not going to change the US’s involvement in this war.

Yeah, that’s exactly right. He is saying, I’m not going to be swayed by angry people in the streets. I’m going to do what I think is right when it comes to foreign policy. Now, what he thinks is that they’re not giving him enough credit for trying to achieve what they want, which is an end of the war.

He has been pressuring Israel and Hamas to come to a deal for a ceasefire that will, hopefully, in his view, would then lead to a more enduring end of hostilities. But, of course, this deal hasn’t gone anywhere. Hamas, in particular, seems to be resisting it. And so the president is left with a policy of arming Israel without having found a way yet to stop the war.

Right. I wonder, though, Peter, if we’re being honest, don’t these protests, despite what Biden is saying there, inevitably exert a kind of power over him? Becoming one of many pressures, but a pressure nonetheless that does influence how he thinks about these moments. I mean, here he is at the White House devoting an entire conversation to the nation to these campus protests.

Well, look, he knows this feeds into the political environment in which he’s running for re-election, in which he basically has people who otherwise might be his supporters on the left disenchanted with him. And he knows that there’s a cost to be paid. And that certainly, obviously, is in his head as he’s thinking about what to do.

But I think his view of the war is changing by the day for all sorts of reasons. And most of them having to do with realities on the ground. He has decided that Israel has gone far enough, if not too far, in the way it has conducted this operation in Gaza.

He is upset about the humanitarian crisis there. And he’s looking for a way to wrap all this up into a move that would move to peacemaking, beginning to get the region to a different stage, maybe have a deal with the Saudis to normalize relations with Israel in exchange for some sort of a two-state solution that would eventually resolve the Palestinian issue at its core.

So I think it’s probably fair to say that the protests won’t move him in an immediate kind of sense. But they obviously play into the larger zeitgeist of the moment. And I also think it’s important to know who Joe Biden is at heart.

Explain that.

He’s not drawn to activism. He was around in 1968, the last time we saw this major conflagration at Columbia University, for instance. At the time, Joe Biden was a law student in Syracuse, about 250 miles away. And he was an institutionalist even then.

He was just focused on his studies. He was about to graduate. He was thinking about the law career. And he didn’t really have much of an affinity, I think, for his fellow students of that era, for their activist way of looking at things.

He tells a story in his memoir about walking down a street in Syracuse one day to go to the pizza shop with some friends. And they walk by the administration building. And they see people hanging out of the windows. They’re hanging SDS banners. That’s the Students for a Democratic Society, which was one of the big activist groups of the era.

And he says, they were taking over the building. And we looked up and said, look at those assholes. That’s how far apart from the antiwar movement I was. That’s him writing in his memoir.

So to a young Joe Biden, those who devote their time and their energy to protesting the war are, I don’t need to repeat the word twice, but they’re losers. They’re not worth his time.

Well, I think it’s the tactics they’re using more than the goals that he disagreed with. He would tell you he disagreed with the Vietnam War. He was for civil rights. But he thought that taking over a building was performative, was all about getting attention, and that there was a better way, in his view, to do it.

He was somebody who wanted to work inside the system. He said in an interview quite a few years back, he says, look, I was wearing sports coats in that era. He saw himself becoming part of the system, not somebody trying to tear it down.

And so how should we think about that Joe Biden, when we think about this Joe Biden? I mean, the Joe Biden who, as a young man, looked upon antiwar protesters with disdain and the one who is now president and his very own policies have inspired such ferocious campus protests?

Yeah, that Joe Biden, the 1968 Joe Biden, he could just throw on a sports coat, go to the pizza shop with his friends, make fun of the activists and call them names, and then that’s it. They didn’t have to affect his life. But that’s not what 2024 Joe Biden can do.

Now, wherever he goes, he’s dogged by this. He goes to speeches and people are shouting at him, Genocide Joe! Genocide Joe! He is the target of the same kind of a movement that he disdained in 1968. And so as much as he would like to ignore it or move on or focus on other things, I think this has become a defining image of his year and one of the defining images, perhaps, of his presidency. And 2024 Joe Biden can’t simply ignore it.

Well, Peter, thank you very much. We appreciate it.

[UPBEAT MUSIC]

Here’s what else you need to know today. During testimony on Thursday in Donald Trump’s hush money trial, jurors heard a recording secretly made by Trump’s former fixer, Michael Cohen, in which Trump discusses a deal to buy a woman’s silence. In the recording, Trump asks Cohen about how one payment made by Trump to a woman named Karen McDougal would be financed. The recording could complicate efforts by Trump’s lawyers to distance him from the hush money deals at the center of the trial.

A final thing to know, tomorrow morning, we’ll be sending you the latest episode from our colleagues over at “The Interview.” This week, David Marchese talks with comedy star Marlon Wayans about his new stand-up special.

It’s a high that you get when you don’t know if this joke that I’m about to say is going to offend everybody. Are they going to walk out? Are they going to boo me? Are they going to hate this. And then you tell it, and everybody cracks up and you’re like, woo.

Today’s episode was produced by Diana Nguyen, Luke Vander Ploeg, Alexandra Leigh Young, Nina Feldman, and Carlos Prieto. It was edited by Lisa Chow and Michael Benoist. It contains original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano, and was engineered by Chris Wood. Our theme music is by Jim Brunberg and Ben Landsverk of Wonderly.

That’s it for “The Daily.” I’m Michael Barbaro. See you on Monday.

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• May 6, 2024   •   29:23 R.F.K. Jr.’s Battle to Get on the Ballot
• May 3, 2024   •   25:33 The Protesters and the President
• May 2, 2024   •   29:13 Biden Loosens Up on Weed
• May 1, 2024   •   35:16 The New Abortion Fight Before the Supreme Court
• April 30, 2024   •   27:40 The Secret Push That Could Ban TikTok
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• April 26, 2024   •   21:50 Harvey Weinstein Conviction Thrown Out
• April 25, 2024   •   40:33 The Crackdown on Student Protesters

Hosted by Michael Barbaro

Featuring Jonathan Wolfe and Peter Baker

Produced by Diana Nguyen ,  Luke Vander Ploeg ,  Alexandra Leigh Young ,  Nina Feldman and Carlos Prieto

Edited by Lisa Chow and Michael Benoist

Original music by Dan Powell and Marion Lozano

Engineered by Chris Wood

Listen and follow The Daily Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music | YouTube

Warning: this episode contains strong language.

Over the past week, students at dozens of universities held demonstrations, set up encampments and, at times, seized academic buildings. In response, administrators at many of those colleges decided to crack down and called in the local police to detain and arrest demonstrators.

As of Thursday, the police had arrested 2,000 people across more than 40 campuses, a situation so startling that President Biden could no longer ignore it.

Jonathan Wolfe, who has been covering the student protests for The Times, and Peter Baker, the chief White House correspondent, discuss the history-making week.

On today’s episode

Jonathan Wolfe , a senior staff editor on the newsletters team at The New York Times.

Peter Baker , the chief White House correspondent for The New York Times covering President Biden and his administration.

Background reading

As crews cleared the remnants of an encampment at U.C.L.A., students and faculty members wondered how the university could have handled protests over the war in Gaza so badly .

Biden denounced violence on campus , breaking his silence after a rash of arrests.

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Jonathan Wolfe is a senior staff editor on the newsletters team at The Times. More about Jonathan Wolfe

Peter Baker is the chief White House correspondent for The Times. He has covered the last five presidents and sometimes writes analytical pieces that place presidents and their administrations in a larger context and historical framework. More about Peter Baker

Luke Vander Ploeg is a senior producer on “The Daily” and a reporter for the National Desk covering the Midwest. More about Luke Vander Ploeg

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