essay about covid 19 quarantine

How does quarantine actually work?

Quarantines are one of the most effective ways to slow the outbreak. Image:  REUTERS/Lindsey Wasson

.chakra .wef-9dduvl{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-9dduvl{font-size:1.125rem;}} Explore and monitor how .chakra .wef-15eoq1r{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-size:1.25rem;color:#F7DB5E;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-15eoq1r{font-size:1.125rem;}} COVID-19 is affecting economies, industries and global issues

.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;color:#2846F8;font-size:1.25rem;}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-1nk5u5d{font-size:1.125rem;}} Get involved with our crowdsourced digital platform to deliver impact at scale

Stay up to date:.

• Italy has imposed tough restrictions on people and businesses to help tackle the COVID-19 pandemic.
• The measures include closing almost all shops and cancelling events and gatherings.
• Similar action in China led to a dramatic decline in new cases.

Reacting to the escalating number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, Italy has placed its entire 60 million population under tightened quarantine restrictions.

Have you read?

.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo{-webkit-transition:all 0.15s ease-out;transition:all 0.15s ease-out;cursor:pointer;-webkit-text-decoration:none;text-decoration:none;outline:none;color:inherit;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:hover,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-hover]{-webkit-text-decoration:underline;text-decoration:underline;}.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo:focus,.chakra .wef-1c7l3mo[data-focus]{box-shadow:0 0 0 3px rgba(168,203,251,0.5);} pandemic declared as infections slow in china. latest coronavirus updates, coronavirus – here’s the public health advice on how to protect yourself, this is what life is like inside italy's coronavirus quarantine zone.

In a move to encourage what’s known as social distancing, cafes, restaurants, gyms, museums, schools and other institutions across the country have closed. All shops – except food stores and pharmacies – will close too.

And public gatherings like religious services and business, social and sporting events have been cancelled.

People are not supposed to enter or leave quarantined areas and only work-related internal movement is permitted.

Italy has seen the largest number of COVID-19 infections outside of China , with more than 12,000 reported cases. The number of daily new cases continues to rise. The hardline quarantine measures emulate a similar approach adopted by authorities in China, during an earlier stage of the global outbreak. Dramatic decline With daily cases of COVID-19 soaring in the Chinese province of Hubei , strict restrictions were put in place to quarantine nearly 60 million people. People were confined to their homes, while buses, railways, ferries and flights stopped running and factories, offices and schools closed their doors.

The result was a dramatic decline in the disease’s spread. Within a month of the social distancing measures taking effect, the number of new cases fell from more than 1,600 each day to just 36.

COVID-19 can be transmitted when people with the virus cough or exhale, releasing tiny contaminated droplets into the air, which others can breathe in or pick up when their hands touch surfaces the droplets have landed on.

Placing people in quarantine reduces social contact to limit opportunities for transmission of a virus, helping to avoid a huge spike in cases that would overwhelm health services. Home alone

But living under lockdown for lengthy periods can take its toll on the people affected. Aside from fear of infection and boredom, studies show living in isolation can produce post-traumatic stress symptoms, confusion and frustration. These feelings can be aggravated by inadequate supplies and financial loss. To keep negative feelings to a minimum, it is important individuals are confined no longer than necessary and given a clear rationale for their quarantine. People also need regular information updates so they know what to do, as well as access to sufficient food and supplies. To alleviate some of these concerns, Italy is encouraging internet companies and publishers to offer its quarantined population free services aimed at helping people work or study at home. Other offers on the government’s Digital Solidarity site include mobile phone companies offering additional data allowances and a major publisher giving away 50,000 free magazine subscriptions.

However unpleasant the experience, quarantine has been a useful tool in slowing outbreaks in the past. During the influenza pandemic of 1918, US cities like St Louis closed churches , schools and movie theatres and cancelled sporting events at the early stages of the outbreak. Research shows that as a result fewer fatalities were recorded than other cities where no such measures were taken.

Don't miss any update on this topic

Create a free account and access your personalized content collection with our latest publications and analyses.

License and Republishing

World Economic Forum articles may be republished in accordance with the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Public License, and in accordance with our Terms of Use.

The views expressed in this article are those of the author alone and not the World Economic Forum.

Related topics:

The agenda .chakra .wef-n7bacu{margin-top:16px;margin-bottom:16px;line-height:1.388;font-weight:400;} weekly.

A weekly update of the most important issues driving the global agenda

.chakra .wef-1dtnjt5{display:-webkit-box;display:-webkit-flex;display:-ms-flexbox;display:flex;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;-webkit-flex-wrap:wrap;-ms-flex-wrap:wrap;flex-wrap:wrap;} More on COVID-19 .chakra .wef-17xejub{-webkit-flex:1;-ms-flex:1;flex:1;justify-self:stretch;-webkit-align-self:stretch;-ms-flex-item-align:stretch;align-self:stretch;} .chakra .wef-nr1rr4{display:-webkit-inline-box;display:-webkit-inline-flex;display:-ms-inline-flexbox;display:inline-flex;white-space:normal;vertical-align:middle;text-transform:uppercase;font-size:0.75rem;border-radius:0.25rem;font-weight:700;-webkit-align-items:center;-webkit-box-align:center;-ms-flex-align:center;align-items:center;line-height:1.2;-webkit-letter-spacing:1.25px;-moz-letter-spacing:1.25px;-ms-letter-spacing:1.25px;letter-spacing:1.25px;background:none;padding:0px;color:#B3B3B3;-webkit-box-decoration-break:clone;box-decoration-break:clone;-webkit-box-decoration-break:clone;}@media screen and (min-width:37.5rem){.chakra .wef-nr1rr4{font-size:0.875rem;}}@media screen and (min-width:56.5rem){.chakra .wef-nr1rr4{font-size:1rem;}} See all

Winding down COVAX – lessons learnt from delivering 2 billion COVID-19 vaccinations to lower-income countries

Charlotte Edmond

January 8, 2024

Here’s what to know about the new COVID-19 Pirola variant

October 11, 2023

How the cost of living crisis affects young people around the world

Douglas Broom

August 8, 2023

From smallpox to COVID: the medical inventions that have seen off infectious diseases over the past century

Andrea Willige

May 11, 2023

COVID-19 is no longer a global health emergency. Here's what it means

Simon Nicholas Williams

May 9, 2023

New research shows the significant health harms of the pandemic 

Philip Clarke, Jack Pollard and Mara Violato

April 17, 2023

How to Write About Coronavirus in a College Essay

Students can share how they navigated life during the coronavirus pandemic in a full-length essay or an optional supplement.

Writing About COVID-19 in College Essays

Getty Images

Experts say students should be honest and not limit themselves to merely their experiences with the pandemic.

The global impact of COVID-19, the disease caused by the novel coronavirus, means colleges and prospective students alike are in for an admissions cycle like no other. Both face unprecedented challenges and questions as they grapple with their respective futures amid the ongoing fallout of the pandemic.

Colleges must examine applicants without the aid of standardized test scores for many – a factor that prompted many schools to go test-optional for now . Even grades, a significant component of a college application, may be hard to interpret with some high schools adopting pass-fail classes last spring due to the pandemic. Major college admissions factors are suddenly skewed.

"I can't help but think other (admissions) factors are going to matter more," says Ethan Sawyer, founder of the College Essay Guy, a website that offers free and paid essay-writing resources.

College essays and letters of recommendation , Sawyer says, are likely to carry more weight than ever in this admissions cycle. And many essays will likely focus on how the pandemic shaped students' lives throughout an often tumultuous 2020.

But before writing a college essay focused on the coronavirus, students should explore whether it's the best topic for them.

Writing About COVID-19 for a College Application

Much of daily life has been colored by the coronavirus. Virtual learning is the norm at many colleges and high schools, many extracurriculars have vanished and social lives have stalled for students complying with measures to stop the spread of COVID-19.

"For some young people, the pandemic took away what they envisioned as their senior year," says Robert Alexander, dean of admissions, financial aid and enrollment management at the University of Rochester in New York. "Maybe that's a spot on a varsity athletic team or the lead role in the fall play. And it's OK for them to mourn what should have been and what they feel like they lost, but more important is how are they making the most of the opportunities they do have?"

That question, Alexander says, is what colleges want answered if students choose to address COVID-19 in their college essay.

But the question of whether a student should write about the coronavirus is tricky. The answer depends largely on the student.

"In general, I don't think students should write about COVID-19 in their main personal statement for their application," Robin Miller, master college admissions counselor at IvyWise, a college counseling company, wrote in an email.

"Certainly, there may be exceptions to this based on a student's individual experience, but since the personal essay is the main place in the application where the student can really allow their voice to be heard and share insight into who they are as an individual, there are likely many other topics they can choose to write about that are more distinctive and unique than COVID-19," Miller says.

Opinions among admissions experts vary on whether to write about the likely popular topic of the pandemic.

"If your essay communicates something positive, unique, and compelling about you in an interesting and eloquent way, go for it," Carolyn Pippen, principal college admissions counselor at IvyWise, wrote in an email. She adds that students shouldn't be dissuaded from writing about a topic merely because it's common, noting that "topics are bound to repeat, no matter how hard we try to avoid it."

Above all, she urges honesty.

"If your experience within the context of the pandemic has been truly unique, then write about that experience, and the standing out will take care of itself," Pippen says. "If your experience has been generally the same as most other students in your context, then trying to find a unique angle can easily cross the line into exploiting a tragedy, or at least appearing as though you have."

But focusing entirely on the pandemic can limit a student to a single story and narrow who they are in an application, Sawyer says. "There are so many wonderful possibilities for what you can say about yourself outside of your experience within the pandemic."

He notes that passions, strengths, career interests and personal identity are among the multitude of essay topic options available to applicants and encourages them to probe their values to help determine the topic that matters most to them – and write about it.

That doesn't mean the pandemic experience has to be ignored if applicants feel the need to write about it.

Writing About Coronavirus in Main and Supplemental Essays

Students can choose to write a full-length college essay on the coronavirus or summarize their experience in a shorter form.

To help students explain how the pandemic affected them, The Common App has added an optional section to address this topic. Applicants have 250 words to describe their pandemic experience and the personal and academic impact of COVID-19.

"That's not a trick question, and there's no right or wrong answer," Alexander says. Colleges want to know, he adds, how students navigated the pandemic, how they prioritized their time, what responsibilities they took on and what they learned along the way.

If students can distill all of the above information into 250 words, there's likely no need to write about it in a full-length college essay, experts say. And applicants whose lives were not heavily altered by the pandemic may even choose to skip the optional COVID-19 question.

"This space is best used to discuss hardship and/or significant challenges that the student and/or the student's family experienced as a result of COVID-19 and how they have responded to those difficulties," Miller notes. Using the section to acknowledge a lack of impact, she adds, "could be perceived as trite and lacking insight, despite the good intentions of the applicant."

To guard against this lack of awareness, Sawyer encourages students to tap someone they trust to review their writing , whether it's the 250-word Common App response or the full-length essay.

Experts tend to agree that the short-form approach to this as an essay topic works better, but there are exceptions. And if a student does have a coronavirus story that he or she feels must be told, Alexander encourages the writer to be authentic in the essay.

"My advice for an essay about COVID-19 is the same as my advice about an essay for any topic – and that is, don't write what you think we want to read or hear," Alexander says. "Write what really changed you and that story that now is yours and yours alone to tell."

Sawyer urges students to ask themselves, "What's the sentence that only I can write?" He also encourages students to remember that the pandemic is only a chapter of their lives and not the whole book.

Miller, who cautions against writing a full-length essay on the coronavirus, says that if students choose to do so they should have a conversation with their high school counselor about whether that's the right move. And if students choose to proceed with COVID-19 as a topic, she says they need to be clear, detailed and insightful about what they learned and how they adapted along the way.

"Approaching the essay in this manner will provide important balance while demonstrating personal growth and vulnerability," Miller says.

Pippen encourages students to remember that they are in an unprecedented time for college admissions.

"It is important to keep in mind with all of these (admission) factors that no colleges have ever had to consider them this way in the selection process, if at all," Pippen says. "They have had very little time to calibrate their evaluations of different application components within their offices, let alone across institutions. This means that colleges will all be handling the admissions process a little bit differently, and their approaches may even evolve over the course of the admissions cycle."

Searching for a college? Get our complete rankings of Best Colleges.

10 Ways to Discover College Essay Ideas

Tags: students , colleges , college admissions , college applications , college search , Coronavirus

2024 Best Colleges

Search for your perfect fit with the U.S. News rankings of colleges and universities.

College Admissions: Get a Step Ahead!

Sign up to receive the latest updates from U.S. News & World Report and our trusted partners and sponsors. By clicking submit, you are agreeing to our Terms and Conditions & Privacy Policy .

Ask an Alum: Making the Most Out of College

You May Also Like

Supporting low-income college applicants.

Shavar Jeffries April 16, 2024

Supporting Black Women in Higher Ed

Zainab Okolo April 15, 2024

Law Schools With the Highest LSATs

Ilana Kowarski and Cole Claybourn April 11, 2024

Today NAIA, Tomorrow Title IX?

Lauren Camera April 9, 2024

Grad School Housing Options

Anayat Durrani April 9, 2024

How to Decide if an MBA Is Worth it

Sarah Wood March 27, 2024

What to Wear to a Graduation

LaMont Jones, Jr. March 27, 2024

FAFSA Delays Alarm Families, Colleges

Sarah Wood March 25, 2024

Help Your Teen With the College Decision

Anayat Durrani March 25, 2024

Toward Semiconductor Gender Equity

Alexis McKittrick March 22, 2024

Featured Topics

Featured series.

A series of random questions answered by Harvard experts.

Explore the Gazette

Read the latest.

When math is the dream

A space for researchers to meet, and AI and natural intelligence to do the same

A fresh take on must-see TV

‘the full covid-19 experience’.

A science and medical reporter offers an intimate look at the pandemic’s personal impact

Alvin Powell and his mother, Alynne Martelle, who passed away from COVID-19 in April 2020.

Photos courtesy of Alvin Powell

Portraits of Loss

Alvin powell.

A collection of stories and essays that illustrate the indelible mark left on our community by a pandemic that touched all our lives.

I remember thinking, “I guess I’m having the full COVID-19 experience,” though I knew immediately it wasn’t true. Having the full experience would mean switching places with the frail woman before me. It would mean my eyes were the ones that were closed, my breath silent and shallow.

But I also knew she wouldn’t want it that way. My mother, Alynne Martelle, was protective like that.

It was April 2020, and I was sitting in a Connecticut nursing home across the bed from my sister Kelly San Martin. I wasn’t thinking about how outlandishly I was dressed, but each glance across the bed provided a reminder. We were both wearing thin, disposable yellow gowns and too-big rubber gloves, with surgical masks covering our noses and mouths. We were each hoping the protection would be enough, but at that point in the pandemic’s first spring surge, nothing seemed certain.

Earlier that day — a Friday — I had been working from home and heard from my sister that my mom, 80 and diagnosed with COVID-19, had taken a turn for the worse. I called the nursing home where she’d lived for nearly five years, and the nurse said to come right away. So I told my editors at the Gazette what was going on, got in the car, and headed down the Pike.

I had a couple of hours to think during the drive. As a science writer for the Gazette, I routinely monitor disease outbreaks around the world — SARS, H1N1, seasonal flu — and discuss them with experts at the University. My hope is to lend perspective for readers on news that can seem too distant to be threatening — yet to which they might want to pay attention— or things that seem threateningly close, but in fact are rare enough that the screaming headlines may not be warranted.

“I suspect that a nursing home isn’t part of anyone’s plan for their final years, and it certainly wasn’t for my mother.“ Alvin Powell

There were two times during my coverage of the pandemic that I felt an almost physical sensation — that pit-of-the-stomach feeling of shock or fear. The first was when Marc Lipsitch, an epidemiologist and head of the Harvard Chan School’s Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics, said early on that, unlike its recent predecessors SARS and MERS, which got people very sick, this virus also caused a lot of mild or asymptomatic cases. As that news sank in, I realized how difficult the future might become: How can you stop something before you know it’s there?

The second time I had that feeling was just a few weeks later. Through February 2020, the number of cases in the U.S. and globally had continued to grow, and it became clear that a major public health emergency was underway. Harvard’s experts, among many others, were offering a way forward, and I was writing regularly about the pandemic, about the new-to-me concept of “social distancing” and the importance of using masks to reduce spread — even as faculty members at our hospitals were also warning of shortages of personal protective equipment, or PPE — another term now embedded in our daily language. That was when President Donald Trump used the word “hoax” in discussing the pandemic. When I read that I thought, “This could get a lot worse.”

More in this series

A table set for two

A teacher for 40 years and a neighborhood ‘den mother’

Pandemic from the rear-view mirror of an ambulance

My grandpa’s 100 hats

By the third week in April, it had. Then, of course, the winter’s much larger surge was still just a vague threat and 100,000 deaths nationally from COVID-19 would soon warrant front-page treatment in The New York Times. Nursing homes — which concentrated society’s frail and elderly — had been hit hard early, as protective measures were being worked out and individual habits — life-saving ones — were still being ingrained.

I suspect that a nursing home isn’t part of anyone’s plan for their final years, and it certainly wasn’t for my mother. She was born in Hartford, poor and proudly Irish. She was artistic, eccentric, and joked later in life that if she hyphenated all her last names, she’d be Alynne Cummings-Powell-Martelle-Martelle-Herzberger-Harripersaud. Though she was tough on her husbands, she was easy on her kids. Despite the roiling of her married life, our home in the Hartford suburbs was mostly stable. That was largely due to the stick-to-it-iveness of my stepfather Sal — the two Martelles in there — and the fact that her four kids never doubted that she loved them.

She traveled even more than she married, preferring out-of-the-way places and bringing home images of the people who lived there. Among her destinations, she spent a summer in Calcutta volunteering at one of Mother Teresa’s orphanages and, on her return, she struck up a correspondence with the future saint.

Alynne Martell (center) surrounded by her children, Laura Lynne Powell (clockwise from left), Kelly San Martin, Alvin Powell, and Joseph Martelle. They are pictured at Hawks Nest Beach in Old Lyme, Conn., where they’ve gone for a week each summer for more than 45 years. Powell and his mother on a family kayak trip on the Black Hall River in Old Lyme.

Mom’s later years were difficult. Her mental decline had her moving from independent to assisted living and then to round-the-clock care. In the last year, her physical health and mobility had declined as well. When my mother spiked a fever in April, my siblings and I assumed it was COVID. It took the doctors some time to work through the possibilities, but they eventually got there, too. They and the nurses reminded us that it was not universally fatal, but nonetheless asked whether she had a living will. She did, and wanted no extraordinary measures taken.

Though many hospitals and nursing homes weren’t allowing visitors, the home where my mother stayed would let us in. Several family members had converged on the parking lot there, and we had a robust discussion of how safe it would be to go inside. My mother’s room was on the first floor, and some family members peered through its sliding glass door. My sister and I decided it was worth the risk to sit with Mom during her final hours, as she would have if indeed our places had been reversed.

On that Friday when Kelly and I entered the lobby, the facility appeared to be taking necessary precautions. In addition to providing PPE, they questioned us about our health and took our temperatures before letting us farther into the building. The main thing I was uneasy about was the use of surgical masks rather than N95 respirators. The N95s, I thought, would provide a level of protection commensurate with sitting in a place where we knew the virus was circulating.

On the second day, two friends teamed up to get us the N95s one had stockpiled during the 2009 H1N1 epidemic. We met in the parking lot for the handover — accomplished with profuse thanks and at a safe distance. The masks eased my mind. The key to weathering the pandemic came not from hiding away, but from a clear-eyed assessment of risks and having a plan to manage them. I had also learned during months of covering the pandemic that even measures inadequate on their own could be powerful when layered over one another. So, though it now seems like overkill, after doffing all the protective gear on the way out, we also changed into clean clothes in the chilly April parking lot, our modesty shielded by open car doors. We stowed the dirty clothes in plastic bags in the trunk and made liberal use of the giant bottle of hand sanitizer Kelly had brought.

“My mom had a metal sculpture of herself made by artist Karen Rossi. Her four kids are hanging off her feet in mobile-style,” writes Alvin Powell.

The result was that my sister and I were able to sit with my mom for several hours over the weekend. She was mostly asleep or unconscious but roused herself, seeming to rise from a place deep inside, to rasp out that she loved us. Then she retreated inward again.

Mom died the following Monday, and I went into home quarantine for two weeks, breaking it once to head back down the Pike to make arrangements with a completely overwhelmed funeral home. She had wanted to be cremated, but the crematorium was also backed up, so they refrigerated her body for several days until they could get to her. Afterward, my brother, Joe Martelle, picked up her remains and brought her home to await her burial.

But we delayed too. We put off her funeral until the family could gather for the bash she wanted as a farewell — she’d picked out the music and assigned tasks to different family members — Joe and I were to build the wooden box for interment. “August,” I initially thought. Then “October.” I was sure about October. My sister in Sacramento, Laura Lynne Powell, had suggested early on we might have to wait for the April anniversary of her death, which at the time seemed ridiculously distant since the pandemic surely would be controlled by then. Now, of course, April’s here and it is still too early for a big gathering.

In the year since my mother died, I’ve been back at work and have continued to learn as much as I can in order to convey our shifting — yet advancing — knowledge to readers. I’ve been repeatedly reminded how far I still am from “the full COVID experience” because the virus seems insatiable and just keeps on taking.

I don’t for a minute think my family is unique in its impacts, but many of those around me have experienced some ugly aspect of it. My son was laid off; my daughter’s 18th birthday, high school graduation, and freshman year in college have been canceled, delayed, or distorted beyond recognition. Two daughters and four grandchildren have been diagnosed with COVID and recovered. In February, four family friends in my Massachusetts town saw the contagion flare through their households, while my own family in Connecticut watched with concern as a loved one became severely ill, later rejoicing at her recovery after treatment with remdesivir.

The pandemic picture seems to have become even muddier lately, devolving into a foot race between vaccines and variants. Through much of March, vaccines seemed sure to win, but warnings from public health officials have become dire of late, warning of too-soon reopenings and the potential for a fourth surge. My stepfather Sal has gotten his second vaccine dose though, so hopefully he, at least, is out of harm’s way. I’m also hearing of friends and family whose first dose appointments are looming. That gives me hope and serves as a reminder that there is one part of “the full COVID experience” I’m looking forward to: its end.

Alvin Powell is the Harvard Gazette’s senior science writer.

Share this article

You might like.

Dora Woodruff was drawn to beauty of numbers as child. Next up: Ph.D. at MIT.

The Kempner Institute buzzes with new code, numbers, ideas

Isabella Madrigal has a vision: storytelling that’s compelling, inspires better, more equitable world

Exercise cuts heart disease risk in part by lowering stress, study finds

Benefits nearly double for people with depression

Finding right mix on campus speech policies

Legal, political scholars discuss balancing personal safety, constitutional rights, academic freedom amid roiling protests, cultural shifts

So what exactly makes Taylor Swift so great?

Experts weigh in on pop superstar's cultural and financial impact as her tours and albums continue to break records.

Seven short essays about life during the pandemic

The boston book festival's at home community writing project invites area residents to describe their experiences during this unprecedented time..

My alarm sounds at 8:15 a.m. I open my eyes and take a deep breath. I wiggle my toes and move my legs. I do this religiously every morning. Today, marks day 74 of staying at home.

My mornings are filled with reading biblical scripture, meditation, breathing in the scents of a hanging eucalyptus branch in the shower, and making tea before I log into my computer to work. After an hour-and-a-half Zoom meeting, I decided to take a long walk to the post office and grab a fresh bouquet of burnt orange ranunculus flowers. I embrace the warm sun beaming on my face. I feel joy. I feel at peace.

I enter my apartment and excessively wash my hands and face. I pour a glass of iced kombucha. I sit at my table and look at the text message on my phone. My coworker writes that she is thinking of me during this difficult time. She must be referring to the Amy Cooper incident. I learn shortly that she is not.

I Google Minneapolis and see his name: George Floyd. And just like that a simple and beautiful day transitions into a day of sorrow.

Nakia Hill, Boston

It was a wobbly, yet solemn little procession: three masked mourners and a canine. Beginning in Kenmore Square, at David and Sue Horner’s condo, it proceeded up Commonwealth Avenue Mall.

S. Sue Horner died on Good Friday, April 10, in the Year of the Virus. Sue did not die of the virus but her parting was hemmed by it: no gatherings to mark the passing of this splendid human being.

David devised a send-off nevertheless. On April 23rd, accompanied by his daughter and son-in-law, he set out for Old South Church. David led, bearing the urn. His daughter came next, holding her phone aloft, speaker on, through which her brother in Illinois played the bagpipes for the length of the procession, its soaring thrum infusing the Mall. Her husband came last with Melon, their golden retriever.

Advertisement

I unlocked the empty church and led the procession into the columbarium. David drew the urn from its velvet cover, revealing a golden vessel inset with incandescent tiles. We lifted the urn into the niche, prayed, recited Psalm 23, and shared some words.

It was far too small for the luminous “Dr. Sue”, but what we could manage in the Year of the Virus.

Nancy S. Taylor, Boston

On April 26, 2020, our household was a bustling home for four people. Our two sons, ages 18 and 22, have a lot of energy. We are among the lucky ones. I can work remotely. Our food and shelter are not at risk.

As I write this a week later, it is much quieter here.

On April 27, our older son, an EMT, transported a COVID-19 patient to the ER. He left home to protect my delicate health and became ill with the virus a week later.

On April 29, my husband’s 95-year-old father had a stroke. My husband left immediately to be with his 90-year-old mother near New York City and is now preparing for his father’s discharge from the hospital. Rehab people will come to the house; going to a facility would be too dangerous.

My husband just called me to describe today’s hospital visit. The doctors had warned that although his father had regained the ability to speak, he could only repeat what was said to him.

“It’s me,” said my husband.

“It’s me,” said my father-in-law.

“I love you,” said my husband.

“I love you,” said my father-in-law.

“Sooooooooo much,” said my father-in-law.

Lucia Thompson, Wayland

Would racism exist if we were blind?

I felt his eyes bore into me as I walked through the grocery store. At first, I thought nothing of it. With the angst in the air attributable to COVID, I understood the anxiety-provoking nature of feeling as though your 6-foot bubble had burst. So, I ignored him and maintained my distance. But he persisted, glaring at my face, squinting to see who I was underneath the mask. This time I looked back, when he yelled, in my mother tongue, for me to go back to my country.

In shock, I just laughed. How could he tell what I was under my mask? Or see anything through the sunglasses he was wearing inside? It baffled me. I laughed at the irony that he would use my own language against me, that he knew enough to guess where I was from in some version of culturally competent racism. I laughed because dealing with the truth behind that comment generated a sadness in me that was too much to handle. If not now, then when will we be together?

So I ask again, would racism exist if we were blind?

Faizah Shareef, Boston

My Family is “Out” There

But I am “in” here. Life is different now “in” Assisted Living since the deadly COVID-19 arrived. Now the staff, employees, and all 100 residents have our temperatures taken daily. Everyone else, including my family, is “out” there. People like the hairdresser are really missed — with long straight hair and masks, we don’t even recognize ourselves.

Since mid-March we are in quarantine “in” our rooms with meals served. Activities are practically non-existent. We can sit on the back patio 6 feet apart, wearing masks, do exercises there, chat, and walk nearby. Nothing inside. Hopefully June will improve.

My family is “out” there — somewhere! Most are working from home (or Montana). Hopefully an August wedding will happen, but unfortunately, I may still be “in” here.

From my window I wave to my son “out” there. Recently, when my daughter visited, I opened the window “in” my second-floor room and could see and hear her perfectly “out” there. Next time she will bring a chair so we can have an “in” and “out” conversation all day, or until we run out of words.

Barbara Anderson, Raynham

My boyfriend Marcial lives in Boston, and I live in New York City. We had been doing the long-distance thing pretty successfully until coronavirus hit. In mid-March, I was furloughed from my temp job, Marcial began working remotely, and New York started shutting down. I went to Boston to stay with Marcial.

We are opposites in many ways, but we share a love of food. The kitchen has been the center of quarantine life —and also quarantine problems.

Marcial and I have gone from eating out and cooking/grocery shopping for each other during our periodic visits to cooking/grocery shopping with each other all the time. We’ve argued over things like the proper way to make rice and what greens to buy for salad. Our habits are deeply rooted in our upbringing and individual cultures (Filipino immigrant and American-born Chinese, hence the strong rice opinions).

On top of the mundane issues, we’ve also dealt with a flooded kitchen (resulting in cockroaches) and a mandoline accident leading to an ER visit. Marcial and I have spent quarantine navigating how to handle the unexpected and how to integrate our lifestyles. We’ve been eating well along the way.

Melissa Lee, Waltham

It’s 3 a.m. and my dog Rikki just gave me a worried look. Up again?

“I can’t sleep,” I say. I flick the light, pick up “Non-Zero Probabilities.” But the words lay pinned to the page like swatted flies. I watch new “Killing Eve” episodes, play old Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats songs. Still night.

We are — what? — 12 agitated weeks into lockdown, and now this. The thing that got me was Chauvin’s sunglasses. Perched nonchalantly on his head, undisturbed, as if he were at a backyard BBQ. Or anywhere other than kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, on his life. And Floyd was a father, as we all now know, having seen his daughter Gianna on Stephen Jackson’s shoulders saying “Daddy changed the world.”

Precious child. I pray, safeguard her.

Rikki has her own bed. But she won’t leave me. A Goddess of Protection. She does that thing dogs do, hovers increasingly closely the more agitated I get. “I’m losing it,” I say. I know. And like those weighted gravity blankets meant to encourage sleep, she drapes her 70 pounds over me, covering my restless heart with safety.

As if daybreak, or a prayer, could bring peace today.

Kirstan Barnett, Watertown

Until June 30, send your essay (200 words or less) about life during COVID-19 via bostonbookfest.org . Some essays will be published on the festival’s blog and some will appear in The Boston Globe.

Essays in Quarantine

In This Series

In the midst of a pandemic, ‘home’ takes on new importance.

My mother recently began painting houses. Little homes; on canvas, I mean.

When kids ask tough questions about coronavirus, is honesty the best policy?

My kids are asking when the coronavirus will end. Here’s how I’m responding.

Can small carbon footprints outlast coronavirus?

Social distancing has made my world smaller. Maybe that's a good thing.

From coronavirus to climate change, our lives will never go back to ‘normal’

We all want a conclusion to the COVID-19 saga. Will we get an end to the story of climate?

I thought I was being safe. Then I found out I had been exposed to coronavirus.

It turns out there’s no place you can be truly “safe” from coronavirus -- or climate change, for that matter.

Georgia’s coronavirus actions are anti-science. Is it time to move?

These are the kind of foolish, anti-science actions that those of us who cover the climate emergency see with alarming frequency.

Coronavirus could help us reclaim city streets — but only if officials act

What if New York City streets were like this all the time — spaces for people first and cars second?

From New York to Saipan, one family weathers coronavirus

It was bad enough when Super Typhoon Yutu struck my childhood home of Saipan. Now the coronavirus is reviving that trauma.

What storytelling means in times of crisis

Crises test our character, and what drives my reporting is the desire to understand how humans survive these tests.

Filed under:

I tried to write an essay about productivity in quarantine. It took me a month to do it.

Americans feel pressured to work under the best of times. What happens during a pandemic?

Share this story

• Share this on Facebook
• Share this on Twitter
• Share this on Reddit
• Share All sharing options

Share All sharing options for: I tried to write an essay about productivity in quarantine. It took me a month to do it.

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when it was just beginning to become clear that people who could stay at home would be doing so for a very long while, an argument began to emerge. It mostly played out on social media, but after a while it moved to news outlets, too: the New York Times, HuffPost, Forbes. It concerned working at home, because it is disproportionately easy for people like me who work in digital media to work at home, and the question it revolved around was: Is a pandemic the time to get extremely productive? Or is it the time to take a break?

First, there was the King Lear argument. Shakespeare, as people reminded each other, wrote King Lear when he was quarantined during a plague. And it soon became clear that Shakespeare was just one of the many geniuses of history who accomplished miraculous things while confined to his house. Sir Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravity and invented calculus under quarantine . Mary Shelley, well, was not under quarantine when she wrote Frankenstein and invented science fiction, but she was at least cooped up in the house because of the year without summer , so truly, can’t she serve as an inspirational figure as well ? After a period, it began to seem somewhat astonishing that anyone ever managed to accomplish anything without some global catastrophe confining them to their home.

Just a reminder that when Shakespeare was quarantined because of the plague, he wrote King Lear. — rosanne cash (@rosannecash) March 14, 2020

And then, inevitably, came the whispered implication: Shouldn’t you yourself be using this time at home — dare we say this gift — because you are at home and not working in an essential field? Shouldn’t you be using this time to become more productive? Shouldn’t you be buckling down and writing a masterpiece or inventing a genre or discovering fundamental laws of the universe? At the very least, shouldn’t you be taking up a new hobby, mastering a skill, or perhaps be reaching your fully fledged form as what Forbes termed a “ coronapreneur ?”

But then came the backlash. The push to be productive while sheltering in place during a once-a-century global catastrophe was the latest sign, critics argued, of capitalism corrupting our minds.

“Please don’t be guilted into being more productive during the coronavirus,” wrote Monica Torres at HuffPost .

“This mindset is the natural endpoint of America’s hustle culture — the idea that every nanosecond of our lives must be commodified and pointed toward profit and self-improvement,” wrote Nick Martin at the New Republic .

“I, too, am declining to write the next King Lear as protest against capitalism,” proclaimed Rosa Lyster at the Outline .

Since Lyster’s March 18 article, the Outline’s staff has been entirely laid off as a result of the pandemic’s toll on the economy. While I was working on this article, CNBC reported that Vox Media, Vox’s parent company, was planning to furlough multiple employees . That’s another layer of this fight: Many of the people who are arguing over how productive anyone should be right now are doing so with the knowledge that layoffs or furloughs or pay cuts are hanging over their heads. With that knowledge comes the whisper developing in the back of everyone’s minds that perhaps this is the time to get very productive indeed, because how else can they show their employer how valuable they are and ensure their continued employment?

Perhaps this is also the time to make our off hours very productive, because you never know when you’ll need a new hobby you can turn into a side hustle. At the very least, staying busy and using your time meaningfully will be the virtuous thing to do, and it will keep your mind off everything else that is happening ... right?

Unless that line of thought is yet another sign of capitalism getting into our heads, and we really need to process and mourn and deal with the overwhelming and exhausting anxiety of living through a once-a-century pandemic. Maybe?

In the end, it all boils down to one question: Under these very peculiar circumstances, should we be trying to be productive?

Time-oriented productivity was invented by industrial capitalism

The idea of productivity as we currently understand it — doing as much as possible, as efficiently as possible — is a product of industrial capitalism. In non-industrialized societies , human beings tend to organize their sense of time around how long it takes to complete certain tasks, measuring time not by hours but by how long it takes to boil a pot of rice, for instance. And instead of keeping to a strict work schedule from 9 am to 5 pm and reserving the rest of their lives for leisure, people in non-industrial societies tend not to establish strict divisions between their working lives and the rest of their lives.

Instead, they work on a task for as long as it takes to do it, with plenty of rest mixed in. Often they fall into what we might call the college student work system: long periods of idleness, and then sprees of frantic work as a deadline approaches (think harvest time, market time, or other similar markers). This way of thinking about work is called task-orientation .

As the West industrialized over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, the rising capitalist bourgeoisie developed new ways of thinking about time, which, in turn, it passed on to the working class. A factory’s machines must be turned on at the same time every day, and so workers, it followed, must be at their posts at the same time every day. And as factory work became more common, workers learned to think of part of their time as their own, and part of it as belonging to the people they worked for. To the capitalist, time is money, and specifically, the worker’s time is the employer’s money.

But the great switch from task-orientation to time-orientation did not happen overnight. It took centuries of social conditioning and moralizing, centuries of discussion of the importance of punctuality and the wickedness of idleness.

Moralizers wrote adages about how Satan finds work for idle hands. Factories instituted harsh punishments against lateness and loitering. Schools were designed to teach students that their time was not their own : If schools could manage to give poor students activities to work on for at least 12 hours a day, declared Bishop William Turner in 1770, “we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them.” And over time, young children could become “habituated, not to say naturalized to Labour and Fatigue,” wrote the reformer John Powell in 1772.

The economist E.P. Thompson developed the ideas and examples I’ve outlined here in his classic 1967 essay, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” which examines England’s shift from task-orientation to time-orientation. Thompson argued that as capitalism and Puritanism rose together in the West, the pair taught human beings a different relationship to time from the one they had before: one in which time had a value, in which it was literally equivalent to money. And for Thompson in 1967, the rise of task-orientation prompted a new question: How were capitalist human beings going to handle leisure time?

“If Puritanism was a necessary part of the work-ethos which enabled the industrialized world to break out of the poverty-stricken economies of the past,” Thompson wrote, “will the Puritan value of time begin to decompose as the pressures of poverty relax?”

Put differently: Now that more people are living out of poverty than ever before , now that we have, once again, the concept of leisure time, is it possible for us to break away from the idea that productivity is a moral good and idleness evil?

In the 21st century, people work even when they’re not supposed to be

In the US, it looks as though the answer to Thompson’s question is no. Americans are not learning to treat productivity as anything but a moral good, or idleness as anything but wicked. Many people spend their time working, even when they are ostensibly off work. Even rich American men — theoretically the people with the opportunity for the most leisure time, since they have plenty of money and fewer household obligations than women do — spend more time working than their peers in other countries . One economist postulated to the Atlantic in 2016 that wealthy American men, like the children William Turner wanted to educate in the 18th century, are so habituated to the accumulation of wealth that they treat it as a form of recreation: It’s the closest thing they have to fun.

But even those of us who are not wealthy and who are not men spend most of our time working. This is especially true for millennials. As BuzzFeed News’s Anne Helen Petersen pointed out in her viral 2019 essay on millennial burnout , the youth of today’s workforce spent their childhoods optimizing to become more effective workers, only to graduate into a job market that had been decimated by the 2008 recession. Raised to be problem solvers, millennials like me responded by optimizing ourselves en masse, becoming ever more efficient and ever more committed to their work, while that work, in turn, seeped invisibly into even more corners of their lives, carried by smartphones and push alerts and long hours at the office.

But that constant work, which was supposed to bring millennials a measure of the job security our parents took for granted, was unsuccessful.

“The more work we do, the more efficient we’ve proven ourselves to be, the worse our jobs become,” Petersen wrote: “lower pay, worse benefits, less job security. Our efficiency hasn’t bucked wage stagnation; our steadfastness hasn’t made us more valuable. If anything, our commitment to work, no matter how exploitative, has simply encouraged and facilitated our exploitation. We put up with companies treating us poorly because we don’t see another option. We don’t quit. We internalize that we’re not striving hard enough. And we get a second gig.”

Millennials work; they cobble together side hustles and temporary jobs into something approaching a living wage; they post the result on social media for their friends to admire. But then social media, too, becomes a form of work, a place on which millennials are reminded that they must always continue optimizing their lives for clicks . Marie Kondo your home , cook your Alison Roman shallot pasta , organize your books by color , and post a picture of the shelf on Instagram.

We spend our time locked into the endless, infinite scroll of Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and Instagram, all of which reward constant immersion and monitoring until they begin to feel like duties rather than products to use for fun. We listen to podcasts and audiobooks at 1.5 speed to consume them more efficiently; Netflix floated the idea of letting us speed up our binge-watches, too . We consult lists of the TV shows we must watch and the books we must read which come, over time, to look more and more like homework. Leisure today is not truly leisure; it is labor.

We have become a society in which people feel constant pressure to work and to be productive, even when they are theoretically resting. And that’s under normal circumstances.

So what happens during a pandemic?

It took me almost a month to write this essay. But I wanted desperately to produce something for that entire month.

My editor assigned this essay to me on March 19. “People keep talking about King Lear ,” she said. “Could you write something about that?”

“No problem,” I said. I started a file labeled “You don’t have to write King Lear ,” and then instead of writing anything in it I sat and stared at it for some time. Then I opened Twitter in another tab.

My mind felt as though it had been shattered. I couldn’t sustain a thought long enough to analyze anything. I just stared in a blank fury at that Rosanne Cash tweet reminding me that Shakespeare wrote King Lear during quarantine.

“What a stupid thing to say,” I thought. “We’re already dealing with a global emergency and now I’m supposed to write King Lear on top of that? Well, fuck you.”

Rosanne Cash was probably not trying to pressure anyone into writing King Lear . Probably she was just trying to remind us that great art can come out of very dark times, and that this too shall pass, and perhaps when it is over, it will have given us some great artistic gift. But I was in no place to think of her tweet that way.

Like nearly everyone else who is living through this, I was grieving. The world was a certain way, and then the pandemic came and changed things, and now that old world will never come back in quite the same way again: It’s dead. That’s a loss, and one we have to work through.

I was also angry. I am still angry. I am furious at the leadership in our government that has abdicated responsibility for handling this crisis. I’m furious that essential workers are putting their lives on the line without medical-grade protection. Looking at one industry and one city alone, at least 62 New York City transit workers are dead and over 6,000 more are in quarantine with suspected Covid-19 after management told them not to wear masks on the subway to prevent customers from panicking. How can anyone not be angry and afraid and sad right now? And how can anyone do meaningful work under those conditions?

I am also living through my second major financial crisis as a working adult at age 31. Those first few weeks, whenever I wasn’t listening to the sirens outside my apartment or trying to figure out safe ways to see my 72-year-old parents again, I was thinking about all the reports that said that traffic throughout digital media was high, but ad revenue was way down ; reports that showed layoffs and pay cuts and furloughs spreading through one media company after another.

I am a good well-behaved, high-achieving millennial. Every instinct I had said that now was the time to buckle down and put myself to work, to try to outwork whatever would come. But I couldn’t sustain a thought long enough to work on long-form analysis.

Still, I wanted to lose myself in a project, something I could finish, something that would give me a sense that I had produced something — and that I had thus been virtuous. I baked bread, and then bread pudding. I sewed masks. I started an advice column . I started a book club .

I felt like I still wasn’t being productive enough. I felt like I couldn’t ever be productive enough. The thought of this unfinished essay assignment haunted me every time I sat down to work.

“The thing is,” I told myself every time I looked at the empty file, “the thesis of this hypothetical piece is that capitalism is fake and you don’t actually have to be productive during a global crisis. So, capitalism is fake. Don’t be productive.”

But the thought felt like cheating. It felt lazy and hackneyed. All I wanted was to produce something, and I knew where the desire came from, what historical and economic factors lent it moral weight and what quirks of my own brain chemistry made me internalize them so completely, but that didn’t make the desire less real. I wanted to produce something, and I couldn’t do it, and the failure felt monumental.

Eventually, I pulled myself together enough to be able to hold a thought in my head. I put this essay together, section by section, and the work felt soothing.

But I don’t have a good answer to the question of how hard you should be working or how productive you should be during a pandemic. We’re in a global crisis, and if we are extremely lucky, we’re sitting in our homes and trying to work through it. Taking on big and absorbing projects might be soothing right now, because we have been taught to experience labor as soothing and this is not the ideal moment to start deprogramming capitalism from our brains. But it also might feel impossible to take on any additional labor right now, because dealing with the loss we’re feeling is monumental enough.

Those are both perfectly reasonable, understandable reactions. Be kind to yourself. Do what feels good to you, and what you have to do to make it through this.

You don’t have to sit around and do nothing if the idea is scary to you. But also: You really don’t have to write King Lear .

Will you support Vox today?

We believe that everyone deserves to understand the world that they live in. That kind of knowledge helps create better citizens, neighbors, friends, parents, and stewards of this planet. Producing deeply researched, explanatory journalism takes resources. You can support this mission by making a financial gift to Vox today. Will you join us?

We accept credit card, Apple Pay, and Google Pay. You can also contribute via

Taylor Swift seems sick of being everyone’s best friend

It’s impossible to be neutral about taylor swift, jontay porter’s lifetime nba ban highlights the risks of sports gambling, sign up for the newsletter today, explained, thanks for signing up.

Check your inbox for a welcome email.

Oops. Something went wrong. Please enter a valid email and try again.

Thank you for visiting nature.com. You are using a browser version with limited support for CSS. To obtain the best experience, we recommend you use a more up to date browser (or turn off compatibility mode in Internet Explorer). In the meantime, to ensure continued support, we are displaying the site without styles and JavaScript.

• View all journals
• Explore content
• About the journal
• Publish with us
• Sign up for alerts
• Perspective
• Published: 05 May 2020

COVID-19 pandemic: the effects of quarantine on cardiovascular risk

• Anna Vittoria Mattioli   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-1487-9530 1 ,
• Matteo Ballerini Puviani   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0002-9815-1338 2 ,
• Milena Nasi   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-3079-8001 1 &
• Alberto Farinetti   ORCID: orcid.org/0000-0003-2133-3595 1  

European Journal of Clinical Nutrition volume  74 ,  pages 852–855 ( 2020 ) Cite this article

72k Accesses

208 Citations

95 Altmetric

Metrics details

• Public health
• Risk factors

COVID-19 is causing a global pandemic with a high number of deaths and infected people. To contain the diffusion of COVID-19 virus, Governments have enforced restrictions on outdoor activities or even collective quarantine on the population. One important consequence of quarantine is a change in lifestyle: reduced physical activity and unhealthy diet. 2019 guidelines for primary prevention of cardiovascular disease indicate that “Adults should engage in at least 150 minute per week of accumulated moderate-intensity or 75 minute per week of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity (or an equivalent combination of moderate and vigorous activity) to reduce ASCVD risk.” During quarantine, strategies to further increase home-based physical activity and to follow a healthy diet should be implemented. Quarantine carries some long-term effects on cardiovascular disease, mainly related to unhealthy lifestyle and anxiety. Following quarantine a global action supporting healthy diet and physical activity is mandatory to encourage people to return to good lifestyle.

Similar content being viewed by others

Association of SARS-CoV-2 infection with physical activity domains and types

Jérémy Vanhelst, Bernard Srour, … the SAPRIS, SAPRIS-SERO Study Groups

Higher level of physical activity reduces mental and neurological symptoms during and two years after COVID-19 infection in young women

Johanna Takács, Darina Deák & Akos Koller

Effects of COVID-19 lockdown on the dietary habits and lifestyle in a population in southern Spain: a cross-sectional questionnaire

Carmen Flores Navarro-Pérez, Ángel Fernández-Aparicio, … Jacqueline Schmidt-RioValle

Introduction

Quarantine and isolation are two measures that can prevent, or at least minimize, the impact of infectious disease outbreaks. In public health practice, “quarantine” refers to the separation of persons (or communities) who have been exposed to an infectious disease. “Isolation,” in contrast, applies to the separation of persons who are known to be infected [ 1 ]. There are several examples of Government imposed quarantine or travel bans, i.e., at least 18 US states quarantined people returning from West Africa during the 2014 Ebola outbreak [ 1 ]. Now, COVID-19 infection is causing a global pandemic with a high number of deaths. By March 29, Italy reported 10,023 deaths (Italian Health Ministry, https://www.salute.gov.it/portale/nuovocoronavirus/ ) [ 2 ]. To contain the diffusion of the COVID-19 virus, the Italian Government as well as others have enforced on the population. The previous experience of the SARS outbreak showed the efficacy of timely quarantine and isolation measures [ 3 , 4 ]. Quarantine is often an unpleasant experience: loss of freedom, uncertainty over disease status, and boredom can create dramatic effects. The potential benefits of mandatory mass quarantine need to be weighed carefully against the possible long-term negative effects on cardiovascular risk burden [ 4 , 5 ].

Quarantine and diet

The main consequence of quarantine is a change in lifestyle and nutritional habits (Table 1 ). Nutritional habits will change due to reduced availability of goods, limited access to food caused by restricted store opening hours, and to a switch to unhealthy food. A recent review on the psychological impact of quarantine [ 6 ] reported negative psychological effects including post-traumatic stress symptoms, confusion, and anger. Having inadequate basic supplies (e.g., food, water) during quarantine was a source of frustration [ 7 ] and continued to be associated with anxiety and anger for 4–6 months following release [ 7 , 8 ]. Due to anxiety of future food shortage, it is plausible that people will purchase packaged and long-life food rather than fresh food. This leads to weight gain and to a reduced intake of antioxidants. Oxidative stress and mild chronic vascular inflammation are part of the pathophysiology of hypertension and atherosclerosis [ 9 ]. Diets rich in antioxidant food (i.e., Mediterranean diet and Dash diet) are vascular protective. Several studies found that the Mediterranean diet is associated with a reduction in incidence, prevalence, and mortality from coronary artery disease, cardiovascular disease, diabetes, and in all-causes mortality including cancer [ 10 , 11 ]. A systematic review on 7186 subjects (5168 subjects assigned to a Mediterranean diet), reported a significant reduction in central obesity with a Mediterranean-type diet [ 12 ]. Mediterranean diet is naturally low in sodium due to its low degree of processing, unlike processed foods (a term that covers all foods that have undergone manufacturing methods, including convenience foods and products like bread, cheese, and meat products) and is also rich in fruit and vegetables [ 13 ]. Diets rich in fruits and vegetables have several positive effects: known health benefits of high flavonol intake, potential increase in nitric oxide species, concomitant weight loss, reduction of blood pressure, and reduction of inflammatory markers [ 14 , 15 ]. These beneficial effects are similar in men and women despite the fact that adherence to diet and healthy lifestyle is influenced by gender [ 11 , 16 ].

Quarantine induces anxiety and stress. Torres and Nowson analyzed the relationship between stress and eating behavior and identified that people cope with stress by eating and drinking in an attempt to feel better (“stress-related eating”). These stress-driven eaters and drinkers were more likely to eat unhealthy foods such as snacks, hamburgers, soda cola, and chocolate regularly and to drink wine and spirits more frequently. In addition, the lack of emotional support from friends and relatives was predictive of stress-driven eating and drinking behaviors [ 17 , 18 ]. During quarantine, stress-driven eaters would easily switch from a healthy diet to unhealthy ones. This would affect cardiovascular risk mainly in high-risk patients.

Quarantine and physical activity

Together with the unhealthy diet, the reduction of physical activity will contribute to weight gain during quarantine. Regular physical activity is mandatory to maintain health status, and is associated with reduction in cardiovascular risk [ 11 , 19 ]. The OMS suggests performing physical activity, such as walking, cycling, sports, dance, and yoga, in a manner that will prevent noncommunicable disease [ 20 ]. During quarantine the Italian Government prohibited the great majority of outdoor and social activities (e.g., going to the gym) resulting in a reduction of physical activity. Despite the guidelines to workout at home, only few subjects comply.

The reduction of physical activity will increase oxidative stress. Oxidative stress leads to apoptotic cell death of endothelial cells, reduces nitric oxide levels, increases activity of matrix metalloproteases and amplifies vascular inflammation, provoking vasoconstriction, LDL oxidation, and accumulation of foam cells [ 19 , 21 ]. Oxidative stress is mutually linked to inflammation, often associated with an increased risk of endothelial dysfunction [ 21 ]. In addition, obesity is associated with elevated circulating levels of IL-6 and TNFα, which are subsequently decreased with weight loss. In obese subjects, adipose tissue becomes dysfunctional, promoting a pro-inflammatory, hyperlipidemic, and insulin resistant environment that contributes to cardiovascular disease [ 22 ].

It is well recognized that chronic physical activity attenuates oxidative stress in healthy subjects via the improvement of antioxidant enzyme capacities and inflammation via the enhancement of anti-inflammatory molecules [ 23 ]. The reduction of physical activity worsens cardiovascular risk by increasing cardiovascular risk factors burden.

Quarantine and well-being

The role of negative psychological factors—including depression, anxiety, and hostility—in the development and progression of cardiovascular disease is well established [ 24 , 25 ].

By contrast, several studies have linked positive psychological characteristics with lower levels of traditional cardiovascular risk factors and decreased incidence of CV disease [ 26 ]. Prospective investigations of patients with existing CVD have shown that greater positive well-being is associated with reduced risk of secondary cardiovascular events and mortality [ 26 , 27 ].

Positive well-being is thought to influence cardiovascular disease by (a) promoting adaptive physiological functioning, (b) motivating better health behaviors, and (c) buffering against the detrimental effects of stress on health [ 26 , 28 , 29 ]. These three pathways are interrelated and not mutually exclusive.

Positive well-being may act as a modifiable protective factor that could reduce the burden of CVD through its potential influences on lifestyle behaviors [ 24 , 26 , 27 , 28 ]. People with higher positive well-being tend to have better health behaviors, including nonsmoking, greater physical activity, better dietary patterns, and lower incidence of sleep disturbances. It remains unclear whether positive well-being leads to better subsequent health behaviors or vice versa, however a strong relationship has been demonstrated. Positive well-being is thought to have multiple salutary effects during stress, such as reducing inflammatory and cardiovascular responses to acute stressors. Positive well-being also acts on cardiovascular function and cardiac autonomic control, reducing heart rate and blood pressure [ 24 , 26 ].

Effects of quarantine in the long-term period

It is difficult to see the acute effects of quarantine on atherosclerosis. Nonhealthy lifestyle through increase of inflammatory status could trigger activation of preexisting plaques. We cannot exclude that changes in lifestyle persist after quarantine. In this case the risk of an economic crisis will maintain stress and anxiety in subjects, principally in those belonging to low socio-economic categories, leading to an increase in cardiovascular risk.

Following the Spagnola pandemic throughout 1918, a peak of cardiovascular events was reported. Such events manifest from 7 to 10 days after the emergence of influenza symptoms. In 1918, immediately after the end of the Spagnola epidemic, deaths caused by cardiovascular events had outmatched deaths from other causes, including superimposed pneumonia [ 30 , 31 ].

What must be done to prevent increase of obesity and of cardiovascular risk

We think cardiologists need to be prepared to face the likely increase in obesity immediately after the end of the pandemic.

During quarantine we must promote physical activity at home. Little information is available on effects of home-based physical activity on chronic disease [ 32 , 33 , 34 ]. Despite physical activity being defined mandatory for cardiovascular prevention, guidelines do not contain home-based physical activity indications [ 35 ]. The “2019 ACC/AHA Guideline on the Primary Prevention of Cardiovascular Disease” recommended that “Adults should engage in at least 150 minute per week of accumulated moderate-intensity or 75 minute per week of vigorous-intensity aerobic physical activity (or an equivalent combination of moderate and vigorous activity) to reduce ASCVD risk” (Class I LOE B-NR) or “for adults unable to meet the minimum physical activity recommendations, engaging in some moderate- or vigorous-intensity physical activity, even if less than this recommended amount, can be beneficial to reduce ASCVD risk” (Class IIa LOE B-NR) [ 35 ].

The WHO has just released guidance to “Stay physically active during self-quarantine” in order to improve healthy behaviour during quarantin [ 36 ]. Today there are thousands of workout videos available on the Internet. The goal is to assist people perform these workouts independently on their own. A common observation is that even people who visit gym regularly find it difficult to perform all steps (body pose alignments) in a workout accurately. By continuously doing an exercise incorrectly may eventually cause severe long-term injuries [ 37 ].

After quarantine we need to reevaluate the cardiovascular risk in patients together with metabolic parameters including glycemic status. Patients also need to be evaluated by psychologist to early identify the persistence of anxiety and stress (Table 2 ). A global action supporting healthy diet and physical activity is mandatory to encourage people to return to good lifestyle. This action has to be stronger at a low socio-economic level where individuals will suffer to a higher degree from the restrictions.

Parmet WE, Sinha MS. Covid-19—the law and limits of quarantine. N Engl J Med. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1056/NEJMp2004211 .

Article   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Wu Z, McGoogan JM. Characteristics of and important lessons from the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) outbreak in China: summary of a report of 72 314 cases from the Chinese Center for Disease Control and Prevention. JAMA. 2020. https://doi.org/10.1001/jama.2020.2648 .

WHO. Update 58—first consultation on SARS epidemiology, travel recommendations for Hebei Province (China), situation in Singapore. WHO. 2003. http://www.who.int/csr/sars/archive/2003_05_17/en/ .

Giubilini A, Douglas T, Maslen H, Savulescu J. Quarantine, isolation and the duty of easy rescue in public health. Dev World Bioeth. 2018;18:182–9. https://doi.org/10.1111/dewb.12165 .

Mattioli AV, Nasi M, Cocchi C, Farinetti A. COVID 19 outbreak: impact of the quarantine-induced stress on cardiovascular disease risk burden [published online ahead of print, 2020 Apr 30]. Future Cardiol. 2020. https://doi.org/10.2217/fca-2020-0055 .

Brooks SK, Webster RK, Smith LE, Woodland L, Wessely S, Greenberg N, et al. The psychological impact of quarantine and how to reduce it: rapid review of the evidence. Lancet. 2020;395:912–20. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(20)30460-8 .

Article   CAS   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Blendon RJ, Benson JM, DesRoches CM, Raleigh E, Taylor-Clark K. The public’s response to severe acute respiratory syndrome in Toronto and the United States. Clin Infect Dis. 2004;38:925–31.

Article   Google Scholar  

Jeong H, Yim HW, Song Y-J, Ki M, Min JA, Cho J, et al. Mental health status of people isolated due to Middle East respiratory syndrome. Epidemiol Health. 2016;38:e2016048.

Siti HN, Kamisaha Y, Kamsiaha J. The role of oxidative stress, antioxidants and vascular inflammation in cardiovascular disease (a review). Vasc Pharmacol. 2015;71:40–56.

Article   CAS   Google Scholar  

Mattioli AV, Coppi F, Migaldi M, Scicchitano P, Ciccone MM, Farinetti A. Relationship between Mediterranean diet and asymptomatic peripheral arterial disease in a population of pre-menopausal women. Nutr Metab Cardiovasc Dis. 2017;27:985–90. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.numecd.2017.09.011 .

Article   CAS   PubMed   Google Scholar  

Mattioli AV, Sciomer S, Moscucci F, Maiello M, Cugusi L, Gallina S, et al. Cardiovascular prevention in women: a narrative review from the Italian Society of Cardiology working groups on ‘Cardiovascular Prevention, Hypertension and peripheral circulation’ and on ‘Women Disease’. J Cardiovasc Med. 2019;20:575–83. https://doi.org/10.2459/JCM.0000000000000831 .

Bendall CL, Mayr HL, Opie RS, Bes-Rastrollo M, Itsiopoulos C, Thomas CJ. Central obesity and the Mediterranean diet: a systematic review of intervention trials. Crit Rev Food Sci Nutr. 2018;58:3070–84. https://doi.org/10.1080/10408398.2017.1351917 .

Magriplis E, Panagiotakos D, Kyrou I, Tsioufis C, Mitsopoulou AV, Karageorgou D, et al. Presence of hypertension is reduced by Mediterranean diet adherence in all individuals with a more pronounced effect in the obese: the Hellenic National Nutrition and Health Survey (HNNHS). Nutrients. 2020;12:853.

Głąbska D, Guzek D, Groele B, Gutkowska K. Fruit and vegetable intake and mental health in adults: a systematic review. Nutrients. 2020;12:E115. https://doi.org/10.3390/nu12010115 .

Mattioli AV, Coppi F, Migaldi M, Farinetti A. Fruit and vegetables in hypertensive women with asymptomatic peripheral arterial disease. Clin Nutr ESPEN. 2018;27:110–2.

Sciomer S, Moscucci F, Maffei S, Gallina S, Mattioli AV. Prevention of cardiovascular risk factors in women: the lifestyle paradox and stereotypes we need to defeat. Eur J Prev Cardiol. 2019;26:609–10. https://doi.org/10.1177/2047487318810560 .

Torres SJ, Nowson CA. Relationship between stress, eating behavior, and obesity. Nutrition. 2007;23:887–94. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.nut.2007.08.008 .

Laitinen J, Ek E, Sovio U. Stress-related eating and drinking behavior and body mass index and predictors of this behavior. Prev Med. 2002;34:29–39. https://doi.org/10.1006/pmed.2001.0948 .

Nasi M, Patrizi G, Pizzi C, Landolfo M, Boriani G, Dei Cas A, et al. The role of physical activity in individuals with cardiovascular risk factors: an opinion paper from Italian Society of Cardiology-Emilia Romagna-Marche and SIC-Sport. J Cardiovasc Med. 2019;20:631–9. https://doi.org/10.2459/JCM.0000000000000855 .

WHO. WHO global action plan on physical activity 2018–2030: more active people for a healthier world. Geneva: World Health Organization; 2018. Licence: CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 IGO.

Karbach S, Wenzel P, Waisman A, Munzel T, Daiber A. eNOS uncoupling in cardiovascular diseases–the role of oxidative stress and inflammation. Curr Pharm Des. 2014;20:3579–94.

Chait A, den Hartigh LJ. Adipose tissue distribution, inflammation and its metabolic consequences, including diabetes and cardiovascular disease. Front Cardiovasc Med. 2020;7:22. https://doi.org/10.3389/fcvm.2020.00022 .

Mury P, Chirico EN, Mura M, Millon A, Canet-Soulas E, Pialoux V. Oxidative stress and inflammation, key targets of atherosclerotic plaque progression and vulnerability: potential impact of physical activity. Sports Med. 2018;48:2725–41. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40279-018-0996-z .

Sin NL. The protective role of positive well-being in cardiovascular disease: review of current evidence, mechanisms, and clinical implications. Curr Cardiol Rep. 2016;18:106. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11886-016-0792-z .

Article   PubMed   PubMed Central   Google Scholar  

Kivimäki M, Steptoe A. Effects of stress on the development and progression of cardiovascular disease. Nat Rev Cardiol. 2018;15:215–29. https://doi.org/10.1038/nrcardio.2017.189 .

Boehm JK, Kubzansky LD. The heart’s content: the association between positive psychological well-being and cardiovascular health. Psychol Bull. 2012;138:655–91.

DuBois CM, Lopez OV, Beale EE, Healy BC, Boehm JK, Huffman JC. Relationships between positive psychological constructs and health outcomes in patients with cardiovascular disease: a systematic review. Int J Cardiol. 2015;195:265–80.

Folkman S, Moskowitz JT. Positive affect and the other side of coping. Am Psychol. 2000;55:647–54.

Ong AD. Pathways linking positive emotion and health in later life. Curr Dir Psychol Sci. 2010;19:358–62.

Collins S. “Excess mortality from causes other than influenza and pneumonia during influenza epidemics”. Public Health Rep. 1932;47:2159–79.

Madjid M, Casscells SW. Of birds and men: cardiologists’ role in influenza pandemic. Lancet. 2004;364:1309.

Hageman D, Fokkenrood HJP, Gommans LNM, van den Houten MML, Teijink JAW. Supervised exercise therapy versus home-based exercise therapy versus walking advice for intermittent claudication. Cochrane Database Syst Rev. 2018;CD005263. https://doi.org/10.1002/14651858.CD005263.pub4 .

Mattioli AV, Nasi M, Coppi F, Gelmini R, Farinetti A. Relationship between socioeconomic status and asymptomatic peripheral arterial disease: a retrospective study. J Cardiovasc Med. 2020. (In press). Apr 3. https://doi.org/10.2459/JCM.0000000000000960 . Online ahead of print.

Taylor JK, Buchan IE, van der Veer SN. Assessing life-space mobility for a more holistic view on wellbeing in geriatric research and clinical practice. Aging Clin Exp Res. 2019;31:439–45. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40520-018-0999-5 .

Arnett DK, Blumenthal RS, Albert MA, Buroker AB, Goldberger ZD, Hahn EJ, et al. 2019 ACC/AHA guideline on the primary prevention of cardiovascular disease: a report of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Task Force on Clinical Practice Guidelines. Circulation. 2019. https://doi.org/10.1161/CIR.0000000000000678 .

WHO guideline. “Stay physically active during self-quarantine” (2020). www.euro.who.int/en/health-topics/health-emergencies/coronavirus-covid-19/novel-coronavirus-2019-ncov-technical-guidance/stayphysically-active-during-self-quarantine .

Nagarkoti A, Teotia R, Mahale AK, Das PK. Realtime indoor workout analysis using machine learning & computer vision. Conf Proc IEEE Eng Med Biol Soc. 2019;2019:1440–3. https://doi.org/10.1109/EMBC.2019.8856547 .

Download references

Acknowledgements

We would like to thank Mrs Janet Ann Carter for reviewing the paper. We thank everyone who is working to resolve the SARS-Cov-2 pandemic.

Author information

Authors and affiliations.

Surgical, Medical and Dental Department of Morphological Sciences related to Transplant, Oncology and Regenerative Medicine, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy

Anna Vittoria Mattioli, Milena Nasi & Alberto Farinetti

Istituto Nazionale per le Ricerche Cardiovascolari, University of Modena and Reggio Emilia, Modena, Italy

Matteo Ballerini Puviani

You can also search for this author in PubMed   Google Scholar

Contributions

MBP, MN, and AVM conceived of the idea at the basis of the article. AVM, MN, and MBP developed the different parts of the manuscript. All authors performed the final supervision. All authors contributed to and approved the final manuscript.

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Anna Vittoria Mattioli .

Ethics declarations

Conflict of interest.

The authors declare that they have no conflict of interest.

Additional information

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

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Cite this article.

Mattioli, A.V., Ballerini Puviani, M., Nasi, M. et al. COVID-19 pandemic: the effects of quarantine on cardiovascular risk. Eur J Clin Nutr 74 , 852–855 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41430-020-0646-z

Download citation

Received : 30 March 2020

Revised : 16 April 2020

Accepted : 22 April 2020

Published : 05 May 2020

Issue Date : June 2020

DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41430-020-0646-z

Share this article

Anyone you share the following link with will be able to read this content:

Sorry, a shareable link is not currently available for this article.

Provided by the Springer Nature SharedIt content-sharing initiative

This article is cited by

Comparing food consumption during the covid-19 pandemic: analysis of household income and expenditure survey data in iran.

• Mojtaba Hajipoor
• Pegah Rahbarinejad
• Seyyed Reza Sobhani

Journal of Health, Population and Nutrition (2023)

Why people were less compliant with public health regulations during the second wave of the Covid-19 outbreak: The role of trust in governmental organizations, future anxiety, fatigue, and Covid-19 risk perception

• Cristiano Scandurra
• Vincenzo Bochicchio
• Nelson Mauro Maldonato

Current Psychology (2023)

The Evolving Phenotypes of Cardiovascular Disease during COVID-19 Pandemic

• Michele Correale
• Francesca Croella
• Natale Daniele Brunetti

Cardiovascular Drugs and Therapy (2023)

Excess mortality associated with the COVID-19 pandemic in Latvia: a population-level analysis of all-cause and noncommunicable disease deaths in 2020

• Inese Gobiņa
• Andris Avotiņš
• Ģirts Briģis

BMC Public Health (2022)

Changes in Spanish lifestyle and dietary habits during the COVID-19 lockdown

• Blanca Raidó-Quintana
• Ramon Estruch

European Journal of Nutrition (2022)

Quick links

• Explore articles by subject
• Guide to authors
• Editorial policies

An official website of the United States government

The .gov means it’s official. Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

The site is secure. The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

• Publications
• Account settings

Preview improvements coming to the PMC website in October 2024. Learn More or Try it out now .

• Advanced Search
• Journal List
• Wiley - PMC COVID-19 Collection

The coronavirus ( COVID ‐19) pandemic's impact on mental health

Bilal javed.

1 Faculty of Sciences, PMAS Arid Agriculture University, Rawalpindi Pakistan

2 Roy & Diana Vagelos Laboratories, Department of Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia Pennsylvania, USA

Abdullah Sarwer

3 Nawaz Sharif Medical College, University of Gujrat, Gujrat Pakistan

4 Department of General Medicine, Allama Iqbal Memorial Teaching Hospital, Sialkot Pakistan

Erik B. Soto

5 Graduate School of Public Health, University of Pittsburgh, Pittsburgh Pennsylvania, USA

Zia‐ur‐Rehman Mashwani

Throughout the world, the public is being informed about the physical effects of SARS‐CoV‐2 infection and steps to take to prevent exposure to the coronavirus and manage symptoms of COVID‐19 if they appear. However, the effects of this pandemic on one's mental health have not been studied at length and are still not known. As all efforts are focused on understanding the epidemiology, clinical features, transmission patterns, and management of the COVID‐19 outbreak, there has been very little concern expressed over the effects on one's mental health and on strategies to prevent stigmatization. People's behavior may greatly affect the pandemic's dynamic by altering the severity, transmission, disease flow, and repercussions. The present situation requires raising awareness in public, which can be helpful to deal with this calamity. This perspective article provides a detailed overview of the effects of the COVID‐19 outbreak on the mental health of people.

1. INTRODUCTION

A pandemic is not just a medical phenomenon; it affects individuals and society and causes disruption, anxiety, stress, stigma, and xenophobia. The behavior of an individual as a unit of society or a community has marked effects on the dynamics of a pandemic that involves the level of severity, degree of flow, and aftereffects. 1 Rapid human‐to‐human transmission of the SARS‐CoV‐2 resulted in the enforcement of regional lockdowns to stem the further spread of the disease. Isolation, social distancing, and closure of educational institutes, workplaces, and entertainment venues consigned people to stay in their homes to help break the chain of transmission. 2 However, the restrictive measures undoubtedly have affected the social and mental health of individuals from across the board. 3

As more and more people are forced to stay at home in self‐isolation to prevent the further flow of the pathogen at the societal level, governments must take the necessary measures to provide mental health support as prescribed by the experts. Professor Tiago Correia highlighted in his editorial as the health systems worldwide are assembling exclusively to fight the COVID‐19 outbreak, which can drastically affect the management of other diseases including mental health, which usually exacerbates during the pandemic. 4 The psychological state of an individual that contributes toward the community health varies from person‐to‐person and depends on his background and professional and social standings. 5

Quarantine and self‐isolation can most likely cause a negative impact on one's mental health. A review published in The Lancet said that the separation from loved ones, loss of freedom, boredom, and uncertainty can cause a deterioration in an individual's mental health status. 6 To overcome this, measures at the individual and societal levels are required. Under the current global situation, both children and adults are experiencing a mix of emotions. They can be placed in a situation or an environment that may be new and can be potentially damaging to their health. 7

2. CHILDREN AND TEENS AT RISK

Children, away from their school, friends, and colleagues, staying at home can have many questions about the outbreak and they look toward their parents or caregivers to get the answer. Not all children and parents respond to stress in the same way. Kids can experience anxiety, distress, social isolation, and an abusive environment that can have short‐ or long‐term effects on their mental health. Some common changes in children's behavior can be 8 :

• Excessive crying and annoying behavior
• Increased sadness, depression, or worry
• Difficulties with concentration and attention
• Changes in, or avoiding, activities that they enjoyed in the past
• Unexpected headaches and pain throughout their bodies
• Changes in eating habits

To help offset negative behaviors, requires parents to remain calm, deal with the situation wisely, and answer all of the child's questions to the best of their abilities. Parents can take some time to talk to their children about the COVID‐19 outbreak and share some positive facts, figures, and information. Parents can help to reassure them that they are safe at home and encourage them to engage in some healthy activities including indoor sports and some physical and mental exercises. Parents can also develop a home schedule that can help their children to keep up with their studies. Parents should show less stress or anxiety at their home as children perceive and feel negative energy from their parents. The involvement of parents in healthy activities with their children can help to reduce stress and anxiety and bring relief to the overall situation. 9

3. ELDERS AND PEOPLE WITH DISABILITIES AT RISK

Elderly people are more prone to the COVID‐19 outbreak due to both clinical and social reasons such as having a weaker immune system or other underlying health conditions and distancing from their families and friends due to their busy schedules. According to medical experts, people aged 60 or above are more likely to get the SARS‐CoV‐2 and can develop a serious and life‐threatening condition even if they are in good health. 10

Physical distancing due to the COVID‐19 outbreak can have drastic negative effects on the mental health of the elderly and disabled individuals. Physical isolation at home among family members can put the elderly and disabled person at serious mental health risk. It can cause anxiety, distress, and induce a traumatic situation for them. Elderly people depend on young ones for their daily needs, and self‐isolation can critically damage a family system. The elderly and disabled people living in nursing homes can face extreme mental health issues. However, something as simple as a phone call during the pandemic outbreak can help to console elderly people. COVID‐19 can also result in increased stress, anxiety, and depression among elderly people already dealing with mental health issues.

Family members may witness any of the following changes to the behavior of older relatives 11 ;

• Irritating and shouting behavior
• Change in their sleeping and eating habits
• Emotional outbursts

The World Health Organization suggests that family members should regularly check on older people living within their homes and at nursing facilities. Younger family members should take some time to talk to older members of the family and become involved in some of their daily routines if possible. 12

4. HEALTH WORKERS AT RISK

Doctors, nurses, and paramedics working as a front‐line force to fight the COVID‐19 outbreak may be more susceptible to develop mental health symptoms. Fear of catching a disease, long working hours, unavailability of protective gear and supplies, patient load, unavailability of effective COVID‐19 medication, death of their colleagues after exposure to COVID‐19, social distancing and isolation from their family and friends, and the dire situation of their patients may take a negative toll of the mental health of health workers. The working efficiency of health professionals may decrease gradually as the pandemic prevails. Health workers should take short breaks between their working hours and deal with the situation calmly and in a relaxed manner. 5

5. STIGMATIZATION

Generally, people recently released from quarantine can experience stigmatization and develop a mix of emotions. Everyone may feel differently and have a different welcome by society when they come out of quarantine. People who recently recovered may have to exercise social distancing from their family members, friends, and relatives to ensure their family's safety because of unprecedented viral nature. Different age groups respond to this social behavior differently, which can have both short‐ and long‐term effects. 1

Health workers trying to save lives and protect society may also experience social distancing, changes in the behavior of family members, and stigmatization for being suspected of carrying COVID‐19. 6 Previously infected individuals and health professionals (dealing pandemic) may develop sadness, anger, or frustration because friends or loved ones may have unfounded fears of contracting the disease from contact with them, even though they have been determined not to be contagious. 5

However, the current situation requires a clear understanding of the effects of the recent outbreak on the mental health of people of different age groups to prevent and avoid the COVID‐19 pandemic.

6. TAKE HOME MESSAGE

• Understanding the effects of the COVID‐19 outbreak on the mental health of various populations are as important as understanding its clinical features, transmission patterns, and management.
• Spending time with family members including children and elderly people, involvement in different healthy exercises and sports activities, following a schedule/routine, and taking a break from traditional and social media can all help to overcome mental health issues.
• Public awareness campaigns focusing on the maintenance of mental health in the prevailing situation are urgently needed.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST

The authors declare no potential conflict of interest.

AUTHOR CONTRIBUTIONS

B.J. and A.S. devised the study. B.J. collected and analyzed the data and wrote the first draft. E.B.S. edited and revised the manuscript. A.S. and Z.M. provided useful information. All the authors contributed to the subsequent drafts. The authors reviewed and endorsed the final submission.

Javed B, Sarwer A, Soto EB, Mashwani Z‐R. The coronavirus (COVID‐19) pandemic's impact on mental health . Int J Health Plann Mgmt . 2020; 35 :993–996. 10.1002/hpm.3008 [ PMC free article ] [ PubMed ] [ CrossRef ] [ Google Scholar ]

Target’s version of 'The Tortured Poets Department' contains two special poems: Read and shop them here

• TODAY Plaza
• Share this —

• Watch Full Episodes
• Read With Jenna
• Inspirational
• Relationships
• TODAY Table
• Newsletters
• Start TODAY
• Shop TODAY Awards
• Citi Concert Series
• Listen All Day

Follow today

More Brands

• On The Show

College, interrupted: The pandemic turned my family into my best friends

For many Americans, the vast majority of time spent with parents occurs before college or whenever they leave the nest. Blogger Donn Felker even quantified it, estimating that out of our total time spent with them, 90% happens before age 18. 

It’s one of those statistics you can’t fully appreciate until that time has passed. It really hit me three years ago, when I found myself alone in a college dorm room on a Friday night. My friends were busy, so I watched “The Holiday,” but all I wanted was to have a movie night with my mom. We both would probably fall asleep on the couch and miss the ending. Yet, we would be together.

So when the coronavirus pandemic took hold in the U.S. in March 2020, I got an unexpected yet welcomed extension of life at home, spending every day with my family for six months. It was a chance, as an adult, to get to know my parents and two younger brothers better while falling back into the easy routines of childhood — time I wouldn’t trade for any college experience now.

College, interrupted

Back in middle and high school, I took quiet Friday nights for granted. It wasn’t until 2018 and my first year at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill that I really yearned for those simple days when I followed a routine that my parents guided me through: awake by 6 a.m. for school, a ride to dance practice, dinner on the table and then an episode of “Jeopardy!” or a rerun of “The Office” before bed.

In college, I had to set my own routines. And by sophomore year, I finally found my groove: connecting with people to pass my days with, editing at my college newspaper and starting to focus on writing as a career. I finally had a full, packed schedule.

By January 2020, I spent every day in The Daily Tar Heel newsroom. And we started seeing headlines about a spreading virus across the world. I remember thinking that with so few cases in the United States, maybe we’d get two weeks off school, max. Surely, everything would be fine.

Then spring break rolled around, and I had planned the rest of my year to be just fun . I had a relaxing beach trip with two of my best friends to Hilton Head, South Carolina, my formal was set for later that month — I still needed a dress, but I was confident I’d find something — then, I had our end-of-year banquet for the paper. Celebrations abounded.

But on the drive to Hilton Head, my friend Morgan checked her email. Our university extended spring break by another week before starting fully remote instruction due to COVID-19, which had just hit North Carolina. For the rest of that trip, we went about life as normal. But I started feeling a creeping dread and unease being in a crowd. 

When the school announced on March 17 that the residence halls were closin g, I drove back with my roommate to officially move out of our sophomore year dorm. We threw out our dead plants, stuffed bedding and clothes into trash bags and filled her car to the brim. It was messy and haphazard (in my panic, I emptied my entire desk drawer, throwing away everything, including legal documents). She dropped me off, with my poorly packed luggage in tow, and I moved back into my parent’s house in Charlotte, 2 1/2 hours away.

We weren’t alone. The University of Washington became the first major college to cancel in-person classes on March 6, 2020. Twenty days later, 1,102 colleges or universities had followed suit. One professor estimated that the onset of the pandemic impacted more than 14 million college students.

WeWork, family edition

My first college Zoom class proved to be a disaster. I overslept for the 8 a.m. class, joined late and forgot to mute myself. But I couldn’t complain about it to my roommate afterward in the library or tell my sorry tale to friends at lunch. Instead, after logging off, I walked downstairs and my dog was there to greet me, wagging his tail and staring at me expectantly. So, I told him about it. 

My house converted into a two-story co-working space. My father, who had always worked from home, saw his office of one turned into an office of five. He’d mute his Zoom and shout from downstairs if my brothers and I talked too loudly. Or he’d stomp into the living room and turn down the TV volume himself.

My mom took calls from our kitchen table. In her days at the office, she was the type of mom who would dress up in pink Chico’s blazers. Now, she took calls in her pajama pants. 

My brother Jackson, a junior in high school at the time, had been finishing up a dreaded research project and figuring out how remote AP testing would work. Joshua, in seventh grade, missed playing basketball with his friends at recess and instead, practiced his tuba from his bedroom during virtual band class. (We all quickly learned not to schedule meetings during those times.)

But by 5 p.m., when we finished up our homework and my parents took their last calls of the day, our shared office quickly turned back into our home. My brothers and I set up our old Nintendo Wii and started playing Mario Kart and Wii Sports Tennis again. We took our dog on a walk at 6 p.m. every night, letting us watch the sunset as we chatted with passing neighbors from a 10-foot distance. Then we would watch a few episodes of a show together. First, it was “Outer Banks,” then Netflix’s “Tiger King.”

"The greatest privilege of all was realizing that they made for not only a loving family but the greatest of friends."

All in all, our routines were simple. A few times a week after our walk, we’d play doubles tennis (mind you, only our mom had ever really played before) in a rotation to make sure all five of us were included. We made tacos every Tuesday, and it became part of how I kept track of the weeks. I downloaded TikTok for the first time and started sending the funniest videos to my brothers, texting them from just one room over. 

From family ... to friends

I’m especially grateful for this special time with my brothers. As the eldest sibling, I have always said that one of my greatest privileges is watching them turn into “real people.” Of course, they were always real, live human beings, but at a certain point, you watch them become mini-contributing members of society. They have their own favorite songs, go-to jokes and sarcastic inflections — topics they could talk about for hours. Jackson and I shared an Apple Music account and discovered that our only intersection in music preferences was the song “Circles” by Post Malone. It was the most-played song for us in 2020 by a long shot.

Rather than just pesky creatures following you around, pushing your buttons and aiming to make your life as difficult as it can be, younger siblings eventually turn into people you can confide in — and want to hang out with. 

And over the summer of 2020, I was lucky enough to solidify those friendships.

We talked to each other all the time. Sure, I FaceTimed my friends from college, but in the day to day, the people who kept me from being lonely was my family. To get through something as life-altering as a pandemic, we were forced to lean on each other.

And the greatest privilege of all was realizing that they made for not only a loving family but the greatest of friends. 

My mom can actively listen to a story while juggling any responsibility. My dad’s dinner table stand-up comedy became my favorite entertainment, and just his laugh alone could make it hard to breathe. Jackson is fiercely loyal, and even if he acted like he didn’t care, he enjoyed knowing about our lives and the people in it. And Joshua’s ability to quote obscure sitcom lines will serve as an impressive party trick one day. 

So, when I turned 20 later that June, surrounded by my family, it was the best party I’ve ever had.

I moved into m y first college apartment six months later to start my junior year online. Now, I’m finishing my senior year. Jackson is a freshman in college and Joshua started high school. My family has a texting group chat that is active daily, even if it’s just my dad sharing his Wordle score. 

I think we just got so used to talking to each other every single day that it would be impossible for us to stop now.

Maddie Ellis is a weekend editor at TODAY Digital.

• Featured Events
• In the News

Teenagers are struggling in quarantine. This student is giving them an outlet.

Lauren davis '23 is helping provide a digital platform for young adults to reflect on the challenges they're facing during the coronavirus pandemic..

Lauren Davis '23

As the coronavirus became a global pandemic and life around the world changed drastically, Lauren Davis '23 and her friends noticed a trend.

“We felt like the young adult voice was not being recognized, as if these voices weren’t valid,” Davis said.

They decided to do something about it. 

Davis, along with childhood friends and acquaintances from her hometown of Sandy Hook, Connecticut, founded The Quaranteen Collection, a website to air their feelings and provide a platform for other young people. The site is an outlet to share perspectives and focus on critical issues that are further complicated by the coronavirus, like racism and mental health . 

“We really felt our age demographics’ needs weren’t being met,” Davis said. “In recognition of what we’re going through, we wanted to give young people a voice and allow everyone to get out how they feel. There are many sides to quarantine.”

The content consists of essays submitted by students, from middle school to college, that are authentic reactions and perspectives about COVID-19 and quarantine in the students’ own words. Common themes in the collection include navigating the switch to virtual learning, challenges with home life and the strain on teenagers’ friendships and social lives. 

“There are a few general themes, but ultimately there’s a desire to make one’s own story heard,” Davis added. “One of our goals is to give people a cathartic way to think through all that’s going on. Submitting a post can be therapeutic. And these reflections have been heartfelt.”

The Quaranteen Collection has posted about 50 submissions so far, and there’s a growing backlog as word about the platform spreads, Davis said. 

“These issues are real,” Davis said. “Many young people haven’t had a chance to process it, to think through how they feel about it and present their side to the world. We want to help and empower others to share.”

The following is an excerpt from Davis’ entry in The Quaranteen Collection titled “ A Shaky Transition ”

“Now that I’m able to think more clearly, I can see that quarantine is really a special opportunity in some ways. When was I ever gonna have quality time like this with my parents and brother again? It means so much to me to have this time to spend with them and my dog, in the town that I grew up in even if I can only drive around. I’m comfortable here, around people I love, and frankly I’ve always been socially anxious so it’s pretty nice to not have any expectations on me to go out. 

“In some ways, this isolation really sucks. We all know this. But I’ve found that it’s an unbelievable opportunity too at this time in my life to really sit down and think through things I haven’t had the time to, to appreciate my family and the friends I’ve made, and most of all appreciate that I’m so unbelievably lucky to be in the position I am in. I am happy to be home in a safe place with my family who loves each other, I miss school (who would’ve thought I’d say that ever), I have friends I miss every second, and I’m comfortable with where I am and with myself. 

“Five years ago, I never would have thought that I could make it to where I am now, which is something I think about a lot. I’m so amazed at it, and rather than lament not being at school right now, I’m reminding myself all the time to just be excited for when we get to go back and how great it will feel to have everything be normal again. Everything has its purpose, quarantine is no different. It’s just up to us to make it happen.”

Categories: General , Student Life

Browse by Category

• Humanities and Social Sciences
• International Affairs
• Science and Technology
• Student Life

Suggest a Story

Persuasive Essay Guide

Persuasive Essay About Covid19

How to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid19 | Examples & Tips

11 min read

People also read

A Comprehensive Guide to Writing an Effective Persuasive Essay

200+ Persuasive Essay Topics to Help You Out

Learn How to Create a Persuasive Essay Outline

30+ Free Persuasive Essay Examples To Get You Started

Read Excellent Examples of Persuasive Essay About Gun Control

Crafting a Convincing Persuasive Essay About Abortion

Learn to Write Persuasive Essay About Business With Examples and Tips

Check Out 12 Persuasive Essay About Online Education Examples

Persuasive Essay About Smoking - Making a Powerful Argument with Examples

Are you looking to write a persuasive essay about the Covid-19 pandemic?

Writing a compelling and informative essay about this global crisis can be challenging. It requires researching the latest information, understanding the facts, and presenting your argument persuasively.

But don’t worry! with some guidance from experts, you’ll be able to write an effective and persuasive essay about Covid-19.

In this blog post, we’ll outline the basics of writing a persuasive essay . We’ll provide clear examples, helpful tips, and essential information for crafting your own persuasive piece on Covid-19.

Read on to get started on your essay.

• 1. Steps to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid-19
• 2. Examples of Persuasive Essay About Covid19
• 3. Examples of Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 Vaccine
• 4. Examples of Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 Integration
• 5. Examples of Argumentative Essay About Covid 19
• 6. Examples of Persuasive Speeches About Covid-19
• 7. Tips to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid-19
• 8. Common Topics for a Persuasive Essay on COVID-19 

Steps to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid-19

Here are the steps to help you write a persuasive essay on this topic, along with an example essay:

Step 1: Choose a Specific Thesis Statement

Your thesis statement should clearly state your position on a specific aspect of COVID-19. It should be debatable and clear. For example:

Step 2: Research and Gather Information

Collect reliable and up-to-date information from reputable sources to support your thesis statement. This may include statistics, expert opinions, and scientific studies. For instance:

• COVID-19 vaccination effectiveness data
• Information on vaccine mandates in different countries
• Expert statements from health organizations like the WHO or CDC

Step 3: Outline Your Essay

Create a clear and organized outline to structure your essay. A persuasive essay typically follows this structure:

• Introduction
• Background Information
• Body Paragraphs (with supporting evidence)
• Counterarguments (addressing opposing views)

Step 4: Write the Introduction

In the introduction, grab your reader's attention and present your thesis statement. For example:

Step 5: Provide Background Information

Offer context and background information to help your readers understand the issue better. For instance:

Step 6: Develop Body Paragraphs

Each body paragraph should present a single point or piece of evidence that supports your thesis statement. Use clear topic sentences, evidence, and analysis. Here's an example:

Step 7: Address Counterarguments

Acknowledge opposing viewpoints and refute them with strong counterarguments. This demonstrates that you've considered different perspectives. For example:

Step 8: Write the Conclusion

Summarize your main points and restate your thesis statement in the conclusion. End with a strong call to action or thought-provoking statement. For instance:

Step 9: Revise and Proofread

Edit your essay for clarity, coherence, grammar, and spelling errors. Ensure that your argument flows logically.

Step 10: Cite Your Sources

Include proper citations and a bibliography page to give credit to your sources.

Remember to adjust your approach and arguments based on your target audience and the specific angle you want to take in your persuasive essay about COVID-19.

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That's our Job!

Examples of Persuasive Essay About Covid19

When writing a persuasive essay about the Covid-19 pandemic, it’s important to consider how you want to present your argument. To help you get started, here are some example essays for you to read:

Check out some more PDF examples below:

Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 Pandemic

Sample Of Persuasive Essay About Covid-19

Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 In The Philippines - Example

If you're in search of a compelling persuasive essay on business, don't miss out on our “ persuasive essay about business ” blog!

Examples of Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 Vaccine

Covid19 vaccines are one of the ways to prevent the spread of Covid-19, but they have been a source of controversy. Different sides argue about the benefits or dangers of the new vaccines. Whatever your point of view is, writing a persuasive essay about it is a good way of organizing your thoughts and persuading others.

A persuasive essay about the Covid-19 vaccine could consider the benefits of getting vaccinated as well as the potential side effects.

Below are some examples of persuasive essays on getting vaccinated for Covid-19.

Covid19 Vaccine Persuasive Essay

Persuasive Essay on Covid Vaccines

Interested in thought-provoking discussions on abortion? Read our persuasive essay about abortion blog to eplore arguments!

Examples of Persuasive Essay About Covid-19 Integration

Covid19 has drastically changed the way people interact in schools, markets, and workplaces. In short, it has affected all aspects of life. However, people have started to learn to live with Covid19.

Writing a persuasive essay about it shouldn't be stressful. Read the sample essay below to get idea for your own essay about Covid19 integration.

Persuasive Essay About Working From Home During Covid19

Searching for the topic of Online Education? Our persuasive essay about online education is a must-read.

Examples of Argumentative Essay About Covid 19

Covid-19 has been an ever-evolving issue, with new developments and discoveries being made on a daily basis.

Writing an argumentative essay about such an issue is both interesting and challenging. It allows you to evaluate different aspects of the pandemic, as well as consider potential solutions.

Here are some examples of argumentative essays on Covid19.

Argumentative Essay About Covid19 Sample

Argumentative Essay About Covid19 With Introduction Body and Conclusion

Looking for a persuasive take on the topic of smoking? You'll find it all related arguments in out Persuasive Essay About Smoking blog!

Examples of Persuasive Speeches About Covid-19

Do you need to prepare a speech about Covid19 and need examples? We have them for you!

Persuasive speeches about Covid-19 can provide the audience with valuable insights on how to best handle the pandemic. They can be used to advocate for specific changes in policies or simply raise awareness about the virus.

Check out some examples of persuasive speeches on Covid-19:

Persuasive Speech About Covid-19 Example

Persuasive Speech About Vaccine For Covid-19

You can also read persuasive essay examples on other topics to master your persuasive techniques!

Tips to Write a Persuasive Essay About Covid-19

Writing a persuasive essay about COVID-19 requires a thoughtful approach to present your arguments effectively. 

Here are some tips to help you craft a compelling persuasive essay on this topic:

Choose a Specific Angle

Start by narrowing down your focus. COVID-19 is a broad topic, so selecting a specific aspect or issue related to it will make your essay more persuasive and manageable. For example, you could focus on vaccination, public health measures, the economic impact, or misinformation.

Provide Credible Sources 

Support your arguments with credible sources such as scientific studies, government reports, and reputable news outlets. Reliable sources enhance the credibility of your essay.

Use Persuasive Language

Employ persuasive techniques, such as ethos (establishing credibility), pathos (appealing to emotions), and logos (using logic and evidence). Use vivid examples and anecdotes to make your points relatable.

Organize Your Essay

Structure your essay involves creating a persuasive essay outline and establishing a logical flow from one point to the next. Each paragraph should focus on a single point, and transitions between paragraphs should be smooth and logical.

Emphasize Benefits

Highlight the benefits of your proposed actions or viewpoints. Explain how your suggestions can improve public health, safety, or well-being. Make it clear why your audience should support your position.

Use Visuals -H3

Incorporate graphs, charts, and statistics when applicable. Visual aids can reinforce your arguments and make complex data more accessible to your readers.

Call to Action

End your essay with a strong call to action. Encourage your readers to take a specific step or consider your viewpoint. Make it clear what you want them to do or think after reading your essay.

Revise and Edit

Proofread your essay for grammar, spelling, and clarity. Make sure your arguments are well-structured and that your writing flows smoothly.

Seek Feedback 

Have someone else read your essay to get feedback. They may offer valuable insights and help you identify areas where your persuasive techniques can be improved.

Tough Essay Due? Hire Tough Writers!

Common Topics for a Persuasive Essay on COVID-19 

Here are some persuasive essay topics on COVID-19:

• The Importance of Vaccination Mandates for COVID-19 Control
• Balancing Public Health and Personal Freedom During a Pandemic
• The Economic Impact of Lockdowns vs. Public Health Benefits
• The Role of Misinformation in Fueling Vaccine Hesitancy
• Remote Learning vs. In-Person Education: What's Best for Students?
• The Ethics of Vaccine Distribution: Prioritizing Vulnerable Populations
• The Mental Health Crisis Amidst the COVID-19 Pandemic
• The Long-Term Effects of COVID-19 on Healthcare Systems
• Global Cooperation vs. Vaccine Nationalism in Fighting the Pandemic
• The Future of Telemedicine: Expanding Healthcare Access Post-COVID-19

In search of more inspiring topics for your next persuasive essay? Our persuasive essay topics blog has plenty of ideas!

To sum it up,

You have read good sample essays and got some helpful tips. You now have the tools you needed to write a persuasive essay about Covid-19. So don't let the doubts stop you, start writing!

If you need professional writing help, don't worry! We've got that for you as well.

MyPerfectWords.com is a professional essay writing service that can help you craft an excellent persuasive essay on Covid-19. Our experienced essay writer will create a well-structured, insightful paper in no time!

So don't hesitate and get in touch with our persuasive essay writing service today!

Frequently Asked Questions

Are there any ethical considerations when writing a persuasive essay about covid-19.

Yes, there are ethical considerations when writing a persuasive essay about COVID-19. It's essential to ensure the information is accurate, not contribute to misinformation, and be sensitive to the pandemic's impact on individuals and communities. Additionally, respecting diverse viewpoints and emphasizing public health benefits can promote ethical communication.

What impact does COVID-19 have on society?

The impact of COVID-19 on society is far-reaching. It has led to job and economic losses, an increase in stress and mental health disorders, and changes in education systems. It has also had a negative effect on social interactions, as people have been asked to limit their contact with others.

Write Essay Within 60 Seconds!

Caleb S. has been providing writing services for over five years and has a Masters degree from Oxford University. He is an expert in his craft and takes great pride in helping students achieve their academic goals. Caleb is a dedicated professional who always puts his clients first.

Paper Due? Why Suffer? That’s our Job!

Keep reading

Advertisement

Supported by

Can You Be Forced to Quarantine or to Stay Home? Your Questions, Answered

Although quarantines are considered a measure of last resort, “police powers” give states, counties and even cities broad authority to make residents stay home.

• Share full article

By Neil MacFarquhar

States and local governments across the United States have issued some variant of stay-at-home orders covering more than half of all Americans. They range in severity from pleas to avoid gatherings and to stay indoors combined with business closings to mandatory orders with severe consequences, as in Hawaii, where violators face a $5,000 fine or up to a year in jail.

Rare in modern history, quarantines were fairly common in ancient times, before medicine stemmed the ferocious spread of contagious diseases. The very word quarantine is rooted in the Italian words quarantenara and quaranta giorni, or 40 days, the period of time that the city of Venice forced ship passengers and cargo to wait before landing in the 14th and 15th centuries to try to stave off the plague. Quarantines have often generated tensions between protecting public health versus respecting individual rights.

Here are answers to some common questions about how quarantines are imposed and enforced in the United States in the wake of the coronavirus.

Can the government force anybody into quarantine or to ‘shelter in place’?

The legal authority to impose quarantines or shelter-in-place orders on individuals is rooted in the “police powers” granted broadly to states, counties and cities to protect public health. That means for most Americans, a state or local stay-at-home order imposed to prevent the spread of the coronavirus will be far more important than any federal order.

When it comes to the federal government, it can impose quarantines under the Public Health Service Act for two main reasons: to prevent the spread of communicable disease into the United States or between states.

Although President Trump has said he would like to reopen the country by Easter, it is not clear that he has the power and authority to do this. The police powers held by states to protect public health came before the Constitution and it did not change them, said Lawrence O. Gostin, a professor at Georgetown University Law School who specializes in public health law. Mr. Trump, for example, could not go into a state and order a business to start operating, experts said.

See Which States and Cities Have Told Residents to Stay at Home

In an attempt to stop the spread of the coronavirus, a vast majority of states and the Navajo Nation have given directives, affecting more than nine in 10 U.S. residents.

What is the difference between a quarantine and a stay-at-home order?

A quarantine is designed to isolate someone sick or at least known to have been exposed to a contagious disease, whereas a stay-at-home order is meant to promote social distancing and thus lower the number of infections.

Quarantines are considered a measure of last resort when no preferable means is available to halt the spread of a deadly communicable disease. “We do not want to restrict people’s liberty unless it is necessary, unless we cannot achieve the public health end with less draconian measures,” said Wendy E. Parmet, the director of the Center for Health Policy and Law at Northeastern University.

So there is no blanket law?

No, the laws vary by state and even locality. Some 40 states updated their quarantine laws after fears spread over a possible broad anthrax attack in the months after the Sept. 11 attacks, according to Professor Gostin., He is the author of a legal template called the State Emergency Health Powers Act, which many states adopted in whole or in part. Some states retain antiquated regulations on their books.

Are quarantines, including self-isolating at home, voluntary or mandatory?

It is a bit of a gray area. It often seems voluntary until the person involved tries to leave, at which point health officials are likely to make it compulsory, experts said. The rules are notoriously hard to confirm because county governments often do not publish their regulations online.

The bottom line, however, is that if a quarantine is not enforced and other people catch the fatal disease as a result, the local government could be held liable, Mr. Gostin said. “Thinking about this as purely voluntary is wishful thinking.”

Is it a crime to evade a quarantine?

Again, laws vary by state, but those who ignore the rule could face fines or jail time. Logic dictates that draconian enforcement would be difficult and often counterproductive. No local law enforcement agency would likely compound its problems by throwing a quarantine scofflaw with a deadly communicable disease in among its jail population.

Local authorities often have some form of enforcement power, but usually try gentle persuasion to convince people that it is for their good and the good of the community. An infected person blatantly ignoring an order might be forced to go into medical isolation — that is, some form of locked hospital ward.

Experts worry that many Americans might think they have the right to go someplace local like the supermarket without considering the consequences for others. “We have lost this tradition of the common good and social responsibility to each other and that could be a big problem in America,” Mr. Gostin said.

Is there a right to appeal?

States should have some manner of appeal process, and some require a court order from the outset. If there is no medical tribunal or other means for a second opinion, ultimately anyone could challenge a quarantine order in court through a writ of habeas corpus.

Quarantine laws tend to be controversial because they are akin to jail time, using the coercive power of the state to tell people that they have to stay confined, even if in their own homes.

The C.D.C. rewrote its quarantine guidelines in 2017 and they have never been tested in court. The Supreme Court has also never dealt with an infectious disease quarantine case, Mr. Gostin said.

Under C.D.C. rules, the federal government must test those confined within 72 hours and define the length of stay from the outset — two weeks for the coronavirus because that is the incubation period for the disease.

The most famous recent test case was Kaci Hickox, a nurse who was initially quarantined involuntarily at Newark Liberty International Airport in 2014 upon returning from West Africa, where she had worked with Ebola patients.

After a few days, she was allowed to return to her home state of Maine but ordered to remain in isolation. Having tested negative for the virus, Ms. Hickox sued and the judge rejected the quarantine order.

With the help of the A.C.L.U., Ms. Hickox also sued New Jersey, which resulted in a settlement that gave arriving passengers more rights, including the right to appeal the decision and to seek legal advice.

What does the government provide during a quarantine?

The most glaring hole in American quarantine laws, experts said, is that there is no guaranteed salary. An employer could even fire a quarantined employee. President Trump has said that his administration would address financial relief for people quarantined.

If you are separated from the community for the public good, the government should provide medical service, essential medications, food and other social support if you need it, Mr. Gostin said.

Are quarantines effective?

They generally help slow the spread of the disease but sometimes do not depending on the disease and the conditions of the quarantine, experts said. In China, that seemed to decelerate the exponential spread of the virus, they said, whereas holding passengers on the Diamond Princess cruise ship in Japan appeared to create a kind of petri dish with more people infected.

Fear, Humor, Defiance: How the World Is Reacting to Coronavirus

The coronavirus has touched a diverse collection of countries and cultures, but a number of shared experiences have emerged — from grieving the dead to writing songs..

[Bagpipe music] There are moments that seem bizarre, moments of fear … … preparation and moments of emptiness. These are scenes from the world living with coronavirus. It has spread across cultures, languages and even out to sea. And despite these global differences, a number of shared experiences have emerged. There is grief over the dead. In Iran, hospital staff mourn a doctor’s death from the virus. In China, a quarantined building collapses, and a firefighter breaks down after pulling bodies from the rubble. In Italy, a man mourns the death of his sister. To try and save lives, authorities take precautions. They disinfect public areas and screen populations. “This is just crazy. Around the world, people are afraid and on edge. “Unbelievable.” In Northern Ireland, routine construction work at an Apple Store is mistaken for virus-related activity. In Japan, tempers flare when a man sneezes on a train. One Italian takes the fear and adds humor. This is a circle to keep people at a safe distance. In fact, lots of people use humor to cope with the uncertainty or the stigma of being sick. In Australia, a run on toilet paper leads to lessons in self-defense. “He’s going to show you how to deal with people stealing your toilet paper.” There is also defiance, a conviction that life must go on despite the virus. Across rooftops in China, quarantined neighbors socialize. From a rooftop in Italy, a theater group performs poetry for an area where movement is restricted. On a quarantined cruise ship, there’s songwriting to pass the time. In an apartment in China, too. But perhaps some of the most striking moments from the pandemic are those where little happens: the empty streets. “Unbelievable. No traffic.” The quiet airports. The places of worship without worshippers. Stores without goods. This is how it is across the globe as we prepare, grieve and wait for the next chapter of the coronavirus.

Could there be broad quarantines in the United States like those imposed by China or Italy?

The United States government lacks the broad authority to impose the sweeping quarantine seen in China, where some 70 million people were confined in the largest such effort in history. Italy, which has a more centralized government, attempted to lock down the entire country. But in the United States neither federal nor state law contains the powers for such expansive measures, Mr. Gostin said.

In addition, the United States does not really have the logistical systems in place to guarantee the distribution of medical services, food and other necessities to people under quarantine.

New York State decided to deploy the National Guard in New Rochelle, a New York City suburb and the center of a significant outbreak, to help provide those kinds of services and to help scrub public spaces clean. The center of the city is considered a “containment zone,” but it is not under quarantine.

Is there any history of quarantines in the United States?

The measures being implemented now around the globe are the most sweeping since the 1918 influenza pandemic.

In the United States, quarantines have been extremely rare. The last federal quarantine was in the early 1960s against a suspected smallpox outbreak. Instead the C.D.C. tends to issue health warnings, like advising pregnant women to avoid Southern Florida in 2016 during an outbreak of the Zika virus.

In earlier times, there were frequent legal quarantines, dating back to at least the early 18th century. The fact that they often targeted minority immigrant communities is a key reason that civil libertarians are leery about giving the government wide powers today.

Two of the most notorious cases occurred during the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

In 1900, the city of San Francisco tried to impose a quarantine on Chinatown, arguing that a diet of rice made people more susceptible to bubonic plague than the more American diet of meat, and demanded that its residents submit to an unproven vaccine, according to Howard Markel, the director of the Center for the History of Medicine at the University of Michigan. Residents sued under the 14th Amendment, which guarantees due process and equal treatment under the law, and won.

In New York City, which once deployed health police armed with billy clubs and powers of arrest, an outbreak of typhus among Russian Jewish and Italian immigrants on the Lower East Side prompted the authorities to confine some 1,200 people on North Brother Island off the Bronx for several months in 1892.

Perhaps the island’s most infamous resident ever was Mary Mallon, known as “Typhoid Mary,” an Irish-born cook who infected dozens of people in New York, killing some of them, by changing jobs frequently and refusing to stop working as a cook.

Mr. Markel cited in his book “Quarantine” an example of the sense of sweeping power held by the authorities at that time, when they thought it was in the public interest to impose a quarantine.

Asked to testify in Congress about quarantining hundreds of immigrants on the island in 1892, Cyrus Edson, the New York City’s sanitary supervisor, responded, “We may take possession of the City Hall forcibly and turn it into a contagious disease hospital if in our opinion it is necessary to do so.”

Neil MacFarquhar is a national correspondent. Previously, as Moscow bureau chief, he was on the team awarded the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in International Reporting . He spent more than 15 years reporting from around the Mideast, including five as Cairo bureau chief, and wrote two books about the region. More about Neil MacFarquhar

Essay on COVID-19 Pandemic

As a result of the COVID-19 (Coronavirus) outbreak, daily life has been negatively affected, impacting the worldwide economy. Thousands of individuals have been sickened or died as a result of the outbreak of this disease. When you have the flu or a viral infection, the most common symptoms include fever, cold, coughing up bone fragments, and difficulty breathing, which may progress to pneumonia. It’s important to take major steps like keeping a strict cleaning routine, keeping social distance, and wearing masks, among other things. This virus’s geographic spread is accelerating (Daniel Pg 93). Governments restricted public meetings during the start of the pandemic to prevent the disease from spreading and breaking the exponential distribution curve. In order to avoid the damage caused by this extremely contagious disease, several countries quarantined their citizens. However, this scenario had drastically altered with the discovery of the vaccinations. The research aims to investigate the effect of the Covid-19 epidemic and its impact on the population’s well-being.

There is growing interest in the relationship between social determinants of health and health outcomes. Still, many health care providers and academics have been hesitant to recognize racism as a contributing factor to racial health disparities. Only a few research have examined the health effects of institutional racism, with the majority focusing on interpersonal racial and ethnic prejudice Ciotti et al., Pg 370. The latter comprises historically and culturally connected institutions that are interconnected. Prejudice is being practiced in a variety of contexts as a result of the COVID-19 outbreak. In some ways, the outbreak has exposed pre-existing bias and inequity.

Thousands of businesses are in danger of failure. Around 2.3 billion of the world’s 3.3 billion employees are out of work. These workers are especially susceptible since they lack access to social security and adequate health care, and they’ve also given up ownership of productive assets, which makes them highly vulnerable. Many individuals lose their employment as a result of lockdowns, leaving them unable to support their families. People strapped for cash are often forced to reduce their caloric intake while also eating less nutritiously (Fraser et al, Pg 3). The epidemic has had an impact on the whole food chain, revealing vulnerabilities that were previously hidden. Border closures, trade restrictions, and confinement measures have limited farmer access to markets, while agricultural workers have not gathered crops. As a result, the local and global food supply chain has been disrupted, and people now have less access to healthy foods. As a consequence of the epidemic, many individuals have lost their employment, and millions more are now in danger. When breadwinners lose their jobs, become sick, or die, the food and nutrition of millions of people are endangered. Particularly severely hit are the world’s poorest small farmers and indigenous peoples.

Infectious illness outbreaks and epidemics have become worldwide threats due to globalization, urbanization, and environmental change. In developed countries like Europe and North America, surveillance and health systems monitor and manage the spread of infectious illnesses in real-time. Both low- and high-income countries need to improve their public health capacities (Omer et al., Pg 1767). These improvements should be financed using a mix of national and foreign donor money. In order to speed up research and reaction for new illnesses with pandemic potential, a global collaborative effort including governments and commercial companies has been proposed. When working on a vaccine-like COVID-19, cooperation is critical.

The epidemic has had an impact on the whole food chain, revealing vulnerabilities that were previously hidden. Border closures, trade restrictions, and confinement measures have limited farmer access to markets, while agricultural workers have been unable to gather crops. As a result, the local and global food supply chain has been disrupted, and people now have less access to healthy foods (Daniel et al.,Pg 95) . As a consequence of the epidemic, many individuals have lost their employment, and millions more are now in danger. When breadwinners lose their jobs, the food and nutrition of millions of people are endangered. Particularly severely hit are the world’s poorest small farmers and indigenous peoples.

While helping to feed the world’s population, millions of paid and unpaid agricultural laborers suffer from high levels of poverty, hunger, and bad health, as well as a lack of safety and labor safeguards, as well as other kinds of abuse at work. Poor people, who have no recourse to social assistance, must work longer and harder, sometimes in hazardous occupations, endangering their families in the process (Daniel Pg 96). When faced with a lack of income, people may turn to hazardous financial activities, including asset liquidation, predatory lending, or child labor, to make ends meet. Because of the dangers they encounter while traveling, working, and living abroad; migrant agricultural laborers are especially vulnerable. They also have a difficult time taking advantage of government assistance programs.

The pandemic also has a significant impact on education. Although many educational institutions across the globe have already made the switch to online learning, the extent to which technology is utilized to improve the quality of distance or online learning varies. This level is dependent on several variables, including the different parties engaged in the execution of this learning format and the incorporation of technology into educational institutions before the time of school closure caused by the COVID-19 pandemic. For many years, researchers from all around the globe have worked to determine what variables contribute to effective technology integration in the classroom Ciotti et al., Pg 371. The amount of technology usage and the quality of learning when moving from a classroom to a distant or online format are presumed to be influenced by the same set of variables. Findings from previous research, which sought to determine what affects educational systems ability to integrate technology into teaching, suggest understanding how teachers, students, and technology interact positively in order to achieve positive results in the integration of teaching technology (Honey et al., 2000). Teachers’ views on teaching may affect the chances of successfully incorporating technology into the classroom and making it a part of the learning process.

In conclusion, indeed, Covid 19 pandemic have affected the well being of the people in a significant manner. The economy operation across the globe have been destabilized as most of the people have been rendered jobless while the job operation has been stopped. As most of the people have been rendered jobless the living conditions of the people have also been significantly affected. Besides, the education sector has also been affected as most of the learning institutions prefer the use of online learning which is not effective as compared to the traditional method. With the invention of the vaccines, most of the developed countries have been noted to stabilize slowly, while the developing countries have not been able to vaccinate most of its citizens. However, despite the challenge caused by the pandemic, organizations have been able to adapt the new mode of online trading to be promoted.

Ciotti, Marco, et al. “The COVID-19 pandemic.”  Critical reviews in clinical laboratory sciences  57.6 (2020): 365-388.

Daniel, John. “Education and the COVID-19 pandemic.”  Prospects  49.1 (2020): 91-96.

Fraser, Nicholas, et al. “Preprinting the COVID-19 pandemic.”  BioRxiv  (2021): 2020-05.

Omer, Saad B., Preeti Malani, and Carlos Del Rio. “The COVID-19 pandemic in the US: a clinical update.”  Jama  323.18 (2020): 1767-1768.

Cite this page

Similar essay samples.

• Essay on Psychological Correlates of Childhood Obesity
• Essay on Volkswagen Ethical Scandals
• Essay on British Petroleum Company (BP)
• Essay on Test Marketing
• Essay on What Makes an Effective Teacher?
• Essay on the Geography of Scotland

• < Previous

Home > History Community Special Collections > Remembering COVID-19 Community Archive > Community Reflections > 21

Community Reflections

My life experience during the covid-19 pandemic.

Melissa Blanco Follow

Document Type

Class Assignment

Publication Date

Affiliation with sacred heart university.

Undergraduate, Class of 2024

My content explains what my life was like during the last seven months of the Covid-19 pandemic and how it affected my life both positively and negatively. It also explains what it was like when I graduated from High School and how I want the future generations to remember the Class of 2020.

Class assignment, Western Civilization (Dr. Marino).

Recommended Citation

Blanco, Melissa, "My Life Experience During the Covid-19 Pandemic" (2020). Community Reflections . 21. https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/covid19-reflections/21

Creative Commons License

Since September 23, 2020

Included in

Higher Education Commons , Virus Diseases Commons

To view the content in your browser, please download Adobe Reader or, alternately, you may Download the file to your hard drive.

NOTE: The latest versions of Adobe Reader do not support viewing PDF files within Firefox on Mac OS and if you are using a modern (Intel) Mac, there is no official plugin for viewing PDF files within the browser window.

Advanced Search

• Notify me via email or RSS
• Expert Gallery
• Collections
• Disciplines

Author Corner

• SelectedWorks Faculty Guidelines
• DigitalCommons@SHU: Nuts & Bolts, Policies & Procedures
• Sacred Heart University Library

Home | About | FAQ | My Account | Accessibility Statement

Privacy Copyright

How do teenagers live in lockdown? – photo essay

Jean-Marc Caimi and Valentina Piccinni investigated how Italian teenagers were coping with the coronavirus lockdown, working with them to take pictures using video chat apps

S ome can’t wait to go out again, others don’t really want to, happy to stay home connected to the outside world only through their computer. Some are worried about the virus and others, instead, are more concerned about the climate crisis. To give an answer to this important question, we adopted the same means teenagers use to study and communicate within their community. Zoom, Skype, WhatsApp … these video chats were our eyes to take the pictures, remotely.

Teens (and their parents) allowed us to take snapshots using the camera of their computers, tablets or mobile phones, at home, in their bedroom or where they are spending the quarantine, while they study, read, chat, play music, watch TV or exercise.

This gives a unique portrait of generation Z.

Rami attends secondary school in Rome. He’s passionate about computers, gaming and app developing. Rami is 16 and was born in Jordan.

I consider myself a very sedentary person . Usually during the school holidays I tend to stay at home most of the time. Quarantine is not affecting what I would normally do with all this extra free time.

One of the things that changed is the shifting of my schedule . Since I don’t have to wake up at 6am , I started to wake up later and later, and as a result I ended up having lunch, dinner, and going to bed at least two hours after my usual time.

The last time I went out it was two days before the quarantine started, with some friends . I don’t feel the need to go out yet.

Viola, 15, attends the International School of Tanganyika in Dar es Salaam in Tanzania. She’s been living there for four years with her parents, who are doctors. She spends her quarantine days studying, learning guitar, listening to music and video chatting with friends.

From the reaction of the Tanzanians, it does not seem people are worried. Here people continue to go to the market, to church or mosques for religious celebrations, as if nothing happened. Unlike Europe , here it is very difficult to ask people to stay at home. Tanzania is a poor country and people live from day to day and earn the little money they will need to buy food. So it is very difficult to ask for a total closure. Here in Dar Es Salaam, water and soap dispensers have been put everywhere and in all the shops the temperature is checked before entering.

Viola sent us some photos that represent her life in quarantine in her house in Dar es Salaam: Viola attending an online class. Right; her father and little brother.

The school has been closed for three weeks. Yesterday, we were told it will be closed for the rest of the school year. Many of my classmates have returned to their countries and so have the teachers. We now do school online from 8.30am to 2.30pm on Zoom. Some of the teachers who have returned to the U S make video calls late in the evening, others have the backdrop of their hometown snowy landscapes, while it is very hot here in Dar!

During the day, apart from web-school and homework, I contact friends, both Italian and from my school here in Tanzania. I can read and listen to music much more than usual. In the afternoon I often take a walk with my dog.

From this experience I have noticed how we kids often don’t enjoy the simple things we have, such as going out with friends. Now that we can’t, we are realising the importance of these little things. Surely, when it’s all over, we’ll be more grateful for what we have.

Alice, 16, lives on the outskirts of Rome and has access to a big garden. This makes the quarantine days easier for her to stand. She’s very good at drawing, and has plans to move to Portsmouth in the autumn to attend an English school year-long programme.

Staying at home is difficult, more than anything else, because I can’t see my friends in person. Apart from not going to school and participating in extra-curricular activity, the only different thing is not going out with my friends.

The connection is often slow and the video freezes, so classes are much more difficult to follow. The upsides are probably the comfort of being at home and not being seen by teachers.

I worry a lot and also wonder whether this virus will ruin my summer . I ’m probably more concerned about the coronavirus than global warming .

Chiara connects with us via Zoom and selects her favourite TV series Money Heist as a background. She’s very good student, she’s a class representative and politically active.

Obviously I miss my friends and going out, but I get along well with my family and maybe I’ve always been a bit lazy, so adapting wasn’t difficult. Instead of going out with friends, on Saturday nights I watch movies or series with my family, something nobody had time to do before.

I spend most of my days studying, but I also have virtual meetings with my collective mates and chat with my friends, but physically it is different and I miss th at aspect.

At first it took me a while to realise what was really happening, but hearing the number of deaths on the news or listening to the stories of my uncle, who is a doctor in the Bergamo area – where the virus hit hardest – has frighten ed me. But I’m quite optimistic : if we all respect the rules, and stay at home we will be able to get out of this situation.

Chiara sent us some pictures representing her lockdown days.

W e feel the virus is hitting closer to home and therefore the instinctive reaction of fear is greater . It ’s more difficult to realise the damage climate breakdown will bring . The complications caused by the virus are perhaps a consequence of the climate crisis, as studies show the areas most affected are also the most polluted. On the other hand, the lockdown is reducing emissions and thus improving the health of our planet.

This experience made us realise our lives had become too hectic and consumerist, which is why we waited too long before completely block ing the economy. The courage to stop it earlier would have prevented many deaths.

Anita, 15, attends the second year of Pilo Albertelli high school in Rome. She is a brilliant student and spends most of her quarantine days doing web-schooling and homework. She loves writing and reading but also doing sports. She’s a long-jumper.

Sometimes I feel the lockdown is an opportunity to rest from the fren zy and to try things I didn’t have time to do before. Other times, I feel tired of living like this – and the fact that I can’t go out drives me crazy. I miss going to school, I miss athletics and seeing my friends, but I also feel lucky because I ’m healthy and in a comfortable home. Having lunch with my whole family is new – that was not a daily habit before.

During the day I read and watch TV series. Sometimes I make video calls with my friends, sometimes I draw. We are lucky at least to be able to continue to study and see our classmates and teachers, but there are internet connection problems and distance learning is more difficult .

I’m worried about the victims and that someone I know might get sick. I’m scared that hospitals are overloaded and there aren’t enough doctors . Despite the lock down we’re doing well in the family, but I’m amazed at how much I miss school.

I ’ve learned that life and our habits can change in a second. I have never thought about this before, but in many other parts of the world this often happens. Then I learned to wash my hands very well!

Chiara B attends the second year at the Italian school in Madrid, where she lives with her family. She’s a Hollywood film fan and she wants to become a director of photography. Spain is among the countries worst-hit by the pandemic. She spends her lockdown days learning to play the guitar, watching movies and studying.

Since I don’t go out of the house any more and I don’t have any more commitments, life is less hectic. This allows me to think more, but sometimes, I get lost in distressing thoughts ( for example, about our future). I miss being able to meet friends in person very much.

I have more time now. I can write more, work out every day, read and work on personal projects . Apart from web school and homework, I mostly video-chat to my friends.

At the beginning distance learning was exciting . I paid more attention to classes because it was new. But as the weeks go by, it gets harder to stay focused in front of a screen.

I am more concerned about the climate crisis tha n the virus, but it took a pandemic for this phenomenon to slow down, at least a little bit. I keep myself informed, but in a very superficial way. The numbers frighten me enough and frighten the whole of Spain .

Julien, 15, was born in Rome but has a French father. He’s passionate about maths and science. He spends his lockdown days mainly studying. He doesn’t feel the urge to go out. He just went jogging a couple of times to stay fit. He’s a high-jump athlete.

The obligation to stay at home does not cause me any stress at all: I am very homely and do not feel the need to go out. School and homework aside, I spend my days mainly on my mobile phone or computer. I seldom go jogging.

The web school works well, we have regular lessons every day (even too many!). It’s nice that it’s easier to consult books during the tests .

I don’t miss the fact that I can’t physically meet my friends . I’m happy even if we only see each other virtually during video calls.

The view from Julien’s room..

The living room where Julien does his homework and spends much of his time with his mum. The view from Julien’s living room window on to the courtyard of a residential area in Rome.

I ’m not very worried about what is happening because of the virus in the world. I ’m not too up to date on how the pandemic is developing; I watch the news from time to time. I think when this is over, everything will go back to the way it was before.

Sofia, 15, plays bass in a rock band. She’s loves horror movies.

I have more time to think and do what I want to do when I get back from school. On Fridays I play with a band, but now I can’t.

A screenshot of a chat with friends. Sofia is a keen photographer – this is the view from her room, where she spends most of the quarantine time.

Sofia is likes classical thrillers and horror movies..

The video lessons aren’t bad, the only thing I don’t like is that nobody shows their face – that would be nice . The way we do web schooling is like listening to a recorded voice and it’s boring.

I miss meeting my friends in person , also because I had just started to go out in the evening with friends and that felt good.

Michela has been reading a lot and keeping good care of her pet.

Being at home doesn’t bother me too much. The relationship with my parents hasn’t changed much, we live in the same house but we don’t see each other often, each of us has his own space in the house and we only get together to eat. At least once a week, I go out for a walk with my grandmother’s dog, so I’m not completely segregated like other people.

Michela sent us some snaps of her daily life in quarantine.

The daily routine hasn’t changed drastically, the main difference is when I play sport: I used to train in the evening for about two hours with my rugby team, now I do it in the morning for one hour at most, doing some exercises suggested by our coach.

School homework is the same as before, and the whole morning is occupied by video lessons. But I finally found some time for myself, for example to make a jewellery box to tidy up all my earrings and necklaces that were previously cluttered in a box.

I am more concerned about the climate crisis because the coronavirus is something to which we will eventually find a solution, even though it will take a long time . Climate breakdown, on the other hand, is a seemingly invisible enemy that we can’t stop, because it’s not as obvious as the coronavirus, because it doesn’t bring “imminent” deaths, but a slow death of the whole planet. It seems that the world is not focused in finding a real solution for that.

• The Guardian picture essay
• Coronavirus
• Photography
• Young people

Most viewed

Search the United Nations

• Policy and Funding
• Recover Better
• Disability Inclusion
• Secretary-General
• Financing for Development
• ACT-Accelerator
• Member States
• Health and Wellbeing
• Policy and Guidance
• Vaccination
• COVID-19 Medevac
• i-Seek (requires login)
• Awake at Night podcast

COVID-19 photo essay: We’re all in this together

About the author, department of global communications.

The United Nations Department of Global Communications (DGC) promotes global awareness and understanding of the work of the United Nations.

23 June 2020 – The COVID-19 pandemic has  demonstrated the interconnected nature of our world – and that no one is safe until everyone is safe.  Only by acting in solidarity can communities save lives and overcome the devastating socio-economic impacts of the virus.  In partnership with the United Nations, people around the world are showing acts of humanity, inspiring hope for a better future. 

Everyone can do something    

Rauf Salem, a volunteer, instructs children on the right way to wash their hands, in Sana'a, Yemen.  Simple measures, such as maintaining physical distance, washing hands frequently and wearing a mask are imperative if the fight against COVID-19 is to be won.  Photo: UNICEF/UNI341697

Creating hope

Venezuelan refugee Juan Batista Ramos, 69, plays guitar in front of a mural he painted at the Tancredo Neves temporary shelter in Boa Vista, Brazil to help lift COVID-19 quarantine blues.  “Now, everywhere you look you will see a landscape to remind us that there is beauty in the world,” he says.  Ramos is among the many artists around the world using the power of culture to inspire hope and solidarity during the pandemic.  Photo: UNHCR/Allana Ferreira

Inclusive solutions

Wendy Schellemans, an education assistant at the Royal Woluwe Institute in Brussels, models a transparent face mask designed to help the hard of hearing.  The United Nations and partners are working to ensure that responses to COVID-19 leave no one behind.  Photo courtesy of Royal Woluwe Institute

Humanity at its best

Maryna, a community worker at the Arts Centre for Children and Youth in Chasiv Yar village, Ukraine, makes face masks on a sewing machine donated by the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) and civil society partner, Proliska.  She is among the many people around the world who are voluntarily addressing the shortage of masks on the market. Photo: UNHCR/Artem Hetman

Keep future leaders learning

A mother helps her daughter Ange, 8, take classes on television at home in Man, Côte d'Ivoire.  Since the COVID-19 pandemic began, caregivers and educators have responded in stride and have been instrumental in finding ways to keep children learning.  In Côte d'Ivoire, the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF) partnered with the Ministry of Education on a ‘school at home’ initiative, which includes taping lessons to be aired on national TV and radio.  Ange says: “I like to study at home.  My mum is a teacher and helps me a lot.  Of course, I miss my friends, but I can sleep a bit longer in the morning.  Later I want to become a lawyer or judge."  Photo: UNICEF/UNI320749

Global solidarity

People in Nigeria’s Lagos State simulate sneezing into their elbows during a coronavirus prevention campaign.  Many African countries do not have strong health care systems.  “Global solidarity with Africa is an imperative – now and for recovering better,” said United Nations Secretary-General António Guterres.  “Ending the pandemic in Africa is essential for ending it across the world.” Photo: UNICEF Nigeria/2020/Ojo

A new way of working

Henri Abued Manzano, a tour guide at the United Nations Information Service (UNIS) in Vienna, speaks from his apartment.  COVID-19 upended the way people work, but they can be creative while in quarantine.  “We quickly decided that if visitors can’t come to us, we will have to come to them,” says Johanna Kleinert, Chief of the UNIS Visitors Service in Vienna.  Photo courtesy of Kevin Kühn

Life goes on

Hundreds of millions of babies are expected to be born during the COVID-19 pandemic.  Fionn, son of Chloe O'Doherty and her husband Patrick, is among them.  The couple says: “It's all over.  We did it.  Brought life into the world at a time when everything is so uncertain.  The relief and love are palpable.  Nothing else matters.”  Photo: UNICEF/UNI321984/Bopape

Putting meals on the table

Sudanese refugee Halima, in Tripoli, Libya, says food assistance is making her life better.  COVID-19 is exacerbating the existing hunger crisis.  Globally, 6 million more people could be pushed into extreme poverty unless the international community acts now.  United Nations aid agencies are appealing for more funding to reach vulnerable populations.  Photo: UNHCR

Supporting the frontlines

The United Nations Air Service, run by the World Food Programme (WFP), distributes protective gear donated by the Jack Ma Foundation and Alibaba Group, in Somalia. The United Nations is using its supply chain capacity to rapidly move badly needed personal protective equipment, such as medical masks, gloves, gowns and face-shields to the frontline of the battle against COVID-19. Photo: WFP/Jama Hassan  

S7-Episode 2: Bringing Health to the World

“You see, we're not doing this work to make ourselves feel better. That sort of conventional notion of what a do-gooder is. We're doing this work because we are totally convinced that it's not necessary in today's wealthy world for so many people to be experiencing discomfort, for so many people to be experiencing hardship, for so many people to have their lives and their livelihoods imperiled.”

Dr. David Nabarro has dedicated his life to global health. After a long career that’s taken him from the horrors of war torn Iraq, to the devastating aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami, he is still spurred to action by the tremendous inequalities in global access to medical care.

“The thing that keeps me awake most at night is the rampant inequities in our world…We see an awful lot of needless suffering.”

:: David Nabarro interviewed by Melissa Fleming

Brazilian ballet pirouettes during pandemic

Ballet Manguinhos, named for its favela in Rio de Janeiro, returns to the stage after a long absence during the COVID-19 pandemic. It counts 250 children and teenagers from the favela as its performers. The ballet group provides social support in a community where poverty, hunger and teen pregnancy are constant issues.

Radio journalist gives the facts on COVID-19 in Uzbekistan

The pandemic has put many people to the test, and journalists are no exception. Coronavirus has waged war not only against people's lives and well-being but has also spawned countless hoaxes and scientific falsehoods.

Dynamic analysis of generalized epidemic models with latent period, quarantine, governmental intervention and Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process

• Zhang, Xinhong
• Jiang, Daqing

Considering the transmission characteristics of COVID-19, we formulate a Susceptible-Exposed-Quarantine-Infected-Recovered epidemic model by five first-order differential equations to study the dynamical behaviors of diseases that have a latent period, quarantine strategy, governmental intervention and general incidence rate. After giving the basic reproduction number R 0 , conditions for the existence of equilibria and their local asymptotic stability are both investigated. However, environmental perturbations always have influence on the epidemic in the natural world. With the assumption that the transmission rate is driven by the log-normal Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, we construct a corresponding stochastic epidemic model that incorporates environmental impacts. Based on the proof of existence and uniqueness of the global positive solution, two critical values R 0 e and R 0 s are established that can determine the extinction and persistence of disease, which are completely constituted by the basic reproduction number and random factors. By solving a changing four-dimensional Fokker-Planck equation, we calculate the exact analytical expression of the probability density function of stationary distribution near the quasi-endemic equilibrium. Finally, some numerical simulations are performed to support obtained theoretical results, and we show the sensitivity index to study the impact of each parameter on disease transmission.

• Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process;
• Local asymptotic stability;
• Extinction and stationary distribution;
• Probability density function

Numbers, Facts and Trends Shaping Your World

Read our research on:

Full Topic List

Regions & Countries

• Publications
• Our Methods
• Short Reads
• Tools & Resources

Read Our Research On:

Discrimination Experiences Shape Most Asian Americans’ Lives

4. asian americans and discrimination during the covid-19 pandemic, table of contents.

• Key findings from the survey
• Most Asian Americans have been treated as foreigners in some way, no matter where they were born
• Most Asian Americans have been subjected to ‘model minority’ stereotypes, but many haven’t heard of the term
• Experiences with other daily and race-based discrimination incidents
• In their own words: Key findings from qualitative research on Asian Americans and discrimination experiences
• Discrimination in interpersonal encounters with strangers
• Racial discrimination at security checkpoints
• Encounters with police because of race or ethnicity
• Racial discrimination in the workplace
• Quality of service in restaurants and stores
• Discrimination in neighborhoods
• Experiences with name mispronunciation
• Discrimination experiences of being treated as foreigners
• In their own words: How Asian Americans would react if their friend was told to ‘go back to their home country’
• Awareness of the term ‘model minority’
• Views of the term ‘model minority’
• How knowledge of Asian American history impacts awareness and views of the ‘model minority’ label
• Most Asian Americans have experienced ‘model minority’ stereotypes
• In their own words: Asian Americans’ experiences with the ‘model minority’ stereotype
• Asian adults who personally know an Asian person who has been threatened or attacked since COVID-19
• In their own words: Asian Americans’ experiences with discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic
• Experiences with talking about racial discrimination while growing up
• Is enough attention being paid to anti-Asian racism in the U.S.?
• Acknowledgments
• Sample design
• Data collection
• Weighting and variance estimation
• Methodology: 2021 focus groups of Asian Americans
• Appendix: Supplemental tables

Following the coronavirus outbreak, reports of discrimination and violence toward Asian Americans increased. A previous Pew Research Center survey of English-speaking Asian adults showed that as of 2021, one-third said they feared someone might threaten or physically attack them. English-speaking Asian adults in 2022 were also more likely than other racial or ethnic groups to say they had changed their daily routines due to concerns they might be threatened or attacked. 19

In this new 2022-23 survey, Asian adults were asked if they personally know another Asian person in the U.S. who had been attacked since the pandemic began.

About one-third of Asian adults (32%) say they personally know an Asian person in the U.S. who has been threatened or attacked because of their race or ethnicity since the COVID-19 pandemic began in 2020.

Whether Asian adults know someone with this experience varies across Asian ethnic origin groups:

• About four-in-ten Chinese adults (39%) say they personally know another Asian person who has been threatened or attacked since the coronavirus outbreak. Similar shares of Korean adults (35%) and those who belong to less populous Asian origin groups (39%) – those categorized as “other” in this report – say the same.
• About three-in-ten Vietnamese (31%), Japanese (28%) and Filipino (28%) Americans and about two-in-ten Indian adults (21%) say they know another Asian person in the U.S. who has been the victim of a racially motivated threat or attack. 

Additionally, there are some differences by regional origin groups:

• Overall, similar shares of East and Southeast Asian adults say they know another Asian person who’s been threatened or attacked because of their race or ethnicity (36% and 33%, respectively).
• A somewhat smaller share of South Asian adults say the same (24%).

There are also differences across nativity and immigrant generations:

• U.S.-born Asian adults are more likely than Asian immigrants to say they know another Asian person who has been threatened or attacked during the COVID-19 pandemic  (40% vs. 28%, respectively).
• Among immigrants, those who are 1.5 generation – those who came to the U.S. as children – are more likely than the first generation – those who immigrated as adults – to say they know someone with this experience (37% vs. 25%).
• And among U.S.-born Asian Americans, 44% of second-generation adults say this, compared with 28% of third- or higher-generation Asian adults.

Whether Asian Americans personally know another Asian person who was threatened or attacked because of their race or ethnicity since the beginning of the pandemic also varies across other demographic groups:

• Age: 44% of Asian adults under 30 years old say they know someone who has been threatened or attacked during the pandemic, compared with 18% of those 65 and older.
• Gender: Asian women are somewhat more likely than men to say they know an Asian person in the U.S. who has been threatened or attacked during the COVID-19 pandemic (35% vs. 28%, respectively).
• Party: 36% of Asian Democrats and Democratic leaners say they know another Asian person who has been threatened or attacked because of their race or ethnicity, higher than the share among Republicans and Republican leaners (25%).

Heightened anti-Asian discrimination during the COVID-19 pandemic

These survey findings follow a spike in reports of discrimination against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic. The number of federally recognized hate crime incidents of anti-Asian bias increased from 158 in 2019 to 279 in 2020 and 746 in 2021, according to hate crime statistics published by the FBI . In 2022, the number of anti-Asian hate crimes decreased for the first time since the coronavirus outbreak, to 499 incidents. Between March 2020 and May 2023, the organization Stop AAPI Hate received more than 11,000 self-reported incidents of anti-Asian bias, the vast majority of which involved harassment, bullying, shunning and other discrimination incidents.

Additionally, previous research found that calling COVID-19 the “Chinese Virus,” “Asian Virus” or other names that attach location or ethnicity to the disease was associated with anti-Asian sentiment in online discourse. Use of these phrases by politicians or other prominent public officials, such as by former President Donald Trump , coincided with greater use among the general public and more frequent instances of bias against Asian Americans.

In the 2021 Pew Research Center focus groups of Asian Americans, participants discussed their experiences of being discriminated against because of their race or ethnicity during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Participants talked about being shamed in both public and private spaces. Some Asian immigrant participants talked about being afraid to speak out because of how it might impact their immigration status:

“I was walking in [the city where I live], and a White old woman was poking me in the face saying, ‘You are disgusting,’ and she was trying to hit me. I ran away crying. … At the time, I was with my boyfriend, but he also just came to the U.S., so we ran away together thinking that if we cause trouble, we could be deported.”

–Immigrant woman of Korean origin in late 20s (translated from Korean)

“[A very close friend of mine] lived at [a] school dormitory, and when the pandemic just happened … his room was directly pasted with the adhesive tape saying things like ‘Chinese virus quarantine.’”

–Immigrant man of Chinese origin in early 30s (translated from Mandarin)

Many participants talked about being targeted because others perceive them as Chinese , regardless of their ethnicity:

“I think the crimes [that happened] against other Asian people can happen to me while going through COVID-19. When I see a White person, I don’t know if their ancestors are Scottish or German, so they will look at me and think the same. It seems that they can’t distinguish between Korean and Chinese and think that we are from Asia and the onset of COVID-19 is our fault. This is something that can happen to all of us. So I think Asian Americans should come together and let people know that we are also human and we have rights. I came to think about Asian Americans that they shouldn’t stay still even if they’re trampled on.”

–Immigrant woman of Korean origin in early 50s (translated from Korean)

“Even when I was just getting on the bus, [people acted] as if I was carrying the virus. People would not sit with me, they would sit a bit far. It was because I look Chinese.”

–Immigrant woman of Bhutanese origin in early 30s (translated from Dzongkha)

Amid these incidents, some participants talked about feeling in community and kinship with other Asian people:

“[When I hear stories about Asian people in the news,] I feel like automatically you just have a sense of connection to someone that’s Asian. … [I]t makes me and my family and everyone else that I know that is Asian super mad and upset that this is happening. [For example,] the subway attacks where there was a mother who got dragged down the stairs for absolutely no reason. It just kind of makes you scared because you are Asian, and I would tell my mom, ‘You’re not going anywhere without me.’ We got pepper spray and all of that. But there is definitely a difference because you just feel a connection with them no matter if you don’t know them.”

–U.S.-born woman of Taiwanese origin in early 20s

“[A]s a result of the pandemic, I think we saw an increase in Asian hate in the media. I think that was one time where I realized as an Asian person, I felt a lot of pain. I felt a lot of fear, I felt a lot of anger and frustration for my community. … I think it was just at that specific moment when I saw the Asian hate, Asian hate crimes, and I realized, ‘Oh, they’re targeting my people.’  I don’t know how to explain it exactly. I never really referred to myself just plainly as an Asian American, but when I saw it in that media and I saw people who looked like me or people who I related with getting hurt and mistreated, I felt anger for that community, for my community.””

–U.S.-born woman of Korean origin in late teens

Some connected discrimination during the pandemic to other times of heightened anti-Asian discrimination . For example, one woman connected anti-Asian discrimination during COVID-19 to the period after Sept. 11:

“[T]he hate crimes I’m reading about now are towards Chinese [people] because of COVID, but I remember after 9/11, that was – I remember the looks that people would give me on the subway but also reading the violent acts committed towards Indians of all types, just the confusion – I mean, I say confusion but I mean really they wanted to attack Muslims, but they didn’t care, they were just looking for a brown person to attack. So there’s always something that happens that then suddenly falls on one community or another.”

–U.S.-born man of Indian origin in late 40s

• Pew Research Center’s American Trends Panel surveys of Asian adults were conducted only in English and are representative of the English-speaking Asian adult population. In 2021, 70% of Asian adults spoke only English or said they speak English “very well,” according to a Pew Research Center analysis of the 2021 American Community Survey. By contrast, the Center’s 2022-23 survey of Asian Americans was conducted in six languages, including Chinese (Simplified and Traditional), English, Hindi, Korean, Tagalog and Vietnamese. ↩

Sign up for The Briefing

Weekly updates on the world of news & information

• Asian Americans
• Discrimination & Prejudice
• Immigration Issues
• Race Relations
• Racial Bias & Discrimination

Key facts about Asian Americans living in poverty

Methodology: 2023 focus groups of asian americans, 1 in 10: redefining the asian american dream (short film), the hardships and dreams of asian americans living in poverty, key facts about asian american eligible voters in 2024, most popular, report materials.

1615 L St. NW, Suite 800 Washington, DC 20036 USA (+1) 202-419-4300 | Main (+1) 202-857-8562 | Fax (+1) 202-419-4372 |  Media Inquiries

Research Topics

• Age & Generations
• Coronavirus (COVID-19)
• Economy & Work
• Family & Relationships
• Gender & LGBTQ
• Immigration & Migration
• International Affairs
• Internet & Technology
• Methodological Research
• News Habits & Media
• Non-U.S. Governments
• Other Topics
• Politics & Policy
• Race & Ethnicity
• Email Newsletters

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

Copyright 2024 Pew Research Center

Terms & Conditions

Privacy Policy

Cookie Settings

Reprints, Permissions & Use Policy