essay on covid 19 lockdown experience

COVID-19 Lockdown: My Experience

When the lockdown started, I was ecstatic. My final year of school had finished early, exams were cancelled, the sun was shining. I was happy, and confident I would be OK. After all, how hard could staying at home possibly be? After a while, the reality of the situation started to sink in.

The novelty of being at home wore off and I started to struggle. I suffered from regular panic attacks, frozen on the floor in my room, unable to move or speak. I had nightmares most nights, and struggled to sleep. It was as if I was stuck, trapped in my house and in my own head. I didn't know how to cope.

However, over time, I found ways to deal with the pressure. I realised that lockdown gave me more time to the things I loved, hobbies that had been previously swamped by schoolwork. I started baking, drawing and writing again, and felt free for the first time in months. I had forgotten how good it felt to be creative. I started spending more time with my family. I hadn't realised how much I had missed them.

Almost a month later, I feel so much better. I understand how difficult this must be, but it's important to remember that none of us is alone. No matter how scared, or trapped, or alone you feel, things can only get better.  Take time to revisit the things you love, and remember that all of this will eventually pass. All we can do right now is stay at home, look after ourselves and our loved ones, and look forward to a better future.

View the discussion thread.

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Community Reflections

My life experience during the covid-19 pandemic.

Melissa Blanco Follow

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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).

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

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Read these 12 moving essays about life during coronavirus

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Lockdown diaries: the everyday voices of the coronavirus pandemic

Senior Lecturer in Social Science, Swansea University

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Michael Ward does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.

Swansea University provides funding as a member of The Conversation UK.

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A diary is by its very nature an intensely personal thing. It’s a place to record our most intimate thoughts and worries about the world around us. In other words, it is a glimpse at our state of mind.

Now, the coronavirus pandemic, and the impact of the lockdown, have left many people isolated and scared about what the future might bring. As a sociologist, I was keen to hear how people were experiencing this totally new way of life. So in early March I began the CoronaDiaries – a sociological study which aimed to highlight the real voices and the everyday experiences of the pandemic by collecting the accounts of people up and down the UK, before, during and after the crisis.

From the frontline health worker concerned about PPE and exposure to COVID-19, to the furloughed engineer worried about his mental health, these are the voices of the pandemic. Entries take a variety of forms, such as handwritten or word-processed diaries, blogs, social media posts, photos, videos, memes and other submissions like songs, poems, shopping lists, dream logs and artwork. So far, the study has recruited 164 participants, from 12 countries, aged between 11 and 87. These people come from a range of backgrounds.

This article is part of Conversation Insights The Insights team generates long-form journalism derived from interdisciplinary research. The team is working with academics from different backgrounds who have been engaged in projects aimed at tackling societal and scientific challenges.

When I began this project in March, I did not expect the study to prove so popular. I have been studying and working as a sociologist for nearly 20 years and most of my research so far has looked at how young men experience education, gender roles and social inequality.

Like many of us, I was wondering how I could be of use at this time, do my bit in the crisis and make the most of my skills. As the weeks have gone by and more and more people have signed up, I’ve realised this project isn’t just a research study to understand how society is being made and remade – it is also providing hope and acting as a cathartic coping tool for people. While some of the documents have made me cry, especially those from already vulnerable people, others have made me laugh and have been a joy to read. I feel as though I am on a journey with the participants as we move through the crisis.

Reading the entries, what becomes clear as the lockdown is eased is that this pandemic has been – and will continue to be – experienced in very different ways across society. For some, the crisis has been an opportunity, but for others, who are already in a disadvantaged position, it is a very frightening experience.

March – first days

The frontline health worker

Emma is in her late 30s, and a frontline health worker in a rural location in Wales. Like many key workers, Emma is also juggling family life and caring responsibilities. In a diary entry written in mid-march, Emma foresaw issues with PPE in the NHS.

On my shifts over the previous weekend, it became apparent how unprepared we are. I was working on a ‘clean’ ward and four of the patients were found to potentially be infected. There were no clinical indications they were potentially infected on admission and had been nursed without PPE for two days. We may have all been exposed, as these patients are suspected to have COVID-19. We have been given bare bones PPE. It was quite sobering when a rapid response was called and the doctors refused to enter the cubicle without FFP3 masks , blue gown and visor.

Emma said the equipment “magically turned up” after the doctors took this stand but said the sight of them all in surgical gowns, helmets and visors “did verge on the ridiculous”. She added:

I did find it amusing – we’re looking at the doctors wanting their protection and they are looking at the consultant wanting his! It did feel like a farce. Fortunately, the patient was made stable and went to surgery for another issue. But the whole episode was worrying, particularly the crappy surgical mask and aprons we are provided. It’s also galling that they have told staff there is no PPE when clearly there is. Can’t help but think a lack of information is creating fear amongst staff. It’s also weird they aren’t testing staff unless they’re symptomatic. This is crazy when they are so dependent on bank and agency workers who move around.

The worried mum

Beth, 35, is a mother of two young children who lives in a busy city. In the early days of the crisis, she hid her fears from her children. Here is a snapshot from her written diary:

I didn’t sleep well last night, didn’t help I watched the news before going to sleep. Then looked at my phone and full of corona news … Today was the big announcement from Boris (Friday, March 20) ‘to stay in’! Even though he had been saying this all week, the tone and manner of the broadcast was so scary and serious. I felt scared for my family and it just made me fearful of what is to come. I rang my mum straight away … [she] could hear my fear. After a good chat … my mum … remind[ed] me ‘we are all well at this moment’ and to focus on that. My daughter cried later that evening. I said, ‘what are you scared of’ to which she replied, ‘I’m not sure mummy, I don’t know what I am scared of.’ Which made me realise that I need to be brave and make sure that both kids are reassured. Later that evening, I felt tearful and just feeling overwhelmed by the whole situation. How stupid too, because we are all safe.

Read more: How to help with school at home: don't talk like a teacher

The student

Audrey, 21, goes to a university in Birmingham and is in the final months of her degree. The rupture of “normal” student life became clear when the full scale of the lockdown came into force, causing her housemates to leave their shared house.

I’d just lost all three of my housemates, who’d returned to Barbados, Spain and France – literally one day after each other. My landlord really kindly agreed that my sister could stay with me – and she won’t even charge any rent. I almost cried when I got that message. I was having a facetime with my friend, where we paused to watch Boris Johnson’s speech (March 23). It was so scary because we were effectively in lockdown. I had told my sister that I thought it was about to happen earlier in the day, she didn’t believe me – and then unfortunately it came true! I told her to jump on the train from Manchester.

Audrey went on to write how some of her fellow students set up a food bank in one of the student accommodations near her and that she is determined help where she can. But despite her altruistic efforts, the lockdown was still taking its toll.

I feel deflated from everything. I chatted to a friend over Messenger and she suggested I paint something. I painted this rainbow and felt so much better at the end. I added in my favourite quote that gets [me] through any hard times and stuck it on the window.

April – settling in

The cleaner

Eva is a self-employed cleaner, in her mid 50s, who lives in South Wales with her husband, John, who works in a factory making hand sanitiser. As the lockdown entered its second month, she reflected on her relationship with the woman who worked for her and how differently the pandemic was effecting them both.

Today I am cleaning the community centre, which since the lockdown, is running as a food bank three days a week … I bleach everything, door handles, floors, everything. Most staff work from home at the moment so we are going in the morning until all this is over. I’m glad I’m still in business for Beverly, who works with me, as much as anything. I’m her only income, but if I don’t work, I don’t get paid. We have a cigarette break outside and I remind Beverly to stay apart. ‘What, beans for brekkie, was it?’ I laugh. Beverly really doesn’t care about COVID – like many others I meet, who believe if they get it, they get it.

For once I’m glad I’m a worrier, plus I’m not ready to die yet. We are out of there early as no staff equals less mess. I break it to Beverly that I can’t give her a lift home for now. Last week I made her sit in the back [of the car] which felt faintly ridiculous, but John advised even that’s too close. Beverly shrugs and says that’s fine. Her son died unexpectedly two years ago and now she accepts hardship with ease. I feel bad as her life really is crap and now she has to walk two miles home.

The teacher

Sophia is a teacher in her 40s and based in the south of England. She is trying to home school her children during the lockdown and being a parent and a teacher is proving challenging.

We began the day slightly differently with an online PE lesson from someone called Joe Wicks, or The Body Coach. He’s been really popular during the lockdown and a few of my friends recommended the 30-minute workout session he does every day at 9am, so I thought we’d give it a go! Unfortunately, my two have the concentration spans of goldfish so it didn’t go according to plan! My son ended up lying upside down, with his legs on a chair and his head on the floor and my daughter said he moved too fast, before promptly falling on her behind! The only problem with changing the routine was that we were then 30 minutes late for home school and my son does not cope well with change. He needs quite a rigid structure, with clearly defined timings and any changes can be detrimental. The speed of the school lockdown was particularly challenging: school gives his day structure and taking it away so abruptly was very difficult for him.

The civil servant

Sarah is a civil servant in her mid-60s working in a pivotal role for HM Revenue and Customs. She used her diary to document the rapid changes which have taken place in her organisation since the lockdown and how working from home was becoming “normal” from March 23.

My department is changing so quickly – we have introduced a new i-form to promote more ‘web chat’. This is proving popular with the public. We are trialling taking incoming telephone calls at home. We are all now working from home when we can, no more car sharing, unless it’s with someone you live with – we must keep two metres apart. I am beginning to accept that this is a crisis, once in a generation, completely alien to us. Will life in the future be remembered as ‘before and after’ COVID-19? For the first time in many years I feel so proud to work where I do…I understand, possibly for the first time, why we are ‘key workers’. We have a letter as proof to show the police if we are ever stopped whilst travelling into work and NCP carparks are free for us to use if we come into work! No better validation than that!

The furloughed engineer

Lucas, a man in his late 30s from Northern Ireland, is finding the pandemic difficult on multiple levels. It’s a trigger for his mental health, but also it is a reminder of past troubles.

Nightmare. Anxiety, fear, dread, no way to burn off the angst, worry upon worry, like how the inside of my head can be at times. Then there’s the ones that are really in the middle of it, nurses dying because there was no proper PPE at the right time, people losing parents, friends, and IMHO worst of all, kids.

Lucas writes about how he stopped watching the news because in an attempt to “avoid anxiety”. He adds:

I grew up in Northern Ireland during ‘the troubles’ and it was totally normal for me to watch the news every night at tea time [6pm] and hear of various paramilitary groups killing people. That was 100% normal to me. Looking back watching the news in those times did me no good. Sure, I know some facts about it all, but do I feel any better for it … Same as now, I’m going to try to ride this out with my hands over my ears and my head in the sand at times.

Read more: Coronavirus: a growing number of people are avoiding news

The academic

Jack, 72, is a retired academic who used his diary to comment on societal problems. One of which is the narrative of what the “new normal” is and how society is being remade.

April 29 saw the return of Boris, who was to ‘take control of the problem’. An almost religious return for someone who came back from being nearly dead on Easter Sunday! It seems we are being told to be ready for the new normal which again raises the issue of what post-lockdown will be like. On the web I don’t see sociologists rushing in to think about this new normal! A Google search suggests that the new normal is being constructed largely by those in business and is largely focused on the new normal being a more exaggerated (and better?) version of the old normal – more globalisation, more focus on customers and so on. There is little ‘thinking outside the box’.

Read more: What will the world be like after coronavirus? Four possible futures

May – Looking forward

The bell-ringer

Daniel, a man in his mid-20s, had just started a new relationship in February with a woman he met while bell-ringing at a church in the Midlands. However, both he and his girlfriend live apart and have not seen each other since the lockdown began. Over the past few months, Daniel has found this a challenge, but has documented how their relationship has been maintained virtually and through the help of keeping a diary.

Suzy and I have got to know each other a lot quicker and a lot better than what we may have done otherwise, and whilst we do miss each other immensely, it’ll make the good times so much better when we do see each other next. Whenever and however we get out of this, I am determined that I will have made the most of these extraordinary circumstances.

This is just a glimpse of the stories that have been gathered by the CoronaDiaries project, but already patterns are emerging. While this crisis is undoubtedly impacting on people across the globe, what is clear from these accounts is that there are multiple crises across everyday life – for the young, the old, for mothers and for fathers and for those from different class, gender and ethnic backgrounds. These entries are able to highlight the multiple different lives behind the dreaded numbers we hear announced each day.

My diarists have been recording how they feel vulnerable and uncertain about their future – but there is also hope that things will not be like this forever.

The evidence which is being gathered here can play an important part in addressing the social, political and economic changes created by the COVID-19 pandemic. This type of analysis will foster global awareness of crucial issues that can help support specific public health responses to better control future outbreaks and to better prepare people for future problems. The study will run until September and all accounts will then be available to view in a free digital online archive.

All the names used in this piece have been changed at the request of the study participants.

For you: more from our Insights series :

Lockdown lessons from the history of solitude

What will the world be like after coronavirus? Four possible futures

The end of the world: a history of how a silent cosmos led humans to fear the worst

To hear about new Insights articles, join the hundreds of thousands of people who value The Conversation’s evidence-based news. Subscribe to our newsletter .

• Mental health
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• Coronavirus insights
• COVID-19 lockdowns

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ORIGINAL RESEARCH article

Positive and negative experiences of living in covid-19 pandemic: analysis of italian adolescents’ narratives.

• Department of Education, Languages, Intercultures, Literatures and Psychology, University of Florence, Firenze, Italy

Introduction: Despite a growing interest in the field, scarce narrative studies have delved into adolescents’ psychological experiences related to global emergencies caused by infective diseases. The present study aims to investigate adolescents’ narratives on positive and negative experiences related to COVID-19.

Methods: Italian adolescents, 2,758 (females = 74.8%, mean age = 16.64, SD = 1.43), completed two narrative tasks on their most negative and positive experiences during the COVID-19 emergency. Data were analyzed by modeling an analysis of emergent themes.

Results: “Staying home as a limitation of autonomy,” “School as an educational, not relational environment,” the impact of a “new life routine,” and experiencing “anguish and loss” are the four emergent themes for negative experiences. As for positive experiences, the four themes were “Being part of an extraordinary experience,” “Discovering oneself,” “Re-discovering family,” and “Sharing life at a distance.”

Conclusion: Authors discuss the impact of COVID-19 on adolescents’ developmental tasks, such as identity processes and autonomy acquisition.

Introduction

After the first case of COVID-19 in Italy was discovered on the 21st of February, schools and universities were shut down on March 5. On the March 9, the government declared lockdown status in order to hinder the spread of the virus. In order to reduce contagion, citizens were required to stay home except for emergencies and primary needs. Over 8 million children and adolescents stopped their social and educational activities, which were reorganized online. On April 5, the last day of data collection for the present study, out of a global number of 1,133,758 ( Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, 2020 ), 128,948 people had been infected by COVID-19 in Italy, of which 15,887 (about the 12.3%) had died ( Italian Ministry of Health, 2020 ).

The COVID-19 pandemic is a public health emergency that poses questions and dilemmas regarding the psychological well-being of people at varying levels.

Currently, several studies have been conducted on how the general population experiences emergencies related to pandemic infectious diseases. Some authors ( Yeung and Fung, 2007 ; Dodgson et al., 2010 ; Peng et al., 2010 ; Main et al., 2011 ; Van Bortel et al., 2016 ), in analyzing the impact of infectious diseases such as SARS or Ebola, report experiences such as fear and anxiety for themselves and their families, separation anxieties, impotence, depression, as well as anger and frustration. In the case of COVID-19, scholars have highlighted several psychological effects of the pandemic on adult samples in China ( Qiu et al., 2020 ; Wang et al., 2020a , b ) and in Italy ( Rossi et al., 2020 ), and found psychological symptoms related to posttraumatic stress disorder. In a recent review, anxiety, depression, psychological stress, and poor sleep have been reported to be the main psychological outcomes of living with the COVID-19 emergency ( Rajkumar, 2020 ).

Considering children and adolescents, several studies have specifically explored psychological experiences related to the global emergency and lockdown experience of COVID-19 ( Lee, 2020 ), but evidence from autobiographical narratives are lacking. Qiu et al. (2020) compared different Chinese aged populations and found lower levels of psychological distress in people under 18. Similarly, Xie et al. (2020) found symptoms of anxiety (18.9%) and depression (22.6%) in primary school children in China.

As for US adolescents, evidence suggests that social trust and greater attitudes toward the severity of COVID-19 are related with more adolescents’ monitoring risk behaviors, performing social distancing, and disinfecting properly. Motivation to perform social distancing is also associated with symptoms of anxiety and depression ( Oosterhoff et al., 2020 ).

A study on Canadian adolescents’ well-being and psychiatric symptoms highlighted that depression and feelings of loneliness are related with great time spent on social media, while family time, physical activity, and schoolwork play a protective role for depression ( Ellis et al., 2020 ). Similarly, in a recent review of adolescents’ experience of lockdown for COVID-19, Guessoum et al. (2020) discuss the relation between the current pandemic and adolescents’ posttraumatic stress, depressive, and anxiety disorders, as well as grief-related symptoms. Furthermore, they found that data on adolescent mental health are still scarce and need to be empowered.

Adolescence is connected to certain developmental tasks ( Havighurst, 1948 ) related, among others, to defining one’s own personal identity ( Kroger and Marcia, 2011 ) and developing one’s autonomy by redefining family ties and building bonds with peers ( Alonso-Stuyck et al., 2018 ).

Considering identity changes, adolescence is characterized by a developmental crisis between the definition of a personal identity and a status of confusion of roles ( Erikson, 1968 ). Adolescents’ ego growth is linked to the separation from childhood identifications in order to allow an individual identity status to emerge. This gradual process is connected with four different styles of identity definition concerning vocational, ideological, and sexual issues ( Kroger et al., 2010 ): identity achievements, moratorium, foreclosure, and diffusion. Overall, the identity process may develop from a period of diffusion, not connected to significant identifications, or with foreclosure, in which identifications are still related to significant childhood figures. The opportunity to explore new relationships with peers and other developmental environments often stresses a time of identity moratorium where individuals investigate themselves by making identity-defining commitments, which usually end by achieving a balance between personal interests and the vocational and ideological opportunities provided by surrounding context.

A turning point in identity development is the acquisition of personal autonomy. Scholars define autonomy as a multidimensional variable related to a set of phenomena involved in psychosocial development: the separation-individuation task as reported by Erikson (1968) , management of detachment, and independence from family in order to look for new developmental environments, psychosocial maturity, self-regulation, self-control, self-efficacy, self-determination, and decision making ( Noom et al., 2001 ).

The main theories on autonomy acquisition during adolescence stress the relation between the desire for autonomy and the development of beliefs about personal capabilities, the need to explore one’s own life goals and reflect on personal desires and preferences. As teenagers gain self-confidence and focus on personal goals and attitudes related to their individual interests and talents, the demand for autonomy in the household increases ( Van Petegem et al., 2013 ). At the same time, intimate relationships with peers in adolescence acquire a vital importance for the definition of autonomous and personal identity. Adolescent friendships represent the possibility of strengthening the completion of the process of identification through establishing relationships with significant others ( Jones et al., 2014 ).

As a privileged context of peer interaction and acquisition of knowledge and personal maturity, school greatly contributes to the development of adolescent identity and interpersonal relationships ( Lannegrand-Willems and Bosma, 2006 ). Both curricular and extracurricular activities at school promote interpersonal interactions, and adolescents’ participation in school activities may have a protective role for academic achievement, substance use, sexual activity, psychological adjustment, delinquency, and young adult outcomes ( Feldman and Matjasko, 2005 ).

During the COVID-19 emergency and the consequent lockdown in Italy, adolescents experienced a strong change in their personal and social environment, which could have affected the trajectory of their developmental tasks. Nevertheless, currently, there is a lack of knowledge of adolescents’ experience of living with COVID-19 and the main psychological issues related to it. Lockdown and the consequent closing of schools ushered in a new life routine for adolescents, centered on sharing time with family and temporarily interrupting face-to-face peer relationships. In this sense, similar to others, very impacting autobiographical events such as diseases or natural disasters, lockdown, and pandemic might have caused a biographical disruption ( Bury, 1982 ; Tuohy and Stephens, 2012 ) interrupting developmental tasks typical of adolescence or forcing a reorganization. To understand the subjective experience of Italian adolescents and the potential impact of the biographical disruption on developmental tasks, we asked them the most impacting experiences related to COVID-19 and the national lockdown. We therefore collected narratives of positive and negative autobiographical events. Our main hypothesis was that the imposed lockdown may have constituted a turning point of pivotal developmental processes of autonomy acquisition and identity development, forcing adolescents to re-organize their personal resources. Therefore, we aimed to explore how Italian adolescents dealt with this peculiar life experience in terms of managing their developmental tasks.

Considering the lack of knowledge in literature and the need to investigate an unexplored topic, we performed a qualitative study to explore adolescents’ feelings and thoughts by means of their narratives. Qualitative research design helps “to generate useful knowledge about health and illness, from individual perceptions to how global systems work” ( Green and Thorogood, 2018 , p. 6) allowing for deep knowledge. Furthermore, narrative is a recognized tool to explore autobiographical experiences in terms of thoughts, emotions, and feelings as well as an intervention to promote emotional elaboration and meaning making ( Pennebaker, 1997 ; Pennebaker et al., 2003 ). As a natural act to elaborate life episodes and generate meanings ( Bruner, 1990 ), narrative enriches the search for evidence on autobiographical experience especially in both normative and not normative life transitions, when the need for meaning making about the self is strong. For this reason, the research design was exploratory, and it was caused by the need to generate insights on adolescence and COVID-19 starting from the direct adolescents’ narrated experience.

Materials and Methods

Participants.

Participants of the present study were part of a broader study involving 5,295 Italian adolescents (mean age = 16.67, SD = 1.43; females = 75.2%; Min = 14, Max = 20) exploring emotional and cognitive patterns involved in COVID-19 experience. Since 14 is the Italian minimum age to give individual consent to having one’s online data processed, inclusion criteria for the present study were to be high school students and to be aged between 14 and 20. From the whole sample, we did not include data about adolescents with any missing data on either narrative task.

The final sample of 2,758 adolescents (females = 74.8%; mean age = 16.64, SD = 1.43; min = 14, max = 20; 14 years old = 7%, 15 years old = 17%, 16 years old = 22.4%, 17 years old = 22.2%, 18 years old = 23.2%, 19 years old = 6.3%, 20 years old = 1.9%) was composed by students attending lyceums (76.9%), technical high schools (16.9%), and vocational high schools (5.5%). Participants came from all regions of Italy: considering the impact of COVID-19 spread in Italy during data collection, the 16.8% of participants came from Lombardy (the most impacted region), the 20.7% came from medium impacted regions (Emilia Romagna, Liguria, Marche, Piedmont, Trentino Alto-Adige, Valle d’Aosta, Veneto), and the 62.5% came from other Italian region less impacted. Overall, 2,464 of them reported and narrated their most negative experiences and 2,110 reported their most positive experiences.

We also collected data about personal experiences involving COVID-19. Of the sample, 7.8% experienced a COVID-19 infection within the family circle (e.g., parents, brothers/sisters, grandparents, etc.). Of the sample, 38.6% experienced COVID-19 infections within friendship, scholastic, or broader social circles (e.g., neighbors, acquaintances). Ten participants (0.4%) reported to be infected themselves.

Procedures and Data Analyses

After the approval of the ethical committee of the University of Florence, data collection took place from April 1 to April 5, 2020, during the peak of the COVID-19 outbreak in Italy, through a popular student website for sharing notes and receiving help with homework 1 , via a pop-up window asking the users to take part in the study. All respondents provided explicit informed consent at the beginning of the survey. It was possible to leave the survey at any point by simply closing the pop-up window. All data collected were anonymous. The contacts of a national helpline (i.e., telephone number and website chat) were provided at the end of the survey, inviting participants to get in touch if they need psychological support.

We invited participants to fill in two narrative tasks: the first on their most negative experience (“ Please, think about your memories surrounding COVID-19 and the “quarantine”. Would you please tell us your most negative experience during the last two weeks? Take your time and narrate what happened and how you experienced it. There are no limits of time and space for your narrative” ) and a second about their most positive experience of life during COVID-19 pandemic (“ Referring again to your memories surrounding COVID-19 and the “quarantine”, would you please tell us your most positive experience of the last two weeks? Please, narrate what happened and how you experienced that episode. There are no limits of time and space for your narrative” ).

The time frame of 2 weeks was referred to time approximately spent between the beginning of lockdown (March 9) and data collection.

All narratives were joined in two different full texts, one for the positive experience narratives and one for the negative ones. Then, a modeling emergent themes analysis was run by the T-Lab Software ( Lancia, 2004 ). Modeling of Emergent Themes discovers, examines, and extrapolates the main themes (or topics) emerging from the text by means of co-occurrence patterns of key-term analysis by a probabilistic model, which uses the Latent Dirichlet Allocation ( Blei et al., 2003 ). The results of the data analysis are several themes describing the main contents of a textual corpus. Researchers discussed in groups emergent themes and selected from elementary contexts derived from analysis those better explaining each theme.

This kind of textual analysis is therefore suggested in studies aiming to deepen unexplored topics in order to identify variables related to a specific kind of experience to be further investigated upon ( Cortini and Tria, 2014 ).

First, the total word count of both narratives by the participants were analyzed. Adolescents’ negative experience narratives were composed of 76,007 words, with a mean number of 30.84 words per narrative, while 38,452 was the number of words used to narrate the most positive experiences (with a mean of 18.22 words per narrative collected). Table 1 shows the words mostly reported in the two texts.

Table 1. The occurrence of the most reported 20 words both for positive and negative experience narratives.

Looking at word occurrence in the two texts (positive and negative experience), many communalities emerged. Among the 20 most cited words in both texts there are: “Home,” “To See,” “Experience,” “Friend,” “To feel,” “Moment,” “Person,” “School,” “Day,” “Boyfriend,” and “Family.” Overall, 11 words out of 20 are shared between the vocabulary of the two collected narratives.

Looking at the modeling emergent themes analysis, The T-Lab software revealed four themes for each text. Tables 2 , 3 summarize the emergent themes and the main words associated with each of them.

Table 2. Themes of negative experience narratives and main words for each of them.

Table 3. Themes of positive experience narratives and specific words for each of them.

Negative Experiences Narratives

For negative experiences narratives, the first and most representative theme concerned feelings of “Anguish and Loss” and was explained by 34% of lemmas. Adolescents shared their anguish for having lost physical and emotional contact with relatives due to quarantine: “I went to my grandmother’s house because she lives next door. I went to hug her and she pushed me away as if I stank, it was so ugly, I felt like a stranger” (Participant n. 1070, male 17 years old) . In this narrative, social distancing acquired the meaning of loss of intimacy in close relationships; other adolescents narrated their anguish for their parents’ and relatives’ health due to the spread of COVID-19. One participant wrote: “When I heard that both my parents were going to have to go back to work, I got very scared, and I’m still scared for their health. We have a lot of friends who are sick, some are dead and we couldn’t even say goodbye to them” (Participant n. 1234, male 16 years old).

The inability to say goodbye to relatives and friends and to experience contact with their deaths is a frequent issue in collected narratives. As shared by a female participant, grief is a process hindered by the inability to experience loss directly: “The most negative experience I had was the death of my grandfather, who died after contracting COVID-19. You will think that I’m only talking about the loss itself, but actually difficulties came later. Not because there were people crying at the funeral and I had to show myself strong in front of my parents; not because when I went to his house I couldn’t find him; not because I won’t get to be spoiled by him just like every other granddaughter is by her grandfather; but because I had to undergo this process with just my mind. I had to imagine a funeral, I had to imagine him, pale and cold, in the coffin and try to feel the dampness of the tears on my cheeks at the moment of burial. There was nothing to help me metabolize the death, to make it happen in my mind. I’m usually a crybaby, but when they told me that my grandfather died I cried only once. When I think about it I feel guilty for how insensitive I’ve been, but he’s still there for me, when I think of him I see him alive. I tried to kill him with my thoughts because that’s the reality, but how hard is it to understand someone’s death when you don’t face it? When you don’t live it?” (Participant n. 23, female 16 years old) .

The second theme explained 24% of lemmas and it was labeled “Home as a limitation to autonomy.” Participants narrated their experience of feeling a limitation to their personal autonomy in daily life activities.

A female participant narrated: “Staying at home brings me moments of nervousness and I’m easily irritable. I often have panic attacks, precisely because staying at home for so long is not good for me. One feels alone, like in a cage and suffocated feelings give rise to nervousness that causes tension” (Participant n. 645, female 16 years old). Similarly, the following narrative introduces the difficulty of finding a personal space to give voice to individual needs at home: “It’s very hard for me to concentrate and I can’t stand spending 24 hours a day with my parents arguing. I don’t even have my own bedroom, because the door is missing so I have to be with them all the time. Personally, I’m not afraid of the virus, there have always been cases in history and of course we have always come out of it unscathed; the point is that I just want to go back to having the chance to be away from home, for example at school and possibly soon at university” (Participant n. 2185, female 18 years old) . The two negative experiences suggested adolescents’ perception of living with COVID-19 as a time to forcibly lose their personal autonomy.

Another male adolescent shared the sensation of being in prison as the result of having lost an individual identity related to a state of suspension of personal desires and identity: “It’s bad to wake up in the morning knowing you can’t accomplish anything with your life, you can’t do anything. I look out the window and it’s all deserted, no more sounds of cars, buses or people talking. It’s like a changed world, it’s like being in prison for something that’s not your fault. All I can do is wait and stay at home.” (Participant n. 1460, 16 years old).

The third theme, saturating by 24% of lemmas, concerned the impact of “A new life routine.” Adolescents narrated their contact with life in quarantine as well as social distancing. Participant n. 488, a 17-year-old male, narrated his most negative experience of not recognizing his best friend because of the mask: “The worst experience I had was when I went out for the first time to go shopping, wearing a mask and gloves. It was horrible to see used masks and gloves in the street that someone threw on the ground. Across the street someone said goodbye to me. He was my best friend with his dog, but I didn’t recognize him because he was covered by the mask. My best friend!” Narratives reported the adolescents’ difficult impact with a new daily routine in which their closest relationships (best friend) and daily activities (shopping) acquire the meaning of something unusual and perturbing. Similarly, the following extract focused on the feeling of being aware of taking part in a new life routine, which is completely different from one’s wishes about adolescent life: “There is not one episode in particular, but perhaps there is the most negative ‘feeling’ of this period, and it is certainly awareness. It’s being aware that you can’t live your senior year in high school as you would have liked. It’s the awareness of not being able to kiss your mom who just came back from the supermarket with your favorite dessert. It’s the awareness that you can’t go dancing or simply talk with friends about something that isn’t the ‘war bulletin’ or the press conference that resounds in the homes of Italians every night at 6 p.m.” (Participant n. 359, female 16 years old).

The fourth emergent theme was saturated by 18% of lemmas and was labeled “School as educational but not relational environment.” Participants reported the difficulty of being engaged in educational activities, which are perceived as lacking in social opportunities. A male adolescent (n. 60, 17 years old) reported: “since there have been positive cases I’ve stayed at home, but with the online lessons and lots of homework I am getting sad and especially stressed. I wanted to talk about Bergamo with the teachers and my classmates, but there is no time and in the online lessons we only talk about school and homework.”

A participant expressed his feeling of being unwelcome and misunderstood by teachers due to the relational distance: “In my opinion this is the saddest thing that this virus has brought: we young people no longer believe in dreams, but above all in hope for a better future. The professors, instead of understanding this situation, blame us, saying that we are ‘slackers’ and that we think we are on holiday, punishing us with millions of tasks, depriving us of everything. […] So, these are the reasons why we young people are exhausted and full of repressed hatred, because we see our peers die before our eyes and teachers often don’t understand us” (Participant n. 2545, female 17 years old).

Moreover, homework and online classes work as stressors and increase the lack of relations: “I felt agitated because homework and video tutorials have stressed me so much. It’s not the same online. I understand the gravity of the situation, the images we see are terrible, all those coffins. I miss my class, the teacher coming in, everything” (Participant n. 260, male 17 years old).

Positive Experiences Narratives

Concerning positive experiences, four themes emerged from the modeling analysis.

The first theme, the most representative for positive experiences collected, covered 33% of the lemmas and dealt with “Discovering oneself.” Adolescents reported to have discovered the pleasure of spending time with themselves and dedicating time to reading, listening to music, painting, and working out on their own. In this sense, lockdown became an opportunity for self-disclosure and personal growth: “I read, studied, I’ve cooked various stuff, experimented, relaxed taking time for myself, watched TV series, movies, played chess. Everything that made me feel good. I felt accepted by myself, because I had time to think about myself much more and to reflect, making me feel like a better and acceptable person” (Participant n. 2069, male 15 years old).

Similarly, a girl narrated: “Like never before, I have time to look inside and talk to myself in my bedroom, having more doubts, being able to resolve them, or simply leaving them unresolved, discovering what confuses me and understanding who I am” (Participant n. 1369, female 18 years old) .

The second emergent theme was labeled “Sharing life at a distance” (31% of lemmas) and dealt with the opportunity to be in a close relationship even at a distance. A participant narrated his relief in feeling his best friend’s support via video-call: “I Hear my friend tell me on the video-call that everything’s going to be okay and we’re going to come out of this even stronger. She said, ‘We’ll come back and watch the sunset on the beach, we’ll come back and eat ice cream together, we’ll come back and hug everybody, have faith’. I felt safe and full of hope” (Participant n. 2721, male 14 years old).

Friendship as an anchor is a frequent issue in adolescents’ narratives: “I felt a big panic inside and I had a video-call with all my friends at 1 am in a tense moment, it helped me a lot!” (Participant n. 1970, female 17 years old).

The third emerged theme, named “Re-discovering family,” was saturated by 22% of the lemmas and focused on the positive impact of spending time with family members and discovering the joy of doing things together: “I’m realizing how precious time is, every moment must be enjoyed because we could be deprived of it at any moment. I spend more time with my parents, before they were always at work and I used to see them for a few hours” (Participant n. 881, female, 16 years old). Similarly, a boy narrated the positive value of spending time with his grandparents: “I’m spending a lot of time with my grandparents and I’m growing up because they teach me so many things I didn’t know! We’ve rediscovered board games and we often play them all together” (Participant n. 2648, 17 years old).

The last theme, “To be part of an extraordinary experience”, was saturated by 14% of the lemmas and concerned participants’ feeling of being part of an unusual experience, which will have an impact on the culture they are living in. A participant narrated: “When I’m in class and I see my classmates, even if we do a test or an inquiry, it’s still a unique experience that I will tell my kids about!” (Participant n. 2044, male 18 years old). Most of the participants reported their satisfaction in their perception of having an active role in society by following the rules of social distancing and protecting others from contagion: “For once I really felt like a fundamental part of society” (Participant 1841, female 15 years old) .

The present study aimed to explore adolescents’ experience of living during the COVID-19 emergency and national lockdown in terms of narratives on positive and negative experiences. In light of a lack of scientific evidence on adolescents’ experience of living with infectious diseases and under national lockdown, the present study brings knowledge on negative and positive issues of such an impactful experience in this peculiar developmental age of adolescence.

At first, results show that adolescents were more forthcoming about their negative experiences than about positive ones. This datum is not a surprise: scientific literature defines one’s need to “create coherence out of chaos” ( Fivush et al., 2003 , p. 1). Scientific literature highlights that negative narratives are usually longer and more coherent than positive ones, and this is due to the narrator’s need to elaborate autobiographical past by means of language ( Fioretti and Smorti, 2015 , 2017 ).

Looking at word occurrence in both texts, results show similarities between terms used to describe the most negative and positive experiences. Nevertheless, emergent themes put in light different issues related to the same words. Overall, results highlight indeed a complex experience of adolescents characterized by a developmental challenge that may entail risk factors, as in the case of loss and anguish related to illness and contagion, or protective factors, such as the possibility of transforming the COVID-19 experience into an opportunity for personal growth.

In the case of impacting experiences such as diseases or traumatic events, scholars introduced the construct of biographical disruption ( Bury, 1982 ; Fioretti and Smorti, 2014 ), which determines a strong breakdown in one’s life trajectory forcing the individual to restore it finding a continuity between past, present, and future. Concerning COVID-19, our results point out that such a biographical disruption may be associated with the interruption of important developmental tasks such as personal autonomy ( Alonso-Stuyck et al., 2018 ). Of the adolescents’ lemmas, 24% narrated lockdown as a stressor in their process of constructing an individual physical and mental environment separate from the family one.

As shown by narratives on positive experiences of living with COVID-19, home acquires a duplex meaning in adolescents’ lives: loss of autonomy, but also the place where re-discovering family as a protective factor thanks to the opportunity to share activities and to spend time together. As argued by Guessoum et al. (2020) , family time is related with less depression symptoms in adolescents. Moreover, our results suggest that family can play an active role in the co-construction of what it means to live during a pandemic and can provide support during experiences of loss, which, as results show, appear to be the most represented issue in adolescents’ narratives.

As reported by participants, the impossibility of experiencing a direct contact with loss and death may play a traumatic role in adolescents’ lives. In their narratives, grief is forcibly an intimate and individual process in which, as in the case of traumatic events, the disruption is sudden and unexpected. Starting from these results, further investigation on potential posttraumatic disorders and long-term symptoms in adolescents related to COVID-19 is needed.

If family plays a protective role in collected narratives, adolescents denounce the absence of school as a place for relationships and emotional sharing. Participants narrate how they feel like receptors of educational contents without being able to play an active role within the educational process. Passivity and the inability to find a space to share concerns and emotions about the impact of the COVID-19 disease on their lives are the base of a feeling of disconnection from the educational environment. In this sense, the current “absence” of school may constitute a risk factor in adolescents’ development, as described in scientific literature ( Feldman and Matjasko, 2005 ).

School closing is part of a broader spectrum of the breakdown of the daily routine that participants described as a negative experience. In developmental psychology, routines acquire a pivotal role in fostering the security necessary for the process of autonomy and self-definition, in childhood and adolescence ( Crocetti, 2018 ). In this sense, the new life routine of wearing masks and gloves, and performing social distancing strongly impacts the process of creating one’s own identity.

On the other hand, narratives on positive experiences also see COVID-19 as an opportunity to make contact and define certain aspects of one’s identity that have not yet been considered. As shown, the discovery of oneself plays a pivotal role in positive experiences narratives saturating 33% of lemmas in analysis.

Identity, as described by Marcia et al. (2012) , undergoes a strong process of moratorium which, as results suggest, during the quarantine also becomes a path of deeper research into one’s sense of self, without the pressure of external agents. The discovery of the self-emergent theme suggests the hypothesis of a posttraumatic growth (PTG) related to life during the COVID-19 emergency. Participants narrated their individual research of themselves and the discovery of the importance of intimate reflexivity. In literature, over time, several terms have been used to describe the positive changes experienced by a person as a result of stress: “perceived benefits” ( Calhoun and Tedeschi, 1991 ), “raising existential awareness” ( Yalom and Lieberman, 1991 ), “stress-related growth” ( Park et al., 1996 ), and “growth through adversity” ( Joseph and Linley, 2006 ). Posttraumatic growth has been defined as an individual transformation entailing both positive intrapersonal and interpersonal changes caused by the impact of facing life challenges ( Tedeschi and Calhoun, 1995 ). Our results suggest that, together with the importance of sharing experiences with peers as reported in 31% of lemmas about positive experiences, an intimate developmental process of self-moratorium was facilitated by living in lockdown due to the COVID-19 emergency. Adolescents narrate their discovery of alone-time as a personal process of growth. Studies on PTG during adolescence are still poor ( Milam et al., 2004 ) and suggest the importance of investigating potential specificities of growth in this peculiar developmental age and its correlations. Future studies could explore the construct of PTG in adolescents exposed to the COVID-19 pandemic in order to further assess a positive impact of living with the current emergency in their lives.

Limitations and Conclusion

Although it provides evidence on a topic which is unknown, the present study has some limitations. First, we did not control for narrative task administration order. All participants completed first the narrative on negative memories and, second, the one on positive experiences. For this reason, the present study did not aim to compare negative and positive experience, rather it considers them as separate narratives on autobiographical experience of living with COVID-19 pandemic.

Moreover, the sample is composed of a large percentage of females and of high school students and does not consider the portions of adolescents of the Italian population who are not currently involved in education. Further studies should consider adolescents’ varying economic and cultural backgrounds. A second limitation is related to the varying impact of the COVID-19 emergency in the different regions of Italy. Adolescents’ experiences might be related to having or not having personal contacts with the disease in their family or social environment. Future studies should focus on specific developmental challenges due to direct or indirect contact with COVID-19.

A third limitation is related to the lack of consideration of the interindividual differences. The study describes a process related to the COVID-19 in the global population without considering possible differential impacts related to personal characteristics and vulnerabilities.

To conclude, the results suggest the need to take into account the impact of lockdown in the developmental tasks of adolescence. As for the negative experiences, loss of autonomy and anguish related to death and loss are the most representative topics. Further studies could better investigate the autonomy issue related to COVID-19 emergency considering the role family and different parenting models can play. For instance, very few studies have investigated the role of pre-pandemic maltreatment experience ( Guo et al., 2020 ) or other experience related to family environment. Our results suggest the duplex role of family and invite scholars and professionals to design specific intervention programs for adolescents with family vulnerability.

Conversely, school, a pivotal developmental environment according to scientific literature, represented a smaller percentage of words in the narratives we collected for our sample, suggesting the need to debate on the lack of relation adolescents perceive in online didactic activities. Home and family may play a double role, both limiting adolescents’ acquisition of autonomy and providing an enriching setting for their personal growth. The latter, discovering oneself, is the most representative in positive experience narratives. In this sense, the starting hypothesis of the present study was left partially unconfirmed. Lockdown and life during the COVID-19 emergency may activate both a disruption and an empowering process in adolescents’ developmental tasks. Further studies are needed on psychological and social variables promoting or contrasting both processes.

In the light of scarce studies exploring narratives on COVID-19 experience, the present research supports the importance of giving language to the autobiographical past by means of methods exploring qualitatively participants’ experience. Results show that a narrative is a tool to collect information on personal experience and to generate insight starting from it. Additionally, a narrative allows narrators emotional disclosure and to give meaning to their life story ( Bruner, 1990 ; McAdams et al., 2006 ). This meaning-making process is even more important in developmental ages, as adolescence is, characterized by self and identity definition and growth of autobiographical process skills ( Habermas and Bluck, 2000 ). We support the need to further investigate adolescents’ narratives in this pandemic transition both as a tool to collect data and as an intervention to promote well-being through emotional and intrapsychic disclosure.

Data Availability Statement

The raw data supporting the conclusions of this article will be made available by the authors, without undue reservation, to any qualified researcher.

Ethics Statement

The studies involving human participants were reviewed and approved by the Commissione per l’Etica della Ricerca, Università degli Studi di Firenze. Written informed consent to participate in this study was provided by the participants’ legal guardian/next of kin.

Author Contributions

CF, BP, AN, and EM conceived and performed the study design, data collection, and mastered the data. CF ran the data analysis. BP, AN, and EM discussed the results. CF wrote the manuscript with the support of BP and AN. EM and AN supervised the project and manuscript preparation. All authors contributed to the article and approved the submitted version.

Conflict of Interest

The authors declare that the research was conducted in the absence of any commercial or financial relationships that could be construed as a potential conflict of interest.

Acknowledgments

We are thankful to Skuola.net and especially its CEO, Daniele Grassucci and Carla Ardizzone and Marcello Gelardini, for the support with data collection. This research would have not been possible without their help during the hard time of the COVID-19 pandemic.

• ^ www.skuola.net

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Keywords : adolescence, COVID-19, narratives, identity, qualitative research

Citation: Fioretti C, Palladino BE, Nocentini A and Menesini E (2020) Positive and Negative Experiences of Living in COVID-19 Pandemic: Analysis of Italian Adolescents’ Narratives. Front. Psychol. 11:599531. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2020.599531

Received: 27 August 2020; Accepted: 12 October 2020; Published: 19 November 2020.

Reviewed by:

Copyright © 2020 Fioretti, Palladino, Nocentini and Menesini. This is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY) . The use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. No use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms.

*Correspondence: Chiara Fioretti, [email protected]

Disclaimer: All claims expressed in this article are solely those of the authors and do not necessarily represent those of their affiliated organizations, or those of the publisher, the editors and the reviewers. Any product that may be evaluated in this article or claim that may be made by its manufacturer is not guaranteed or endorsed by the publisher.

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

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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."

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Tell us about your experiences during the Covid pandemic

Whether you’ve suffered in the past year or been lucky enough to escape the worst of it, we would like to hear your stories about the pandemic

The pandemic has been a difficult, dramatic time for so many of us, for so many different reasons. We have lost loved ones, had our families torn apart, struggled financially and emotionally. Some of us have been stressed by overwork; others by sudden unemployment. We have had to shield from the outside world – or been reluctantly obliged to mix with it.

If you have a story to share we would love to hear from you. You might be a doctor working flat out in A&E, a student who was locked down at university, a key worker forced to serve the public with inadequate PPE, a single mother who had to go months without childcare, a son who couldn’t visit his dying father in the care home … or even one of the lucky ones who has come out of the past year feeling stronger and more optimistic about life.

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• Coronavirus

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• Open access
• Published: 29 March 2023

Life in lockdown: a qualitative study exploring the experience of living through the initial COVID-19 lockdown in the UK and its impact on diet, physical activity and mental health

• Tania Griffin 1   na1 ,
• Elisabeth Grey 1 , 2   na1 ,
• Jeffrey Lambert 1 ,
• Fiona Gillison 1 ,
• Nick Townsend 3 &
• Emma Solomon-Moore 1  

BMC Public Health volume  23 , Article number:  588 ( 2023 ) Cite this article

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In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, the UK imposed a national lockdown prompting change to daily routines. Among behaviours impacted by the lockdown, diet and physical activity may be particularly important due to their association with mental health and physical health. The aim of this study was to explore people’s experiences of how lockdown impacted their physical activity, dietary behaviours and mental health, with a view to informing public health promotion.

This phenomenological qualitative study used semi-structured telephone interviews. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim. Thematic analysis was conducted, guided by the Framework Approach.

Forty participants (28 female) completed an interview (mean duration: 36 min) between May and July 2020. The overarching themes identified were (i) Disruption (loss of routines, social interaction and cues to physical activity) and (ii) Adaptation (structuring the day, accessing the outdoor environment, finding new ways for social support). The disruption to daily routines altered people’s cues for physical activity and eating; some participants spoke of comfort eating and increased alcohol intake in the early days of lockdown, and how they consciously tried to change these when restrictions lasted longer than first anticipated. Others spoke of adapting to the restrictions using food preparation and meals to provide both routine and social time for families. Disruptions from the closure of workplaces resulted in flexible working times for some, allowing for physical activity to be built into the day. In later stages of restrictions, physical activity became an opportunity for social interaction and several participants reported intending to continue to replace sedentary means of socialising (e.g., meeting in cafes) with more active, outdoor activities (e.g., walking) once restrictions were lifted. Staying active and building activity into the day was seen as important to support physical and mental health during the challenging times of the pandemic.

Conclusions

Whilst many participants found the UK lockdown challenging, adaptations to cope with the restrictions presented some positive changes related to physical activity and diet behaviours. Helping people sustain their new healthier activities since restrictions have lifted is a challenge but presents an opportunity for public health promotion.

Peer Review reports

The COVID-19 pandemic resulted in unprecedented measures to restrict people’s movement and activity to control the spread of the virus. In March 2020 a ‘stay at home’ order was instated in the UK, referred to as ‘lockdown’. All non-essential services were closed and residents were permitted only to leave home for specified reasons such as the purchase of food and medical supplies, to exercise once-a-day, or to access emergency health care. The lockdown inevitably resulted in a change in working patterns, daily routines, physical activity and dietary habits [ 1 ]. Large scale studies with both healthy populations and disease-specific groups from around the globe have suggested a mostly negative impact of the pandemic on physical activity, shown by self-reported survey data [ 1 , 2 ] as well as objective data such as step counts [ 1 , 3 ]. Similarly, evidence from both cross-sectional and longitudinal survey studies worldwide highlight unhealthy dietary changes during the pandemic, with shifts towards increased snack and ultra-processed food consumption, alcohol consumption and decreased intake of fresh fruit and vegetables [ 4 , 5 ].

The aim of this study was to explore how the impact of the UK lockdown on people’s diet and physical activity behaviours changed, and how this may have also influenced their health and wellbeing. Wellbeing is a broader construct than physical health alone, that is conceptualised as an ideal state of being or existence comprising two main elements: feeling good and functioning well [ 6 ] Mental health and wellbeing are known to have been negatively impacted by the pandemic. In terms of mental health; in the first week after the first UK lockdown, a survey of 36,520 adults in England found 47% and 52% reporting mild to severe symptoms of anxiety and depression, respectively [ 7 ]. Another UK survey study conducted one month into the lockdown found participants (N = 842) to have elevated levels of depression and anxiety symptoms, with those classified as ‘vulnerable’ or experiencing severe COVID-19 symptoms expressing particularly high levels of anxiety [ 8 ]. In terms of wellbeing, a survey study with Irish adults (N = 604) examined daily emotional wellbeing during the COVID-19 pandemic, finding that time exercising, going for walks, gardening, pursuing hobbies, and taking care of children were positively associated with wellbeing, while home-schooling children and obtaining information about COVID-19 were negatively associated with wellbeing [ 9 ].

Whilst studies have examined the impact of COVID-19 on diet, physical activity mental health and well-being, few have examined this in combination. Furthermore, much of the evidence related to physical activity, dietary habits, and mental health and wellbeing throughout the COVID-19 pandemic is based on survey evidence. Alongside this, qualitative research can offer context and personal experiences of the pandemic to help us better understand people’s behavioural responses [ 10 ]. For example, an interview study with adults aged over 70 in the UK highlighted the particular challenges they faced with regards to maintaining mental wellbeing and the coping behaviours they adopted in response [ 11 ]. Another interview study with primary care nurses provided insight into the selfcare strategies, including exercise, that this group implemented to help limit the effects of the increased stress and anxiety they felt as a result of the pandemic [ 12 ]. Much of the qualitative research so far has focused on specific groups, often with a heightened risk of COVID-19, or focused on single outcomes, such as mental health, to provide much needed insight into ways to support these defined populations. Alongside these studies, it is also important to consider the lived experience of people living in the community. We know from survey data the pandemic prompted behaviour changes, but to help predict long term maintenance we need to understand more about people’s reasons for making changes and their experiences of these new habits. These are insights that can’t be gained from survey data alone and can be helpful for setting future public health research and policy.

The present study used qualitative semi-structured interviews to explore the experiences of UK residents during the initial UK lockdown, with a specific focus on physical activity, diet, mental health and wellbeing. The insight gained from this study on people’s experience of the lockdown was intended to help inform future health promotion activities, both in current, less restricted times and if any future lockdowns are imposed.

This phenomenological qualitative study [ 13 ] used semi-structured interviews Ethical approval was obtained from the University of Bath Research Ethics Approval Committee for Health (REACH) reference number: EP 19/20 041.

Participants

Participants were a subgroup of respondents to an online cross-sectional survey study which is detailed elsewhere [ 14 ]. The survey was promoted through social media (Twitter and Facebook), a press release and interviews with local radio stations. The survey was open to anyone living in the UK during the national lockdown. At the end of the online survey, respondents were asked to leave their details if they were willing to take part in an interview. The list of volunteers was stratified by age, employment status and working conditions (e.g., working from home), and household set-ups (e.g., living with school-aged children). A maximum diversity sampling strategy [ 13 ] was employed to select participants from a range of lived lockdown experiences, for example, recognising that the lived experience of a retired participant would likely differ from that of working parents managing home schooling and home working, or parents of primary school aged children were likely to have different experiences from those whose children were in secondary school.

Participants who were selected for interview and provided an email address were sent the participant information sheet and consent form by email. The consent form was included for information and a note included to explain to the participant that if they chose to participate in an interview consent would be confirmed over the telephone. Participants were asked to read the attachment and if they were interested in taking part in an interview to respond to the email, or that a researcher would follow up with them in a few weeks. Thereafter, four researchers (EG, ESM, JL, TG), with experience of conducting research interviews, contacted potential participants to provide further information about the interviews and ask if the participant had any questions. If the participant agreed to take part, a convenient time for a telephone interview was arranged. Oral consent was taken at the start of the telephone call; each consent statement was read aloud to the participant who was asked to audibly confirm a response. A copy of the completed form was sent by email to the participant after the interview for future reference. Interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim; all identifying names and references were removed for anonymity. To provide context, the researchers conducting the interviews were in full time employment, of White ethnicity and experienced a variety of living circumstances during lockdown (living alone, with others and with young children).

Interview schedule

The interviews were semi-structured and directed by a topic guide (see Additional File 1), allowing for iterative questioning and inviting participants to share their experiences of lockdown. Questions and prompts aimed to focus discussion on the impact of the lockdown on participants’ physical activity, diet, mental health and wellbeing, exploring any barriers or facilitators they experienced to being active, eating healthily and attaining positive mental wellbeing. To build rapport with the interviewees and encourage openness, the researchers took some time for an informal chat with participants before beginning the interview recording. Interviews were conducted between May and July 2020. In context, on the 26th of March, the first legally enforceable lockdown in the UK came into force which ordered people to “stay at home”. This was relaxed to a phased re-opening of schools in England on the 15th followed by non-essential shops reopening on the 23rd of June. On the 4th of July, more restrictions were eased, including the reopening of pubs, restaurants, and hairdressers [ 15 ].

Thematic analysis of the transcripts was conducted by two of the researchers (EG and TG), guided by the Framework Approach [ 16 , 17 ]. First, 10% of the transcripts were reviewed independently. Second, the researchers met to discuss common themes they had identified and developed a coding framework. This framework was then applied to the remaining transcripts, using NVivo 12 (QSR International Pty Ltd. Version 12, 2018) software to help organise the data. The process was iterative with the researchers regularly discussing any new codes they identified that had not been captured in the original coding framework. When all transcripts had been coded, EG and TG reviewed and discussed the coding framework to ensure the themes were representative of the data. The final themes and their organisation were discussed among the whole research team.

Forty interviews were conducted, 70% of the participants (n = 28) were female and ages ranged from 25 to 75 + years. The majority were white ethnic group and lived in areas of low deprivation. Further details of the participant characteristics are provided in Table  1 . Interview duration (following rapport building) ranged from 12 to 67 min (mean: 36 min). Throughout the results, interview quotes are presented followed by participant number, age group and gender (M or F), to demonstrate that the quotes presented represent a range of participants in terms of gender and age group. Data analysis was conducted with data from all 40 participants, and quotes selected from among the participants to show those most reflective of each subtheme. Two overarching themes were identified; (1) Disruption and (2) Adaptation, with subsequent sub themes (see Table  2 ).

Theme 1: disruption to physical activity, diet and mental health and wellbeing

This theme captures the various ways in which participants reported that the lockdown restrictions impacted on their physical activity, diet and mental health and wellbeing.

Loss of routine

Several participants, most noticeably those whose working patterns were changed through lockdown, reported finding the loss of routine challenging. The loss of structure to one’s day, left some participants feeling they lacked a sense of purpose.

“I do find that I’m getting up later. I find that I’m going to bed later as a result. And just generally I find that working, it’s a lot less structured than it would have been if I was in an office environment” [P22, 25–34 years, M] “Having no structure at all which is what I have at the moment… it makes you a bit uncertain, when you’re used to having rules and structures and have none at all, it’s quite difficult… Being furloughed and not having any work to do means that I have no structure at all to my day. The only structure in my day is that I wake up at some point and I have to eat and at some point I have to go to sleep but there isn’t anything in between”. [P16, 45–54 years, M]

The loss of social interaction

Lockdown restrictions prohibited mixing with others outside one’s household for social purposes. This loss of social interaction was reported by many participants to be challenging, and noted by some to negatively impact their mental health. Among participants who lived with others, some mentioned placing more emphasis on planning and preparing meals and eating together, seeing this to be an important time for social interaction (see Theme 2). Missing socialising and eating out was frequently mentioned; those who lived alone particularly felt this loss and reported feeling lonely or isolated, which made abiding by the lockdown rules hard.

“I have felt lonely and I think touch is hugely significant and the fact that when I see my friends or relatives I can’t give them a hug you know, particularly because I live on my own, it’s quite, it’s really depressing”. [P15, 65–74 years, F] “the lockdown rules because they’re not, they just don’t take into account the impact on people who live on their own… the only people I know who don’t break the rules are people who are in families”. [P16, 45–54 years, M]

Cues for eating and physical activity

In the early days of lockdown, all participants expressed that they had experienced disruption to their environment and in turn, many spoke of how cues for their daily habits for both eating and physical activity were both positively and negatively impacted. Firstly, in relation to diet, the change in working routines and locations in some cases removed cues for incidental eating opportunities, such as not being able to drop into fast food restaurants when journeying to and from work or less exposure to commercial eating outlets in the working environment.

“…[pre COVID-19] I did tend to grab, like, a Greggs vegan sausage roll or something like that just because I was walking past it, and obviously everybody got coffees, and if you get coffee sometimes you get a cookie to go with it ... [in lockdown] I just had my healthy breakfast in the house and I didn’t grab stuff because I was peckish. [P05, 35–44 years, F]

In contrast, others found additional cues for eating in their home environment, such as a closer proximity to the kitchen while working, leading to an increase in snacking.

“ when you’re working from home I think there is an element of boredom, especially where I was sat working where I was staring at the fridge … even if you’re making yourself a tea or coffee and you see something in the fridge and you start eating it, … if you are out on the go, you know, foods not always as important, I became a lot more conscious about controlling urges” [P13, 45–54 years, M]

There were also positive and negative changes to cues for physical activity during the lockdown. The change in working patterns for some participants offered a more flexible approach to the working day, presenting additional opportunities to be physically active, be it during an extended lunch hour or in time that would otherwise be spent commuting.

“It means I can cycle in my lunch hour, so if I don’t get out after work I can at least be getting out during the week in my lunch hour”. [P23, 45–54 years, F]

The government announcement that exercise was a permitted reason to leave the house seemed to encourage people to capitalise on this opportunity.

“When it was announced you could go out for an hour’s walk, we did that come what may, even on the days at the beginning when it was raining. Whereas prior to lockdown, if it had been raining, we’d never have dreamt of going out for a walk. But because it was almost as though everything had been taken away from you, but actually they had given something back in the form of an hour’s walk”. [P02, 65–74 years, F]

Conversely, a few participants mentioned a decrease in activity when mostly based at home, or a reduction in incidental activity, such as walking to or around the workplace, and the added pressure of childcare and/or home schooling led to a reduction in time and/or motivation for exercise.

“my husband used to walk to work and he used to do between 10,000 and 15,000 steps a day. And now that he doesn’t go into the office he’s doing no exercise at all…he’s not motivated in terms of looking after himself or anything. So it’s had an absolutely disastrous impact on his exercise” [P17, 55–64 years, F]

Theme 2: adaptation related to physical activity, diet and mental wellbeing

This theme covers the ways in which participants adapted to their new circumstances, some of which evolved through the lockdown as it became evident that restrictions were to last longer than initially thought.

Structuring the day

In acknowledgement of their loss of routine, some participants explained how they adapted by using their one permitted outing of the day to try to ensure their days had some structure to break up the monotony; for many this was also an important coping strategy, to help their mood and overall wellbeing.

“…we will all go out … to the beach or the park or somewhere with not many people to go and wander around in. That was quite exciting in a way when we got used to that, we’d sort of look forward to 3 o’clock... there was a lot more of nothing, nothing, nothing, nothing, something, nothing, nothing, but it felt like, it made it feel a bit special then” [P05, 35–44 years, F]

While there was less of a change in routine amongst retired participants, their social activities were often reduced. This led many to increase their solitary hobbies and place greater importance on the remaining excursions that were allowed within the restrictions.

“I am retired but I am one of the fit ones in the village. So there is a couple close to me, I go out and get a prescription for them and when I go shopping, help them with bits and pieces… No, I mean I’m fortunate my son rings and ‘Dad do you want anything’ and I say ‘No’. Goodness, that’s my one highlight of the week going outdoors, to go shopping”. [P09, 65–74 years, M] “In the month of May I walked five marathons and I climbed 15,000 feet. … well, I had nothing else to do … I try and do something in the morning and break the day up a with decent long walk in the afternoon and then settle down in the evening. I think I’ve probably watched more rubbish television than I have in the rest of my life.” [P14, 75 + years, M]

Physical activity was often mentioned as an important means of providing structure to participants’ days, where their normal routines had been disrupted. Physical activity provided an opportunity to take time for oneself, especially for those in busy households, to see others, either socially or in passing, or to have a change of scene.

I guess making sure we go for a walk at lunchtime and actually talk to other members of the family rather than just existing in the same house, I think that’s really helped because obviously I’m like I am checking that everyone’s okay and you know they’re checking I’m okay as well so it’s quite nice to do that and I think having the little games in the garden it’s just a bit of fun at the end of a boring day.[P01, 45–54 years, F]

Some participants tried engaging with online exercise classes during the lockdown, either to replace their usual gym sessions while unable to access gyms or to overcome the decrease in incidental activity. For some, this was a positive experience that they hoped to continue beyond the lockdown.

“one of my friends, he’s a yoga instructor and he pointed out that [app] was a free, they were running it for free... so I downloaded that and started using it ...I think I’m going to try and keep going with the yoga actually once lockdown ends... I have found that it’s quite a good way of sort of clearing your head [P03, 35–44 years, F]

However, others struggled to engage with exercise in the home setting and felt the loss of social interaction that they gained in a gym.

“I enjoy my PT, because I go [to the gym], I throw around heavy weights and I come out of there feeling powerful... it was a really good place the gym I go to, and I’ve really missed it”. [P20, 25–34 years, M] “I’ve done a lot of online classes from home but yeah it’s not the same, really as going, cos it’s sort of in your living room or whatever trying to fit in around everybody else in the house, and it’s, I don’t associate exercise with being at home particularly so it’s much harder to kind of push yourself” [P18, 45–54 years, F]

Food was mentioned frequently in relation to routine, and for some it was used as a coping strategy, providing a source of comfort or distraction or structure to the day. Participants discussed mealtimes providing clear boundaries between work and leisure time, and an opportunity for social interactions within the household. Taking time to prepare food trying new recipes or baking, and eating together was a source of enjoyment.

“I kind of welcomed the novelty of life having to be different and simpler and like having weird dinners… there is always stuff in the back of your cupboard that you would like ignore for like a year... I was quite up for it” [P05, 35–44 years, F] “we made Sushi yesterday for the first time, it was really good fun, and having the time to do that sort of thing is lovely” [P12, 45–54 years, F] “I’ve been cooking a lot more, because can’t go out to eat … food has become more important during lockdown…you haven’t got other sensory stuff going on, your only sensory thing probably is food” [P06, 35–44 years, F]

For some, the disruption to their routines prompted the adoption of dietary practices they normally reserved for holidays, such as increased snacking, eating larger and more elaborate meals, and increased alcohol consumption.

“the meals have become a much bigger part of our life…probably be a bit more elaborate in what we make and bit more of a holiday diet rather than a day to day diet you know, um, when we go away on holiday we tend to eat a lot more and I’ve found that we’ve been doing that through lockdown”. [P10, 45–54 years, F] “I started putting sugar on my porridge again, umm sugar in my coffee, lots of cakes and biscuits through the day…I was buying lots of treaty food … I was buying far more than we would actually normally eat, but I felt like I needed to nurture or nourish something. There was just that need to comfort myself I think” [P21, 25–34 years, F]

However, despite this initial disruption, once evident lockdown was going to last longer than a few weeks, many people reported re-adjusting their diets, especially with reference to alcohol intake.

“since lockdown … we were drinking more, but again that’s on the downturn again as well. My husband has given up all together and I am limiting myself to one drink at five o clock... all of the things that got out of hand are now settling down more” [P07, 55–64 years, F]

As well as physical activity and meals, simply making time for oneself was acknowledged as an important factor to include in the day. During a time of anxiety, such as the early days of the pandemic, having time for oneself was felt by some to be particularly important for mental wellbeing.

“I think if lockdown’s taught me anything, it’s taught me the benefit of having ‘me time’… It’s a global pandemic, there’s things going on that I can’t have any influence over. So for me it’s sort of taught me to realise when I’m perhaps not coping so well and take that time to just either sit and read a book or have a bath or sit and watch some sort of trash TV programme. And just not sit and think about everything that’s going on. I don’t think that’s something I necessarily appreciated before lockdown”. [P22, 25–34 years, M]

The importance of the outdoor environment

The outdoor environment played an important role for many participants, having a positive impact on mood and wellbeing. Enjoyment in walking was discussed, as was exploring the local area and observing nature. Many spoke of engaging with, or taking up new, hobbies outdoors such as birdwatching or gardening.

“we’ve found some new places within walking distance from our house that like we’ve never really noticed or never been to before, so it’s been quite nice in that that respect”. [P01, 45–54 years, F] “I am sure a lot of people are the same where they’ve done a lot of DIY... and I’ve taken up building stuff out of wood, and gardening and growing vegetables, and all sort of things that we’d never done before, so that’s been really positive”. [P10, 45–54 years, F]

It is important to note that during the first lockdown the UK experienced a long period of fine weather, ideal for enjoying outdoor activities. Participants acknowledged this had a positive impact on their mood and encouraged them to be active outdoors, conceding that on wet or colder days, their motivation for outdoor activity decreased.

“The weather helped, cos it was so lovely... we do like walking but I think if the weather had been like it has the last day or two obviously that would’ve caused a few more issues of getting out. [P11, 45–54 years, F]

Having an opportunity to leave the house and access outdoor space was also seen as important for providing a change of scene from the home environment.

“when I was able to go out …only to walk to do some shopping, that was a real joy just to get out and walk in the fresh air rather than being stuck inside”. [P04, 55–64 years, M] “I’ll go for that walk, part of it is making sure I’m keeping active but also it’s that just taking some time out to not think about everything that’s going on in the world at the moment. And I think it’s important for my mental health to sort of get that fresh air and be by the water… my front room is now my office as well so it’s that separation of work and life space has sort of become very, very blurred” [P22, 25–34 years, M]

New forms of social support

The importance of community, supporting friends and neighbours locally, was discussed amongst participants, such as collecting shopping or dropping off baked goods. When meeting others from different households outside was permitted, being physically active together, such as going for walks or cycle rides, was seen as an important opportunity for socialising, taking the place of more sedentary meetings at cafes, pubs etc.; activities which were not allowed at the point of lockdown, but which may have been the default prior to lockdown. Participants spoke of hope for this to continue but acknowledged likely barriers.

“I went for a walk this morning with a friend... that’s kind of not been part of our social lives before, you know, it’s sort of seeing each other in the evening to go for a drink, or to go see a play or whatever, but now I would like to be able to carry on saying to people oh can we go for a walk? Obviously going into autumn and winter that might be- but I think hopefully it will become engrained enough of a habit that it’s something I want to carry on doing. [P12, 45–54 years, F] “The walking with my friends now that is really nice, we’ve really loved that and I really hope that that stays….it was something that I was doing before but not as frequently, so there’s kind of 2 groups of friends and my sister, so I’ve been trying to do walks with, you know 3 nice big walks with those people each week. I don’t think it’s sustainable as everyone gets busier but I’d really like for those long walks to carry on in some shape”. [P19, 35–44 years, F]

This study provides insight into the impact of the UK lockdown on physical activity and dietary behaviours. The inevitable change in daily routine due to the lockdown resulted in adjustment to both dietary and physical activity behaviours which for some participants was associated with changes (both positive and negative) in their perceived mental health and wellbeing.

Our findings show the short-term changes participants made to their diet and physical activity at the start of lockdown, as well as how conscious decisions were made to adapt their behaviour in more sustainable ways as it became clear that the lockdown period would last longer than anticipated. Past research has detailed how behaviour is more within intentional control when environmental cues that drive habits are disrupted [ 18 , 19 , 20 ], and these findings provide a case study of the types of considerations people make in forming and enacting intentions towards new habits the extreme case of disruption that the COVID-19 pandemic brought about. As lockdown progressed, participants displayed a need to establish new daily routines to support their wellbeing, and diet and physical activity were key ways of providing this routine. This supports pre-pandemic research on the benefit of routine and habits in making healthy choices [ 21 , 22 ]. The adoption of less healthy behaviours appeared to be driven in our sample by emotions such as anxiety, boredom, a desire for comfort, as well as more instrumental barriers such as the lack of access to facilities and social support. Adopting healthier behaviours seemed to be associated with participants finding enjoyment in new activities, being motivated to take action for personal wellbeing, and having the time and resources to adopt healthier practices.

In some cases, participants expressed the desire to retain their new, healthy and enjoyable habits beyond the end of pandemic restrictions. However, it is likely this will be challenging for many due to a change in both opportunities (such as having time at home, and fewer conflicting responsibilities), and the re-introduction of the environmental cues that promoted former habits (e.g., driving rather than walking, eating out). For example, for some, a return to the workplace may have prompted old, less healthy habits, potentially over-riding any healthy intentions formed during lockdown. However, there may still be an opportunity to capitalise on some of the more positive experiences some people had during the pandemic related to diet and physical activity, whereby they may be more open to change than they would have been previously, giving interventions to promote physical activity and dietary change at a population level a greater chance of success [ 23 ]. From a public health perspective, environmental interventions and policy action to increase the availability and accessibility of healthy foods (and decrease the prevalence of unhealthy food) and encourage active commuting could help to provide cues for some people towards healthier habits [ 24 ]. Flexible working practices have also been shown to support positive health and wellbeing [ 25 , 26 ] and may well support the ways in which people have found ways to incorporate local exercise into their day, however, it is recognised that flexible working is not always practical or possible and its suitability will vary by both employer and employee circumstance. Similarly, future work is needed to identify opportunities for physical activity to be built into the working day, especially for professions where flexible working is not possible. This has been explored by Ryde et al. (2020) [ 27 ] who identified that, whilst the likely benefits were acknowledged by employee and employer, there were significant barriers, such as workload and culture.

Food provided a focal point of the day for many, and flexible routines allowed more time in planning, preparing and eating meals within the household, giving structure to the day and, for some, social interaction. It seems plausible to suggest this could have led to acquisition of skills in food preparation which can hopefully be sustained. Similar to findings in the literature [ 4 , 5 ], an initial change toward less healthy eating behaviours was reported, however this seemed to be temporary and consciously addressed, moving back towards previous habits as lockdown progressed. Previous research on the association between family meals and health outcomes [ 28 , 29 ] lends support for the positive impact of eating together within multiple occupancy households observed in this research. Since the COVID-19 pandemic prompted enforced changes, and rapid adaptation to changed working patterns, it may present an opportunity to reflect on these changes, with emphasis on the importance of positive lifestyle behaviours for health, wellbeing and disease prevention. As the present study sample was predominantly affluent, with 30% of retired individuals, it is worth noting that for less affluent groups and those working irregular hours, eating together as a household and negotiating changes to working patterns may be less easy.

The increased time spent in the outdoor environment and appreciation for nature reported by participants is similar to that seen in New Zealand [ 30 ] and corroborates data reported by the UK Office for National Statistics (ONS) that showed a rise in use of parks and green spaces in 2020 compared to previous years [ 31 ]. While the ONS report also included survey findings suggesting that people placed an increased importance on green and natural spaces for their wellbeing following the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, it also highlighted the inequality in access to such spaces. Having limited access to natural spaces of sufficient quality is likely to negatively impact people’s wellbeing in multiple ways; it limits their ability and motivation to exercise outdoors and prevents them benefitting from the stress-relieving effects of nature [ 32 ]. The increased appreciation for the outdoors brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic adds support for local authorities or charitable organisations, to drive improvements to access of green spaces.

The important interplay between mental wellbeing and lifestyle behaviours was also spoken of by participants: feeling anxious and depressed was reported to be linked to lack of motivation for exercise and turning to food for comfort. The restrictions on social interaction were challenging for many participants but particularly for those living alone and there was some indication that the lockdown caused some participants to reconsider their values and priorities, placing greater emphasis on (or simply acknowledging the importance of) social connection. Making use of the permitted exercise outing presented an opportunity for social interaction, whether this was to say hello to strangers in passing or, when lockdown rules eased, meeting up with friends and family. These findings suggest that encouraging and facilitating active social gatherings could be a useful area of future research, identifying whether it is a practical and effective approach to promoting both mental and physical health and wellbeing across a range of diverse settings. The UK government has been tracking population mental health and wellbeing throughout the pandemic, revealing a continually fluctuating nature [ 33 ], which is likely in turn to impact people’s health behaviours. Our findings, therefore, lend support to calls for further investment in public mental health support [ 34 ], policies to support emotional wellbeing, and emphasises an opportunity to promote physical activity, a known treatment for poor mental health and wellbeing [ 35 ].

Participants in this study discussed a heighted awareness through lockdown of the contribution that food and physical activity can have towards their daily experience, and how these were considered important to support their physical and mental health and wellbeing. For example, people learned new routes and opportunities within their local area, tried out new forms of socialising (e.g., walking, cycling with friends) that were cheap and enjoyable alternatives to previous habits (e.g., eating and drinking out), gained confidence in new skills and activities, and found ways of being together enjoyably as a family (e.g., cooking together). These findings parallel those found in a qualitative study of older adults in Mauritius whereby a positive of the lockdown experience was strengthening family bonds, taking part in activities together and enjoying time for hobbies [ 36 ]. Self-efficacy, motivation and health status have been associated with physical activity in past research [ 37 ]. The accumulation of experiences that have improved knowledge, skills and confidence provides opportunity for targeting interventions that reinforce, and remind people to support the continuation of some, or all of these activities longer term, to promote and support healthy lifestyle habits.

Strengths and limitations

A key strength of this study is that it provides a qualitative insight into lifestyle experiences across a range of participants residing in the UK through the lockdown measures. A number of limitations are acknowledged. First, the timing of interviews meant that COVID-19 lockdown restrictions evolved through the data collection period (May - July 2020). Participants who were interviewed as restrictions were easing were asked to reflect back on their experiences in the earlier lockdown period, as well as on the present day, however, there may be risk of recall bias amongst participants interviewed later in the study. It should be noted that during the first lockdown the weather was warm and pleasant; experiences of later lockdowns during winter months, in particular on our key areas of interest (physical activity, diet and mental health), may have been different. Few of our participants resided in areas of high sociodemographic deprivation and most were female and of White ethnicity, which we recognise limits the generalisability of the findings. While we did not gain individual-level income data, it is likely that our sample is not representative of underserved and minority ethnic groups in the UK amongst which the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic are known to be worse [ 38 , 39 ].

This study provides insight into the reasons behind people’s fluctuating health behaviours over the period of nationally imposed restrictions. The findings highlight the impact, both positive and negative, of restructured days and negotiating changes to working patterns. They show the multiple roles of food and food preparation in coping and adjusting to restrictions, and how people’s understanding of the importance of physical activity and diet for maintaining their wellbeing developed and shaped their behaviour over time. This insight could have relevance to public health attempts to promote or support people to maintain positive behaviour changes, such as replacing sedentary forms of socialising for physical activities which incorporate a social element, building on the experiences identified over the period of national restrictions and lockdowns.

Data Availability

The datasets used and analysed during the current study are available from the corresponding author on reasonable request.

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OHID, Office for Health Improvement and Disparities. 2022: COVID-19 mental health and wellbeing surveillance report.2022. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/covid-19-mental-health-and-wellbeing-surveillance-report/2-important-findings-so-far. Accessed 30 July 2022.

Williams H. Investment is the only way to boost mental health services. The Guardian [internet]. 2022 February 22. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/feb/22/investment-is-the-only-way-to-boost-mental-health-services . Accessed 30 July 2022.

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Acknowledgements

Thank you to all participants who kindly gave up their time to talk to us during the COVID-19 lockdown.

This project was unfunded.

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Tania Griffin and Elisabeth Grey are joint first authors.

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Department for Health, University of Bath, Claverton Down, Bath, BA2 7AY, United Kingdom

Tania Griffin, Elisabeth Grey, Jeffrey Lambert, Fiona Gillison & Emma Solomon-Moore

Population Health Sciences, Bristol Medical School, Canynge Hall, 39 Whatley Road, Bristol, BS8 2PS, United Kingdom

Elisabeth Grey

School for Policy Studies, University of Bristol, 8 Priory Rd, Bristol, BS8 1TZ, United Kingdom

Nick Townsend

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The study was conceptualised by all authors. Data collection was conducted by TG, EG, ESM and JL. TG and EG drafted the manuscript with contribution from all authors. All authors read and approved the manuscript.

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Correspondence to Tania Griffin .

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Ethical approval was obtained from the University of Bath Research Ethics Approval Committee for Health (REACH) reference number: EP 19/20 041. The study methods were carried out in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations. Informed consent was obtained from all participants. Consent was obtained orally due to national lockdown restrictions in place during the data collection. Each consent statement was read to the participant, and they were asked to confirm audibly that they agreed with each statement. The process for consent was outlined in the ethics application approved by the University of Bath Research Ethics Approval Committee for Health (REACH).

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Griffin, T., Grey, E., Lambert, J. et al. Life in lockdown: a qualitative study exploring the experience of living through the initial COVID-19 lockdown in the UK and its impact on diet, physical activity and mental health. BMC Public Health 23 , 588 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-023-15441-0

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• http://orcid.org/0000-0003-1512-4471 Emily Long 1 ,
• Susan Patterson 1 ,
• Karen Maxwell 1 ,
• Carolyn Blake 1 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0001-7342-4566 Raquel Bosó Pérez 1 ,
• Ruth Lewis 1 ,
• Mark McCann 1 ,
• Julie Riddell 1 ,
• Kathryn Skivington 1 ,
• Rachel Wilson-Lowe 1 ,
• http://orcid.org/0000-0002-4409-6601 Kirstin R Mitchell 2
• 1 MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit , University of Glasgow , Glasgow , UK
• 2 MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, Institute of Health & Wellbeing , University of Glasgow , Glasgow , UK
• Correspondence to Dr Emily Long, MRC/CSO Social and Public Health Sciences Unit, University of Glasgow, Glasgow G3 7HR, UK; emily.long{at}glasgow.ac.uk

This essay examines key aspects of social relationships that were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. It focuses explicitly on relational mechanisms of health and brings together theory and emerging evidence on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic to make recommendations for future public health policy and recovery. We first provide an overview of the pandemic in the UK context, outlining the nature of the public health response. We then introduce four distinct domains of social relationships: social networks, social support, social interaction and intimacy, highlighting the mechanisms through which the pandemic and associated public health response drastically altered social interactions in each domain. Throughout the essay, the lens of health inequalities, and perspective of relationships as interconnecting elements in a broader system, is used to explore the varying impact of these disruptions. The essay concludes by providing recommendations for longer term recovery ensuring that the social relational cost of COVID-19 is adequately considered in efforts to rebuild.

• inequalities

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Data sharing not applicable as no data sets generated and/or analysed for this study. Data sharing not applicable as no data sets generated or analysed for this essay.

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https://doi.org/10.1136/jech-2021-216690

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Introduction

Infectious disease pandemics, including SARS and COVID-19, demand intrapersonal behaviour change and present highly complex challenges for public health. 1 A pandemic of an airborne infection, spread easily through social contact, assails human relationships by drastically altering the ways through which humans interact. In this essay, we draw on theories of social relationships to examine specific ways in which relational mechanisms key to health and well-being were disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Relational mechanisms refer to the processes between people that lead to change in health outcomes.

At the time of writing, the future surrounding COVID-19 was uncertain. Vaccine programmes were being rolled out in countries that could afford them, but new and more contagious variants of the virus were also being discovered. The recovery journey looked long, with continued disruption to social relationships. The social cost of COVID-19 was only just beginning to emerge, but the mental health impact was already considerable, 2 3 and the inequality of the health burden stark. 4 Knowledge of the epidemiology of COVID-19 accrued rapidly, but evidence of the most effective policy responses remained uncertain.

The initial response to COVID-19 in the UK was reactive and aimed at reducing mortality, with little time to consider the social implications, including for interpersonal and community relationships. The terminology of ‘social distancing’ quickly became entrenched both in public and policy discourse. This equation of physical distance with social distance was regrettable, since only physical proximity causes viral transmission, whereas many forms of social proximity (eg, conversations while walking outdoors) are minimal risk, and are crucial to maintaining relationships supportive of health and well-being.

The aim of this essay is to explore four key relational mechanisms that were impacted by the pandemic and associated restrictions: social networks, social support, social interaction and intimacy. We use relational theories and emerging research on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic response to make three key recommendations: one regarding public health responses; and two regarding social recovery. Our understanding of these mechanisms stems from a ‘systems’ perspective which casts social relationships as interdependent elements within a connected whole. 5

Social networks

Social networks characterise the individuals and social connections that compose a system (such as a workplace, community or society). Social relationships range from spouses and partners, to coworkers, friends and acquaintances. They vary across many dimensions, including, for example, frequency of contact and emotional closeness. Social networks can be understood both in terms of the individuals and relationships that compose the network, as well as the overall network structure (eg, how many of your friends know each other).

Social networks show a tendency towards homophily, or a phenomenon of associating with individuals who are similar to self. 6 This is particularly true for ‘core’ network ties (eg, close friends), while more distant, sometimes called ‘weak’ ties tend to show more diversity. During the height of COVID-19 restrictions, face-to-face interactions were often reduced to core network members, such as partners, family members or, potentially, live-in roommates; some ‘weak’ ties were lost, and interactions became more limited to those closest. Given that peripheral, weaker social ties provide a diversity of resources, opinions and support, 7 COVID-19 likely resulted in networks that were smaller and more homogenous.

Such changes were not inevitable nor necessarily enduring, since social networks are also adaptive and responsive to change, in that a disruption to usual ways of interacting can be replaced by new ways of engaging (eg, Zoom). Yet, important inequalities exist, wherein networks and individual relationships within networks are not equally able to adapt to such changes. For example, individuals with a large number of newly established relationships (eg, university students) may have struggled to transfer these relationships online, resulting in lost contacts and a heightened risk of social isolation. This is consistent with research suggesting that young adults were the most likely to report a worsening of relationships during COVID-19, whereas older adults were the least likely to report a change. 8

Lastly, social connections give rise to emergent properties of social systems, 9 where a community-level phenomenon develops that cannot be attributed to any one member or portion of the network. For example, local area-based networks emerged due to geographic restrictions (eg, stay-at-home orders), resulting in increases in neighbourly support and local volunteering. 10 In fact, research suggests that relationships with neighbours displayed the largest net gain in ratings of relationship quality compared with a range of relationship types (eg, partner, colleague, friend). 8 Much of this was built from spontaneous individual interactions within local communities, which together contributed to the ‘community spirit’ that many experienced. 11 COVID-19 restrictions thus impacted the personal social networks and the structure of the larger networks within the society.

Social support

Social support, referring to the psychological and material resources provided through social interaction, is a critical mechanism through which social relationships benefit health. In fact, social support has been shown to be one of the most important resilience factors in the aftermath of stressful events. 12 In the context of COVID-19, the usual ways in which individuals interact and obtain social support have been severely disrupted.

One such disruption has been to opportunities for spontaneous social interactions. For example, conversations with colleagues in a break room offer an opportunity for socialising beyond one’s core social network, and these peripheral conversations can provide a form of social support. 13 14 A chance conversation may lead to advice helpful to coping with situations or seeking formal help. Thus, the absence of these spontaneous interactions may mean the reduction of indirect support-seeking opportunities. While direct support-seeking behaviour is more effective at eliciting support, it also requires significantly more effort and may be perceived as forceful and burdensome. 15 The shift to homeworking and closure of community venues reduced the number of opportunities for these spontaneous interactions to occur, and has, second, focused them locally. Consequently, individuals whose core networks are located elsewhere, or who live in communities where spontaneous interaction is less likely, have less opportunity to benefit from spontaneous in-person supportive interactions.

However, alongside this disruption, new opportunities to interact and obtain social support have arisen. The surge in community social support during the initial lockdown mirrored that often seen in response to adverse events (eg, natural disasters 16 ). COVID-19 restrictions that confined individuals to their local area also compelled them to focus their in-person efforts locally. Commentators on the initial lockdown in the UK remarked on extraordinary acts of generosity between individuals who belonged to the same community but were unknown to each other. However, research on adverse events also tells us that such community support is not necessarily maintained in the longer term. 16

Meanwhile, online forms of social support are not bound by geography, thus enabling interactions and social support to be received from a wider network of people. Formal online social support spaces (eg, support groups) existed well before COVID-19, but have vastly increased since. While online interactions can increase perceived social support, it is unclear whether remote communication technologies provide an effective substitute from in-person interaction during periods of social distancing. 17 18 It makes intuitive sense that the usefulness of online social support will vary by the type of support offered, degree of social interaction and ‘online communication skills’ of those taking part. Youth workers, for instance, have struggled to keep vulnerable youth engaged in online youth clubs, 19 despite others finding a positive association between amount of digital technology used by individuals during lockdown and perceived social support. 20 Other research has found that more frequent face-to-face contact and phone/video contact both related to lower levels of depression during the time period of March to August 2020, but the negative effect of a lack of contact was greater for those with higher levels of usual sociability. 21 Relatedly, important inequalities in social support exist, such that individuals who occupy more socially disadvantaged positions in society (eg, low socioeconomic status, older people) tend to have less access to social support, 22 potentially exacerbated by COVID-19.

Social and interactional norms

Interactional norms are key relational mechanisms which build trust, belonging and identity within and across groups in a system. Individuals in groups and societies apply meaning by ‘approving, arranging and redefining’ symbols of interaction. 23 A handshake, for instance, is a powerful symbol of trust and equality. Depending on context, not shaking hands may symbolise a failure to extend friendship, or a failure to reach agreement. The norms governing these symbols represent shared values and identity; and mutual understanding of these symbols enables individuals to achieve orderly interactions, establish supportive relationship accountability and connect socially. 24 25

Physical distancing measures to contain the spread of COVID-19 radically altered these norms of interaction, particularly those used to convey trust, affinity, empathy and respect (eg, hugging, physical comforting). 26 As epidemic waves rose and fell, the work to negotiate these norms required intense cognitive effort; previously taken-for-granted interactions were re-examined, factoring in current restriction levels, own and (assumed) others’ vulnerability and tolerance of risk. This created awkwardness, and uncertainty, for example, around how to bring closure to an in-person interaction or convey warmth. The instability in scripted ways of interacting created particular strain for individuals who already struggled to encode and decode interactions with others (eg, those who are deaf or have autism spectrum disorder); difficulties often intensified by mask wearing. 27

Large social gatherings—for example, weddings, school assemblies, sporting events—also present key opportunities for affirming and assimilating interactional norms, building cohesion and shared identity and facilitating cooperation across social groups. 28 Online ‘equivalents’ do not easily support ‘social-bonding’ activities such as singing and dancing, and rarely enable chance/spontaneous one-on-one conversations with peripheral/weaker network ties (see the Social networks section) which can help strengthen bonds across a larger network. The loss of large gatherings to celebrate rites of passage (eg, bar mitzvah, weddings) has additional relational costs since these events are performed by and for communities to reinforce belonging, and to assist in transitioning to new phases of life. 29 The loss of interaction with diverse others via community and large group gatherings also reduces intergroup contact, which may then tend towards more prejudiced outgroup attitudes. While online interaction can go some way to mimicking these interaction norms, there are key differences. A sense of anonymity, and lack of in-person emotional cues, tends to support norms of polarisation and aggression in expressing differences of opinion online. And while online platforms have potential to provide intergroup contact, the tendency of much social media to form homogeneous ‘echo chambers’ can serve to further reduce intergroup contact. 30 31

Intimacy relates to the feeling of emotional connection and closeness with other human beings. Emotional connection, through romantic, friendship or familial relationships, fulfils a basic human need 32 and strongly benefits health, including reduced stress levels, improved mental health, lowered blood pressure and reduced risk of heart disease. 32 33 Intimacy can be fostered through familiarity, feeling understood and feeling accepted by close others. 34

Intimacy via companionship and closeness is fundamental to mental well-being. Positively, the COVID-19 pandemic has offered opportunities for individuals to (re)connect and (re)strengthen close relationships within their household via quality time together, following closure of many usual external social activities. Research suggests that the first full UK lockdown period led to a net gain in the quality of steady relationships at a population level, 35 but amplified existing inequalities in relationship quality. 35 36 For some in single-person households, the absence of a companion became more conspicuous, leading to feelings of loneliness and lower mental well-being. 37 38 Additional pandemic-related relational strain 39 40 resulted, for some, in the initiation or intensification of domestic abuse. 41 42

Physical touch is another key aspect of intimacy, a fundamental human need crucial in maintaining and developing intimacy within close relationships. 34 Restrictions on social interactions severely restricted the number and range of people with whom physical affection was possible. The reduction in opportunity to give and receive affectionate physical touch was not experienced equally. Many of those living alone found themselves completely without physical contact for extended periods. The deprivation of physical touch is evidenced to take a heavy emotional toll. 43 Even in future, once physical expressions of affection can resume, new levels of anxiety over germs may introduce hesitancy into previously fluent blending of physical and verbal intimate social connections. 44

The pandemic also led to shifts in practices and norms around sexual relationship building and maintenance, as individuals adapted and sought alternative ways of enacting sexual intimacy. This too is important, given that intimate sexual activity has known benefits for health. 45 46 Given that social restrictions hinged on reducing household mixing, possibilities for partnered sexual activity were primarily guided by living arrangements. While those in cohabiting relationships could potentially continue as before, those who were single or in non-cohabiting relationships generally had restricted opportunities to maintain their sexual relationships. Pornography consumption and digital partners were reported to increase since lockdown. 47 However, online interactions are qualitatively different from in-person interactions and do not provide the same opportunities for physical intimacy.

Recommendations and conclusions

In the sections above we have outlined the ways in which COVID-19 has impacted social relationships, showing how relational mechanisms key to health have been undermined. While some of the damage might well self-repair after the pandemic, there are opportunities inherent in deliberative efforts to build back in ways that facilitate greater resilience in social and community relationships. We conclude by making three recommendations: one regarding public health responses to the pandemic; and two regarding social recovery.

Recommendation 1: explicitly count the relational cost of public health policies to control the pandemic

Effective handling of a pandemic recognises that social, economic and health concerns are intricately interwoven. It is clear that future research and policy attention must focus on the social consequences. As described above, policies which restrict physical mixing across households carry heavy and unequal relational costs. These include for individuals (eg, loss of intimate touch), dyads (eg, loss of warmth, comfort), networks (eg, restricted access to support) and communities (eg, loss of cohesion and identity). Such costs—and their unequal impact—should not be ignored in short-term efforts to control an epidemic. Some public health responses—restrictions on international holiday travel and highly efficient test and trace systems—have relatively small relational costs and should be prioritised. At a national level, an earlier move to proportionate restrictions, and investment in effective test and trace systems, may help prevent escalation of spread to the point where a national lockdown or tight restrictions became an inevitability. Where policies with relational costs are unavoidable, close attention should be paid to the unequal relational impact for those whose personal circumstances differ from normative assumptions of two adult families. This includes consideration of whether expectations are fair (eg, for those who live alone), whether restrictions on social events are equitable across age group, religious/ethnic groupings and social class, and also to ensure that the language promoted by such policies (eg, households; families) is not exclusionary. 48 49 Forethought to unequal impacts on social relationships should thus be integral to the work of epidemic preparedness teams.

Recommendation 2: intelligently balance online and offline ways of relating

A key ingredient for well-being is ‘getting together’ in a physical sense. This is fundamental to a human need for intimate touch, physical comfort, reinforcing interactional norms and providing practical support. Emerging evidence suggests that online ways of relating cannot simply replace physical interactions. But online interaction has many benefits and for some it offers connections that did not exist previously. In particular, online platforms provide new forms of support for those unable to access offline services because of mobility issues (eg, older people) or because they are geographically isolated from their support community (eg, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ) youth). Ultimately, multiple forms of online and offline social interactions are required to meet the needs of varying groups of people (eg, LGBTQ, older people). Future research and practice should aim to establish ways of using offline and online support in complementary and even synergistic ways, rather than veering between them as social restrictions expand and contract. Intelligent balancing of online and offline ways of relating also pertains to future policies on home and flexible working. A decision to switch to wholesale or obligatory homeworking should consider the risk to relational ‘group properties’ of the workplace community and their impact on employees’ well-being, focusing in particular on unequal impacts (eg, new vs established employees). Intelligent blending of online and in-person working is required to achieve flexibility while also nurturing supportive networks at work. Intelligent balance also implies strategies to build digital literacy and minimise digital exclusion, as well as coproducing solutions with intended beneficiaries.

Recommendation 3: build stronger and sustainable localised communities

In balancing offline and online ways of interacting, there is opportunity to capitalise on the potential for more localised, coherent communities due to scaled-down travel, homeworking and local focus that will ideally continue after restrictions end. There are potential economic benefits after the pandemic, such as increased trade as home workers use local resources (eg, coffee shops), but also relational benefits from stronger relationships around the orbit of the home and neighbourhood. Experience from previous crises shows that community volunteer efforts generated early on will wane over time in the absence of deliberate work to maintain them. Adequately funded partnerships between local government, third sector and community groups are required to sustain community assets that began as a direct response to the pandemic. Such partnerships could work to secure green spaces and indoor (non-commercial) meeting spaces that promote community interaction. Green spaces in particular provide a triple benefit in encouraging physical activity and mental health, as well as facilitating social bonding. 50 In building local communities, small community networks—that allow for diversity and break down ingroup/outgroup views—may be more helpful than the concept of ‘support bubbles’, which are exclusionary and less sustainable in the longer term. Rigorously designed intervention and evaluation—taking a systems approach—will be crucial in ensuring scale-up and sustainability.

The dramatic change to social interaction necessitated by efforts to control the spread of COVID-19 created stark challenges but also opportunities. Our essay highlights opportunities for learning, both to ensure the equity and humanity of physical restrictions, and to sustain the salutogenic effects of social relationships going forward. The starting point for capitalising on this learning is recognition of the disruption to relational mechanisms as a key part of the socioeconomic and health impact of the pandemic. In recovery planning, a general rule is that what is good for decreasing health inequalities (such as expanding social protection and public services and pursuing green inclusive growth strategies) 4 will also benefit relationships and safeguard relational mechanisms for future generations. Putting this into action will require political will.

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Twitter @karenmaxSPHSU, @Mark_McCann, @Rwilsonlowe, @KMitchinGlasgow

Contributors EL and KM led on the manuscript conceptualisation, review and editing. SP, KM, CB, RBP, RL, MM, JR, KS and RW-L contributed to drafting and revising the article. All authors assisted in revising the final draft.

Funding The research reported in this publication was supported by the Medical Research Council (MC_UU_00022/1, MC_UU_00022/3) and the Chief Scientist Office (SPHSU11, SPHSU14). EL is also supported by MRC Skills Development Fellowship Award (MR/S015078/1). KS and MM are also supported by a Medical Research Council Strategic Award (MC_PC_13027).

Competing interests None declared.

Provenance and peer review Not commissioned; externally peer reviewed.

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Blog Justice Digital

https://mojdigital.blog.gov.uk/2021/01/13/our-lockdown-experiences-reflections-on-living-through-a-pandemic/

Our lockdown experiences...Reflections on living through a pandemic

Many of us have been working at home for several months now under lots of different circumstances. 

In March, with the first national lockdown it felt like a bit of a shock to the system knowing that we would be working from home for an unknown time. Now that we have been working this way for more than 9 months and it seems likely for at least the next few months we’ve all been finding different ways to deal with the impact of the pandemic. 

Obviously, like many others across government and public services, we have a huge responsibility to focus and continue to work on the ongoing delivery of services to our users in these times.

For the first few months of working remotely, most of my energy (along with many others!) was focussed on that and I didn’t really feel like I had any headspace to really process any personal impact. I live with my little dog, Daphne, and the first few months were pretty hard going but not as hard as for many people. 

I’m really lucky, as I think many of us are at MoJ, in that I’m part of a supportive team and I felt that I was able to share my anxiety about suddenly being pretty much confined to the house, alone. The team was great and we talked quite openly about it. They’ve been checking in on me ‘out of hours'’ and that’s been great. I highly value that we can be that honest with each other. 

Personally, I’ve found the past couple of months quite difficult for a few reasons: 

• Pandemic fatigue - if that’s a thing. It’s just felt relentless and I have friends and family who were then in Tier 3 restrictions since July. We absolutely must do what is right and follow the guidance but I’m very much looking forward to meeting my newborn niece, Valentina. She’s quite cute even though she’s not a puppy.   
• I miss seeing colleagues and friends in real life at work - a lot of my work is based on building relationships with people, having the unplanned conversations in the office and tea and cake! 
• I’ve recently become the Mental Health Champion in D&T and I’m very excited about this. Although this has come at a time that has felt particularly challenging personally and when I’ve felt quite overwhelmed, I’m trying to take this in my stride and do the best I can when I can. There’s a great team of mental health allies in our group and we are planning some good things for next year. 

I’ve been doing a couple of things to help deal with the ongoing pandemic and restrictions on our lives:

• Initially going to the office occasionally (and when allowed) and seeing colleagues. I have a real new found fondness for 102 Petty France and going there was really beneficial for my mental health. Though I appreciated it was harder for others with very long commutes and anxiety and concerns about the trains, etc. 
• Keeping to my favourite exercise classes and sessions as much as I can. I massively feel the difference when I’m not doing this and spin classes and deadlifts are now an essential part of keeping mentally well and happy for me.
• Dog training sessions on a Friday night - I know how to enjoy myself! I had been taking Daphne to agility training since September - through the wind and rain. Good for my soul and she seemed to love it! 
• Cold and wintery dog walks at lunchtimes to get outdoors during the short daylight days. 
• This Too Shall Pass - Stories of Change, Crisis and Hopeful Beginnings - Julia Samuel 
• Time and How to Spend it - James Wallman 
• The Boy, the Fox and the Horse - Charlie Mackesy 

Interesting that these were the three books I bought just before the initial lockdown in March - seem really relevant to the time we’re in. 

So these things are helping for now and I’m sure they will on an ongoing basis too. Things are obviously still quite uncertain and who knows how long we will be in this situation for, so I guess we will all be adapting as we go.

All these photos were taken before COVID-19 and the restrictions in place.

Tags: Covid-19 , wellbeing

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Comment by MATTHEW SALMON posted on 14 January 2021

Jenni thanks for sharing your experience - really helpful to other people with similar feelings about the enforced isolation. And great tips and suggestions for getting through to safe harbour in a few months.

Comment by Jenni Moss posted on 17 January 2021

Thank you Matthew, I hope so. Wishing you well

Comment by EVA BLASCO posted on 14 January 2021

A brilliant and honest blog that helps us remember we're in this together, and share similar ups and downs. Thanks Jenni.

Thank you Eva, that's very kind of you. Take care for now

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The Coronavirus Crisis

Personal essay: coronavirus lockdown is a 'living hell'.

A Resident Of Wuhan

Editor's note: The author of this essay asked for anonymity for fear of reprisals by authorities for speaking critically of the Chinese government.

The government lockdown orders in Wuhan, China, have emptied the city's streets. Stringer for NPR hide caption

The government lockdown orders in Wuhan, China, have emptied the city's streets.

As residents of Wuhan, China, my family and I are living in hell.

The city has been locked down for more than a month. Every night before falling asleep I have been confronted by an unreal feeling and many questions:

Read This Essay In Chinese

To read this essay in Chinese, click here.

I know that coronavirus is the reason for the lockdown — but did life in Wuhan have to become a living hell?

Why were we notified about the city lockdown at 2 a.m. on the second to last morning before the Lunar New Year?

Why have I not been given any instructions from a government officer about how to cope when an entire city is on lockdown?

I'm nearly 30 years old. My family members and I have devoted ourselves to our jobs to build a better life — and we have largely succeeded. There's only a little more to do before we reach the level of middle class.

But along the way, things did not go exactly as I'd hoped. I have been working hard in school since I was small. My dream was to become a journalist, and I passed the test to enter the best school for journalism in China.

After school, I learned that government supervision of the media meant that telling the truth was not an option. So I gave up my dream and turned to another career.

I kept telling myself that my hard work would reward me in my personal life. And to protect myself, I decided to shut up, to be silent about politics — even when I saw people treated unfairly by the government. I thought that if I followed that path, I would be secure, I would be one of the fortunate ones.

Now I realize that this is an illusion. A secure life is not an option with a political system that does not give us freedom to speak out and that does not communicate with us truthfully.

At the moment when the city was first locked down, I hoped with all my heart that China's political system, known for concentrating resources to get big jobs done, could save the Wuhanese. But infected patients were treated in the hospital in Wuhan as early as the beginning of December, and for unknown reasons, the government held off informing the public and taking effective action.

So they missed the best window of prevention due to this cover-up.

That knowledge has made me fall into desperation. The order to lock down the city appeared from nowhere on Jan. 23 at 2 a.m., without any sign or explanation to residents — even though everyone knew what was up.

People rushed to shop at 24-hour convenience stores at 3 a.m. to gather necessary food and other items. We tried every method to escape from Wuhan, but the cage was already locked.

On new year's eve, Jan. 24, I watched the glorious performances from a gala aired on CCTV, Chinese television. But our celebratory meal was sparse, pieced together from the few ingredients I'd been able to buy in that last-minute shopping trip.

Then on the second day of the new year, another order arrived out of the blue, notifying us that the Wuhanese shall not drive. But this order only survived for less than six hours — perhaps because the authorities realized that, with public transportation shut down, cars would be needed to drive medical staffers to work and back home. So community officers called upon residents of Wuhan to provide rides for many of these workers — and to get permits to do this driving. Under the pressure of massive criticism, the government had to revoke this order for residents to provide rides.

Other orders were issued that reflected the chaos. Residents were asked to donate rice and oil to feed the medical staffers at Wuhan's top hospital since there was not enough food to guarantee meals for them. But we are the taxpayers. Shouldn't the government be able to provide?

From former schoolmates who now work in the medical profession, I learned that medical workers were not given medical supplies and were exposed to a risk of death. Many people wonder: Why didn't they go on strike? It is because they were informed that if they went on strike, their licenses to practice medicine would be revoked and their family members' jobs would be affected.

Before this coronavirus, I always thought it was OK to sacrifice some level of democracy and freedom for better living conditions. But now I have changed my attitude. Without democracy and freedom, the truth of the outbreak in Wuhan would never be known.

What has happened in Wuhan is as if your house caught on fire and all your neighbors knew but forbade you from jumping out of the window. Only until the fire is out of control, and the entire town ablaze, do they slowly begin taking responsibility while highlighting their own heroic efforts.

Not everyone has the same privileges and rights. Because I knew how to get outside of the Great Firewall that blocks the Internet, I was able to obtain masks.

The younger generations, born after 1995 and in the 2000s, have good impressions about the Chinese system, putting the nation before all because they have been living in an era of prosperity and have yet to experience adversity.

The things that happened during this outbreak have greatly surprised those kids. For example, a young man scolded others on Weibo in the early days of the outbreak. He accused them of spreading rumors and argued that if we don't trust the government, there is nothing we can trust. Later, he said, when a member of his family was infected with the coronavirus but was unable to get treatment in the overcrowded hospital, he cursed and called for help.

When Li Wenliang, one of the doctors who first reported a mysterious SARS-like illness, died of the disease himself, a student commented on the Internet: "It was just the virus that killed him, so we should focus on the epidemics." But then the student's dormitory was appropriated for quarantine patients — and he was shocked and dismayed.

This is the lesson these young people are learning. When someone says we can accomplish something but we must pay a price, do not rush to applaud.

One day you may become the price that is paid.

There is a saying in Chinese that has taken on new meaning in this coronavirus era: "When the stick hits my own head, I finally understand the pain — and why some others once cried out of pain."

Perhaps it is true that only China can build a hospital in 10 days, only China can mobilize so many people to devote themselves to the anti-epidemic agenda, only China can lock down a city with millions of people at lightning speed.

But people are not thinking critically. They do not understand that if we had human rights, democracy and freedom, we would have learned about what happened in Wuhan one month earlier. And the first whistleblower would not have died for nothing.

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Open Access

Peer-reviewed

Research Article

The good, the bad and the ugly of lockdowns during Covid-19

Contributed equally to this work with: Talita Greyling, Stephanie Rossouw, Tamanna Adhikari

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Resources, Software, Supervision, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

Affiliation School of Economics, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa

Roles Conceptualization, Data curation, Investigation, Methodology, Project administration, Software, Supervision, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

* E-mail: [email protected]

Affiliation School of Economics, Auckland University of Technology, Auckland, New Zealand

Roles Data curation, Formal analysis, Investigation, Methodology, Validation, Visualization, Writing – original draft, Writing – review & editing

• Talita Greyling, 
• Stephanie Rossouw, 
• Tamanna Adhikari

• Published: January 22, 2021
• https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245546
• Peer Review
• Reader Comments

Amidst the rapid global spread of Covid-19, many governments enforced country-wide lockdowns, with likely severe well-being consequences. In this regard, South Africa is an extreme case suffering from low levels of well-being, but at the same time enforcing very strict lockdown regulations. In this study, we analyse the causal effect of a lockdown and consequently, the determinants of happiness during the aforementioned. A difference-in-difference approach is used to make causal inferences on the lockdown effect on happiness, and an OLS estimation investigates the determinants of happiness after lockdown. The results show that the lockdown had a significant and negative impact on happiness. In analysing the determinants of happiness after lockdown, we found that stay-at-home orders have positively impacted happiness during this period. On the other hand, other lockdown regulations such as a ban on alcohol sales, a fear of becoming unemployed and a greater reliance on social media have negative effects, culminating in a net loss in happiness. Interestingly, Covid-19, proxied by new deaths per day, had an inverted U-shape relationship with happiness. Seemingly people were, at the onset of Covid-19 positive and optimistic about the low fatality rates and the high recovery rates. However, as the pandemic progressed, they became more concerned, and this relationship changed and became negative, with peoples' happiness decreasing as the number of new deaths increased.

Citation: Greyling T, Rossouw S, Adhikari T (2021) The good, the bad and the ugly of lockdowns during Covid-19. PLoS ONE 16(1): e0245546. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245546

Editor: Francesco Di Gennaro, National Institute for Infectious Diseases Lazzaro Spallanzani-IRCCS, ITALY

Received: July 29, 2020; Accepted: December 30, 2020; Published: January 22, 2021

Copyright: © 2021 Greyling et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

Data Availability: All relevant data are within the paper and its Supporting Information files.

Funding: The following authors received salaries from their institutions, whom were also the funders of the research. 1. Prof T Greyling: University of Johannesburg via the University Research Fund. 2. Dr Stephanie Rossouw: Auckland University of Technology via the Faculty of Business, Economics and Law. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.

Competing interests: The authors have declared that no competing interests exist.

1. Introduction

In an attempt to curb the spread of Covid-19 and minimise the loss of life, governments around the world have imposed their version of mandatory self-isolation through implementing lockdown regulations. Unfortunately, restricting people's mobility and depriving them of what matters most might intensify the negative effect on happiness levels.

In an extreme country case, this might be amplified. In this study, we treat an extreme country as a country with very strict lockdown regulations, with likely high infection rates, amidst low levels of well-being. We define well-being as those aspects of life that society collectively agrees are important for a person's quality of life, happiness and welfare. One of the dimensions of well-being, material (income) hinges on a bleak economic outlook.

To this end, our primary aim in this study is to use the Gross National Happiness Index (GNH), a real-time measure of well-being, derived from Big Data, to investigate if lockdown regulations in itself caused a decrease in happiness. Secondly, we determine which factors matter most (factors significantly influencing happiness) to happiness under these changed circumstances. We accomplish these aims by using two econometric techniques: difference-in-difference (DiD) and ordinary least squares (OLS).

Against this backdrop, the current study makes several contributions to the literature:

• Determining whether lockdown regulations cause a decline in happiness –in an extreme country case scenario.
• Investigating specifically the determinants of happiness during a lockdown, whereas other studies have focused on mental well-being and related matters (see section 2).
• Being one of the few studies (see also Rossouw, Greyling and Adhikari; Greyling, Rossouw and Adhikari [ 1 , 2 ]) that investigates the effect of lockdown on happiness making use of real-time Big Data . Other studies such as Hamermesh [ 3 ] and Brodeur et al. [ 4 ] also use Big Data, though limited to Google Trends (see section 2).

These results give policymakers the necessary information to take action in increasing the happiness of the nation and set the scene for increased economic, social and political well-being. It also allows them to reflect on happiness outcomes due to their policy actions. An additional benefit of the current study is that policymakers do not need to wait for extended periods to see the consequences of their policies, as we are making use of real-time data, with immediate information. Usually, policymakers can only evaluate their own decision making, with significant time-lags, prolonging the implementation of corrective actions.

Our results indicate lockdown itself causes a decrease in happiness. Furthermore, in an extreme country case (a country under stringent lockdown regulations coupled with low levels of well-being) what matters most to happiness under lockdown is the factors directly linked to the regulations that were implemented. These factors can be classified as (i) social capital issues; lack of access to alcohol (and tobacco), increased social media usage, and more time to spend at home, of which all are negatively related to happiness except the stay-at-home factor, and (ii) economic issues; concerns over jobs and the threat of retrenchments, which are negatively related to happiness. The finding on the stay-at-home order is interesting as even though lockdown itself caused a decline in happiness, it seems that people adjust and over time begin to appreciate the benefits of staying at home.

Noteworthy is that Covid-19, proxied by new deaths per day, had an inverted U-shape relationship to happiness. Seemingly people were, at the onset of Covid-19, positive and optimistic as the fatality rate was relatively low and recovery rates high. However, as the pandemic progressed, they became more concerned, and this relationship changed and became negative, with peoples' happiness decreasing as the number of new Covid-19 deaths increased.

The rest of the paper is structured as follows. The next section contains a brief background on South Africa and briefly discusses literature about happiness and studies conducted on the impacts of pandemics and consequently lockdown regulations. Section 3 describes the data, the selected variables and outlines the methodology used. The results follow in section 4, while the paper concludes in section 5.

2. Background and literature review

2.1 south africa.

In this study, we focus on South Africa because it presents us with a unique case to investigate the effect of a lockdown on happiness when levels of well-being are already low. Health and income, two dimensions of well-being, was significantly affected, although in opposite directions. Health was positively affected by the lockdown since it limited the spread of Covid-19. At the stage of writing the paper (3 June 2020), the number of new Covid-19 cases were nearly 120,000 (John Hopkins University [ 5 ]). On the other hand, the economic outlook of the country, and therefore peoples' incomes, was negatively affected. This opposite effect has led to significant debates on the value of the implementation of the lockdown.

Furthermore, South Africa implemented one of the most stringent lockdown regulations (comparable to the Philippines and Jordan), which exacerbated the costs to well-being and the economy while already experiencing a severe economic downturn. Therefore, South Africa is an example of an extreme country case which unfortunately amplifies the effects of the difficult choices made by policymakers. Therefore, we take advantage of this unique country case and determine how stringent lockdown regulations impact happiness during a one in 100-year event.

In South Africa, there are five levels of differing lockdown regulations, with alert level 5 being the most stringent and alert level 1 the most relaxed. The idea behind these levels is to curb the spread of Covid-19 and give time to South Africa's health system to prepare itself. Additionally, as they move down in levels, South Africans receive increasingly more of their previous liberties back. During level 5, which was announced 23 March 2020 and implemented on 27 March 2020, South Africans were only allowed to leave their homes to purchase or produce essential goods. All South Africans were instructed to work from home, there was no travel allowed, the sale of alcohol and tobacco were banned, people were not allowed to exercise outside their homes, and the police and defence force ensured compliance to the restrictions. South Africa moved to level 4 lockdown on 01 May 2020. With this move, they received back the ability to exercise outside from 6 am—9 am, purchase more than just essential goods, including food deliveries as long as it was within curfew.

Interestingly, the sale of alcohol and tobacco was still banned. On 01 June they moved to level 3, allowing restricted sales of alcohol (Mondays to Thursdays) and the re-opening of certain businesses. However, the services industry, especially beauty and tourism, remained closed. At the time of writing this paper, South Africa was still under level 3 lockdown.

Whereas everybody understands that the Covid-19 infections curve needs to be flattened, there are grave concerns that these stringent lockdown regulations will also flatline South Africa's well-being and economy. Before the Covid-19 lockdown, South Africa's average happiness levels were 6.32 compared to an average of 7.23 and 7.16 in Australia and New Zealand, respectively (Greyling et al. [ 2 ]). Furthermore, South Africa had a 29 per cent unemployment rate, and the gross domestic product (GDP) has been estimated to shrink by 7 per cent in 2020 (Bureau of Economic Analysis [ 6 ]). According to the South African Reserve Bank [ 7 ], an additional 3 to 7 million people can potentially become unemployed as a direct consequence of the pandemic, thereby increasing unemployment rates to approximately 50 per cent. The country's sovereign credit rating was downgraded to junk status in March 2020, which impacted on political stability, the level of the national debt and debt interest payments. Add to this already grim situation, the fact that consumption of South Africans has been declining in 2020, with a significant decrease seen after lockdown, then one can very easily see how the well-being and happiness levels in South Africa can plummet.

2.2 Happiness

Why should we care whether people's happiness is adversely impacted by not only a global pandemic but also by the response from the government? The studies of Helliwell, Layard, Stiglitz et al., Veenhoven, Diener and Seligman and others [ 8 – 12 ], have shown beyond a shadow of a doubt that if policymakers want to maximise the quality of life of their citizens, they need to consider subjective measures of well-being. Piekalkiewicz [ 13 ] states that happiness may act as a determinant of economic outcomes: it increases productivity, predicts one's future income and affects labour market performance. By measuring happiness, individuals themselves reveal their preference and assigned priority to various domains, which cannot be identified by a measure such as GDP. As was pointed out by Layard [ 9 ], while economists use exactly the right framework for thinking about public policy, the accounts we use of what makes people happy are wrong. In layman's terms, we say that utility increases with the opportunities for voluntary exchange. However, Layard [ 14 ] argues that this overlooks the significance of involuntary interactions between people. Policymakers should formulate policy to maximise happiness or well-being, as is the main aim of many constitutions. This can be achieved by directing economic, social, political and environmental policy to maximise well-being while acknowledging that people's norms, aspirations, feelings and emotions are important. Thereby underscoring that understanding and measuring happiness should be an integral part of the efforts to maximise the quality of life.

On the other hand, if people's happiness is negatively affected, such as it was in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic and the implementation of lockdown regulations, there are far-reaching consequences.

These consequences are as follows:

• Social capital: unhappier people display less altruistic behaviour in the long run (Dunn et al. [ 15 ]). They are also less active, less creative, poor problem solvers, less social, and display more anti-social behaviour (Lyubomirsky et al. [ 16 ]). If unhappier people display more anti-social behaviour, South Africa could see an increase in behaviour such as unrests, violent strikes and perhaps higher crime rates.
• Health care: unhappier people are less physically healthy and die sooner (Lyubomirsky et al. [ 16 ]). Additionally, unhappy people engage in riskier behaviour such as smoking and drinking, thereby placing unnecessary pressure on national health systems.
• Economic: unhappy workers are typically less productive, in particular in jobs that require sociability and problem solving (Bryson et al. [ 17 ]). If an economy can raise the rate of growth of productivity, by ensuring their workers are happier, then the trend growth of national output can pick up.

2.3 Literature on the determinants of happiness during a lockdown

Having established that policymakers should strive to maximise the happiness of their people, it is necessary to know what determines happiness. Previous studies have investigated, at a macro-level, what influences happiness and found that economic growth, unemployment and inflation play a significant role (Stevenson and Wolfers, Perović, Sacks et al. [ 18 – 20 ]). However, these studies were conducted during 'normal' periods and not under such conditions that are currently plaguing the world. The current study will have the opportunity to investigate this exact question, namely what determines happiness during a lockdown driven by a global health pandemic.

Naturally, the number of studies being conducted to examine the effect of Covid-19 is growing exponentially. This increasing interest in the effect of a global pandemic as well as the policies implemented by governments on peoples' well-being, come on the back of relatively few studies conducted during prior pandemics such as SARS and the H1N1. When SARS hit in 2002 and then again when H1N1 hit in 2009, scholars were only truly starting to understand that for governments to formulate policies to increase well-being, you needed to measure well-being. Of the current studies being conducted on the effect of Covid-19 or lockdown regulations on all affected domains, not many studies are in a position to use real-time Big Data, such as we do.

In layman's terms, Big Data is a phrase used to describe a massive volume of both structured (for example stock information) and unstructured data (for example tweets) generated through information and communication technologies such as the Internet (Rossouw and Greyling [ 1 ]). At the time of writing this paper, the following studies were closest aligned with our study and focused on:

• nationwide lockdown on institutional trust, attitudes to government, health and well-being, using survey data collected at two points in time (December 2019 and April 2020) (1003 respondents) (Sibley et al. [ 21 ]). Their preliminary results showed a small increase in people's sense of community and trust. However, they also found an increase in anxiety/depression post-lockdown and hinted at longer-term challenges to mental health.
• the happiness of married and single people while in government-imposed lockdown by running simulations to formulate predictions, using Google Trends data (Hamermesh [ 3 ]). Not surprisingly, married people were more satisfied with life than single people.
• the timing of decision-making by politicians to release lockdown based on a comparison of economic benefits with the social and psychological benefits versus the cost, increase in deaths if policymakers released lockdown too early (Layard et al. [ 22 ])
• the stages of GNH using a Markov switching model in New Zealand (Rossouw et al. [ 23 ]). They found that happiness was at a lower level and the unhappy state lasted longer than was expected. Furthermore, they found that the factors important for New Zealand's happiness post-Covid-19 were related to international travel, employment and mobility.
• exploring Covid-19 related determinants of life dissatisfaction and feelings of anxiety in a cross-country study using survey data collected between 23 March and 30 April (de Pedraza et al. [ 24 ]). They found that persons with poorer general health, without employment, living without a partner, not exercising daily and those actively seeking out loneliness report higher dissatisfaction and higher anxiety. Additionally, they found that the effect of Covid-19 on dissatisfaction and anxiety levels off with a higher number of cases.

2.4 Literature on the causal effect of a lockdown

To the knowledge of the authors, there are only two papers that investigated the causal effect between lockdowns and population well-being. Brodeur et al. [ 4 ] investigated the changes in well-being (and mental health) in the United States and Europe after a lockdown was implemented, using Google Trends data. They found an increase in searches for loneliness, worry and sadness, which indicated a negative effect on mental health. Greyling et al. [ 2 ] conducted a cross-country study investigating the effect of lockdown on happiness. They found that lockdown caused a negative effect on happiness, notwithstanding the different characteristics of the countries (South Africa, New Zealand and Australia), the duration and the type of lockdown regulations. When they compared the effect size of the lockdown regulations, they found that South Africa, with the most stringent lockdown regulations incurred the greatest happiness costs.

Brodeur et al. [ 4 ] study analysed data from one Big Data source, Google Trends and collected data for a short period between only 01 January 2019 and 10 April 2020 in countries that had introduced a full lockdown by the end of this period. Greyling et al. [ 2 ] study used both Google Trends and the GNH index but did not investigate the determinants of happiness after lockdown for an extreme country case.

In summary, taking all of the above into consideration, there is not one study which determines causality between lockdown and happiness and analyses the determinants of happiness in an extreme country case using real-time , Big Data . Therefore, our study is the first of its kind.

3. Data and methodology

To estimate the causal effects of a lockdown on happiness, we use a Difference-in-Difference (DiD) approach (see section 3.3.1). The technique compares happiness (dependent variable), before and after the treatment (the lockdown) to a counterfactual time period in the year before. For the control period, we select the same time period, with the same number of days in 2019, corresponding to the number of days in 2020, thus 152 days in each year (01 January 2020 to 03 June 2020, excluding 29 February 2020). Our results should thus be interpreted as the average impact of the lockdown on happiness, comparing pre and post-lockdown in 2020 to the same time period in 2019, which we assume had normal levels of Gross National Happiness (see a discussion on the GNH in section 3.2.1). In this manner, we also account for seasonal trends in happiness.

In the analyses, we make use of daily data for South Africa. As high-frequency data available at almost real-time, is scarce, we make use of novel Big Data methodologies to harvest data. Additionally, we use the Oxford Stringency dataset that was released in May 2020, which includes data related to lockdown regulations, such as time-series data on the stay-at-home index, Covid-19 cases and Covid-19 deaths (Hale et al., Roser et al. [ 25 , 26 ]).

3.2 Selection of variables

The selection of the variables included in our estimations is based on the reviewed literature, the contents of tweets related to the lockdown and data availability.

3.2.1 Gross National Happiness Index–the dependent variable.

To measure happiness (the dependent variable), we make use of the Gross National Happiness Index (GNH), which was launched in April 2019 (Greyling, Rossouw and Afstereo [ 27 ]). This project measures the happiness (mood) of a country's citizens during different economic, social and political events.

Since February 2020, the researchers extended the project that initially analysed the sentiment of tweets, to incorporate the analysis of the emotions underpinning tweets. The team did this to determine which emotions are most prominent on specific days or events.

To construct the GNH index, the researchers use Big Data methods and extract tweets from the voluntary information-sharing social media platform Twitter. Big Data, such as Twitter, provides real-time information for policymakers to assist them when facing short-term deadlines with imperfect information. Big Data also allows governments to 'listen' and capture those variables which their citizens deem to be important for their well-being, rather than relying on pre-defined economic utility theories. Big Data offers governments the opportunity to observe people's behaviour and not just their opinions. This approach of revealed preferences unveils a reflexive picture of society because it allows the main concerns of citizens (and the priority ranking of those concerns) to emerge spontaneously, and it complements as such the information captured by gross domestic product. Lastly, Big Data does not suffer from non-response bias (Callegaro and Yang [ 28 ]).

Greyling, Rossouw and Afstereo [ 27 ] apply sentiment analysis to a live Twitter-feed and label every tweet as having either a positive, neutral or negative sentiment. This sentiment classification is then applied to a sentiment-balance algorithm to derive a happiness score. The happiness scores range between 0 and 10, with five being neutral, thus neither happy nor unhappy.

All tweets per day are extracted, and a happiness score per hour is calculated. The index is available live on the GNH website (Greyling, Rossouw and Afstereo [ 27 ]). In South Africa, the average number of tweets extracted for 2020 is 68,524 per day. South Africa has approximately 11 million Twitter users, representing almost 18 per cent of the population (Omnicore [ 29 ]). Although the number of tweets is extensive and represents significant proportions of the populations of the countries, it is not representative. However, Twitter accommodates individuals, groups of individuals, organisations and media outlets, representing a kind of disaggregated sample, thus giving access to the moods of a vast blend of Twitter users, not found in survey data.

Furthermore, purely based on the vast numbers of the tweets, it seems that the GNH index gives a remarkably robust reflection of the evaluative mood of a nation. Also, we correlate the GNH index with 'depression' and 'anxiety', derived from the 'Global behaviors and perceptions at the onset of the Covid-19 Pandemic data ' survey, for the period from 01 March 2020 (OFS [ 30 ]). We find it negative and statistically significant related, therefore, it seems that the GNH index derived from Big Data gives similar trends to survey data. (We would have appreciated the opportunity to correlate the GNH to a happiness measure–but a happiness measure, as such, was not included in the survey).

Considering the GNH index over time, we found that the index accurately reflects a nation's emotions, for example, when South Africa won the Rugby World Cup on 02 November 2019, the happiness index accurately depicted the joy experienced by South Africans ( Fig 1 ). The hourly happiness score was 7.9 at 13:00, the highest score ever measured, at the exact time that the final whistle was blown to announce the victory of the Springboks over England.

• PPT PowerPoint slide
• PNG larger image
• TIFF original image

Source: Authors' calculations using GNH dataset (Greyling et al. [ 27 ]).

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245546.g001

Also, when the famous American basketball player, Kobe Bryant and his daughter Gigi, tragically passed away on 27 January 2020, the happiness index once again captured the negative mood of the nation, and the happiness score decreased to 5.8, significantly below the mean (see Fig 2 ). The result of the GNH mirrors the one determined by the Hedonometer, which recorded an average happiness score of 5.89 on the day of Bryant's death. The top three words that made this day sadder than the previous seven were 'crash', 'died' and 'rip'.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245546.g002

3.2.2 The selection of covariates included in estimations.

We found ourselves in uncharted territory, as there are limited studies estimating happiness functions during a lockdown (see Brodeur et al., Greyling et al., Rossouw et al. [ 2 , 4 , 23 ]). As a result, we considered these studies and the tweets to determine the factors to consider, which might influence happiness during a lockdown , as well as the most tweeted subjects. It was evident from the tweets that the main topics of discussion related to economic concerns, the prohibition of the sale of alcohol and tobacco, the stay-at-home orders and the Covid-19 pandemic itself.

To estimate our difference-in-difference model, we restricted our covariates to the lockdown variable, a year effect, the difference-in-difference estimator and controlled for new Covid-19 deaths, job searches and searches for alcohol. We were restricted in the number of covariates due to the limited observations and potentially encountering the issue of over-identification of the models. Therefore, we selected those variables which were available for both 2019 and 2020, and which were also trending subjects during the lockdown period. We were not able to add a stay-at-home variable which captures the lack of mobility, as the counterfactual time period is then not comparable to 2020.

Lockdown, our treatment variable, divides the sample into two distinct time periods: before the announcement of the lockdown, 23 March 2020 and thereafter. We make use of the date of the announcement of the lockdown rather than the date of the implementation, as this showed the severest effect on happiness (see Brodeur et al. [ 4 ]).

The Covid-19 pandemic and consequent spread of the virus is the reason for the lockdown. As such, we include the number of new daily Covid-19 deaths as well as its square. This will allow us to control for the likelihood of a U-shaped relationship between the number of Covid-19 deaths and happiness. Furthermore, there is likely a lagged effect on happiness due to Covid-19 deaths being reported in the media only the following day. Therefore, we lag these variables by one day. We derive the data from the Oxford Stringency data set (Hale et al. and Roser et al. [ 25 , 26 ]).

To measure jobs (a proxy for future job uncertainty) and the sale of alcohol and tobacco, we use the methodology as set out by Nuti et al. and Brodeur et al. [ 4 , 31 ] and use daily searches on Google Trends (see also Simionescu and Zimmermann [ 7 ]). We considered searches for both the alcohol and tobacco topic; however, the variables follow the same trends during the lockdown period and are highly correlated (r = 0.83). We are, furthermore, restricted in the number of covariates to include in the model and decided to include only 'alcohol' in the estimations. We justify this decision since the ban of alcohol affects a larger proportion of the population. It is estimated that 41 per cent of males and 17.1 per cent of females consume on average 9.3 litres of alcohol per capita annually whereas only 17.6 per cent smoke (Peltzer et al. and Reddy et al. [ 32 , 33 ]). However, as a robustness check, we also run all estimations using the searches for tobacco.

It should be noted that when we use Google Trends data, it is expressed as an index between 0 and 100 with 0 being the "least" interest and 100 being the "most" interest shown in the topic for the year. However, the series are not comparable across years as the underlying data is sourced from different search requests for each of the two years. To address this, we use a scaling procedure outlined in Brodeur et al. [ 4 ]. First, we generate "weekly" interest weights for each day by expressing the average weekly score that a particular daily score fell on, as a proportion of the average yearly score. Then, we multiply the daily scores with these weights to obtain weighted search trends. Finally, we normalise these weighted search trends to render us a score between 0 and 100, which is comparable across years.

Other topics that are trending are related to the 'stay-at-home' orders. The Oxford Stringency dataset includes a time series variable on the stay-at-home orders. It differs on a day to day basis according to its stringency. It is an ordinal variable plus binary of geographic scope. It takes the value 0 if there are no stay-at-home orders and 1 if the government recommends not leaving your house. Value 2 represents people not leaving their homes with the exceptions of daily exercise, grocery shopping, and 'essential' trips. Not leaving your home with minimal exceptions (e.g. allowed to leave only once a week, or only one person can leave at a time, etc.) takes the value 3 (Hale et al. [ 25 ]).

Furthermore, we include the number of tweets per day, as it forms part of the Twitter data extracted daily for South Africa (Greyling et al. [ 27 ]), which is a proxy for connectivity. It also gauges the opportunity cost of not being able to have face to face interactions, which seems to be negatively related to happiness (Chae and Wilson et al. [ 34 , 35 ]). Interestingly the number of tweets increased markedly during the lockdown period, from an average of 60,708 to 80,000 tweets per day. Table 1 provides descriptive statistics for the variables included in the estimations.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245546.t001

3.3 Methodology

3.3.1 difference-in-difference..

Where GNH it is the daily happiness for South Africa at time t . The treatment variable lockdown takes the value of 0 pre-announcement day (23 March) and one post-announcement of lockdown in both the year of the actual lockdown (2020) as well as the year before the lockdown (2019). Year is a dummy variable where 1 is the year 2020. We control for new deaths per million with a one-day lag as well as the quadratic effect of new deaths per million on GNH. Additionally, we control for the effect of job and alcohol searches. As a robustness test, we use the number of new Covid-19 cases instead of new Covid-19 deaths (see Table 4 in S1 Appendix ).

Our main coefficient of interest is the interaction between the lockdown and the year variable. If it is found to be significant, it provides evidence of a causal effect of the lockdown on the dependent variable, in the current year, notwithstanding the trend in 2019.

3.3.2 OLS regression.

Here, y t refers to the Gross National Happiness Index (GNH) for each day and X t is a vector of several relevant covariates to account for the changes in the happiness levels during the lockdown period. μ t is the error term.

Due to the various factors that affect happiness, some of our independent variables may be correlated with the error term, leading to endogeneity concerns. Depending on the direction of the correlation between the error term and the X-variable, the coefficient could be biased upwards or downwards. For instance, the coefficient on the indicator for jobs is likely biased upwards as it, in all likelihood, shows the effect of concerns about jobs as well as some other negative economic shock on happiness. In the absence of panel data or an appropriate instrument, it is difficult to ascertain causality to Eq ( 2 ). However, simply correlating the covariates and the error term we find all levels of correlation to be less than 0.3, although a very basic test, this still indicates that the likelihood that endogeneity might bias estimations is relatively small. A natural extension of the work, as better data becomes available with time, would be to address these concerns.

We cannot rule out the probability of autocorrelation and heterogeneity in our data, especially due to its time-series nature. We use robust standard errors to account for this. The choice of our controls, however, comes with a caveat. Seeing as we only have 81 daily observations using a larger battery of covariates would lead to problems arising due to overfitting of the model. This issue is considered in Green [ 36 ], who suggests a minimum of 50 observations for any regressions as well as an additional eight observations per additional term. As a robustness test, we included tobacco rather than alcohol products (see Table 5 in S1 Appendix ).

4. Results and analysis

4.1 difference-in-difference estimation.

Fig 3 tracks the dependent variable (GNH) over the time period before and after the date of the lockdown (23 March) in the year of the lockdown (2020) and the year preceding it. On the day of the announcement of the lockdown and for a few successive days, we see a sharp downwards departure from the 2019 trend, assumed to be normal.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245546.g003

Table 2 provides the results for the difference-in-difference specification, which helps us to make causal inferences on the effect of the lockdown on the GNH. At the outset, we notice a negative and significant effect of the 'year' variable (p<0.001), showing that on average the GNH was lower in 2020 than in 2019.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245546.t002

We control for trends in job searches (a proxy for job uncertainty) and alcohol searches (a proxy for increased interest in alcohol-related topics in the specification). Both variables show a negative association with GNH, implying if there are more searches for jobs or alcohol, reflecting a scarcity in these items, GNH decreases. The negative effect of alcohol is statistically significant at the 1% level (p<0.001). We also control for lagged new Covid-19 related deaths and lagged new Covid-19 related deaths squared, both are significant (p<0.001). Interesting is the finding of the significant inverted U-shaped relationship between new Covid-19 deaths and happiness ( Fig 4 ). In the earlier stages of the pandemic, with very few new Covid-19 deaths, it appears that people were positive and optimistic as the fatality rates were very low and the recovery rates very high. However, as time progressed, the higher fatality rates turned the relationship around so that the number of new Covid-19 cases were negatively related to happiness.

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245546.g004

To determine if the decrease in GNH was due to the lockdown (the treatment) specifically and not just due to the year trend, we must consider the estimated coefficient of the interaction variable 'lockdown and year'. We report a negative and statistically significant coefficient (p-value 0.064) on the interaction variable, indicating that 'lockdown' caused, on average a decrease in GNH of 0.101 points when compared to its mean values for average 2019 values, controlling for the general trend in the two years. Thus, we can conclude that the lockdown caused a decline in GNH in 2020 compared to 2019. The decline of 0.101 may seem small at first but given the low general levels of happiness in South Africa compared to other countries (Greyling et al. [ 27 ]) the reduction is substantial.

4.2 Regression analysis

To address the second research question, namely, to determine the factors that are related to happiness after the lockdown was implemented, we consider the results of Table 3 .

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245546.t003

Table 3 shows that job searches (p-value 0.09), searches for alcohol (p-value<0.001) and the number of tweets is negatively related to happiness. In contrast, the stay-at-home index is positively related to happiness (p-value<0.001). The squared relationship between new Covid-19 deaths and happiness is negative and statistically significant (p-value<0.001), indicating that this relationship changed over time as was highlighted in section 4.1. Suppose we consider the relatively low mortality rate (0.02 per cent of confirmed cases in the early stages) compared to countries such as the USA (3.9 per cent), the U.K. (15.4 per cent) and Spain (9.4 per cent). In that case, it could explain the initial positive relationship between the number of new Covid-19 deaths and happiness. Although as time passed and the death rate increased (currently, the mortality rate is at 1.5 per cent of confirmed cases), this relationship became negative. As a robustness test, we used the number of new Covid-19 cases and its square instead of the new Covid-19 deaths and found similar results (see Table 4 in S1 Appendix ).

As expected, job searches, a proxy for uncertainty about the future job market is negatively related to happiness (p-value<0.001). Analysing the tweets, we realised that this is a major concern, which is closely related to economic concerns. The economic performance of South Africa in the last year has been weak with high levels of unemployment (increase to 50 per cent), low growth rates (GDP is expected to contract with 7 per cent in 2020) and high debt to income ratios (government debt as a percentage of GDP– 80 per cent). In a recent survey conducted by Statistics South Africa on behavioural and health impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic (Statistics South Africa [ 37 ]), it was found that 95 per cent of the respondents were very concerned about the economy. In contrast, only 60 per cent was concerned about the Covid-19 pandemic itself. This supports our current findings in that economic factors matter more to South Africans happiness levels than Covid-19 itself.

Alcohol-related searches are also found to be negatively related to happiness (p-value<0.001). Considering the close correlation between alcohol and tobacco products, we can assume that what holds for alcohol products, also holds for tobacco products. As a robustness test, we excluded the alcohol variable and included searches for tobacco variable and found very similar results (see Table 5 in S1 Appendix ). South Africa is one of the very few countries globally that have banned alcohol and tobacco sales during the Covid-19 pandemic. It is argued that these products contribute to the negative effects of the virus. The banning of these products had severe implications on different levels of society. Individuals see this as a major infringement of their human rights, negatively affecting their happiness. Furthermore, research done by Sommer et al. [ 38 ] proved that because of the presence of hordenine in beer, it significantly contributes to mood-elevation. In South Africa, which is well-known for its high per capita beer and alcohol consumption (Statistics South Africa [ 39 ]), also related to 'socialising', the ban on these products had a severe negative effect on happiness. Even in level 3, when the ban on alcohol sales was lifted, but still restricted, we found this negative relationship.

The restricted sale of alcohol and tobacco has indirect consequences for South Africans happiness via the economic impact since these industries are two of the largest industries in South Africa. They employ people across the whole supply chain from production to retail. Due to the ban on these industries, people can potentially lose their jobs. Lastly, the government sector forgoes all taxes on these products. This is against the backdrop of the recent downgrade of South Africa's debt rating to junk status in an already very uncertain fiscal environment. If all of these factors are aggregated, we can understand that the cumulative effect of the banning and restriction of sales of these products severely decreases the happiness levels. In Table 5 in S1 Appendix , we use tobacco searches instead of alcohol to estimate the determinants of happiness, which gives us results that are qualitatively similar to Table 3 .

The number of tweets is negatively related to happiness (p-value<0.001). Previous research has shown that increases in the use of social media are negatively related to happiness (Rolland et al., Chae and Wilson et al. [ 34 , 40 , 41 ]). Noteworthy is that the number of tweets during the lockdown period increased significantly from an average of 60,708 per day before the lockdown to 80,000 per day after the lockdown indicating that more people used social media during the lockdown period.

Interesting is the result of the stay-at-home orders being positively related to happiness (p-value<0.001). On analysing the contents of the tweets, we find the following. South Africans are wary of contracting Covid-19, and therefore, they abide by the stay-at-home orders and social distancing regulations to minimise the risk. That means that the stay-at-home orders in itself increase happiness; it is only once the other lockdown regulations are added that a total decrease in happiness levels are experienced.

Additional benefits revealed from analysing the tweets show that being at home provides a more peaceful and calmer environment compared to the rushed experience outside their homes. Also, people in the suburbs seem to be more convivial, with strangers greeting one another as people went for short walks around their neighbourhoods. In general, people have more time to spend with their loved ones. People earning salaries incur major savings, as there is less opportunity to spend money. People also save on commuting to and from workplaces and other destinations. One of the unexpected benefits of the stay-at-home orders is the much lower crime rates experienced in the country. Homes are constantly occupied, limiting the risk of residential robberies (-3.8 per cent). Other types of crimes such as murder (-72 per cent), rape (-87.2 per cent) and carjacking (-80.9 per cent) are much lower as well (Adapted from the speech of Police Minister Cele 2020 [ 42 ]).

In summary, what changed when the lockdown regulations to curb the spread of Covid-19 were implemented? It caused a significant decrease in happiness, and factors related to the lockdown regulations became relevant determinants of happiness.

5. Conclusions

In this paper, we used the Gross National Happiness Index (GNH), a real-time measure of well-being, derived from Big Data, to investigate whether lockdown regulations caused a decrease in happiness. Additionally, we determined which factors matter to happiness under these changed circumstances. We accomplished these aims by using two models: difference-in-difference and ordinary least squares.

We added to the current literature by determining causality between lockdown and happiness and analysing the determinants of happiness after a lockdown in an extreme country case using real-time , Big Data . Subsequently, this was the first study of its kind.

To determine if the decrease in GNH was due to the lockdown, specifically, we considered the estimated coefficient of the interaction variable 'lockdown and year'. We found a negative and statistically significant coefficient on the interaction variable, indicating that the lockdown caused a decline in GNH in 2020 compared to 2019.

As regards to the factors that are related to happiness after the lockdown was implemented, we found searches for alcohol (tobacco), the number of tweets and uncertainty about the future job market to be negatively related to happiness. In contrast, stay-at-home orders are positively related to happiness. Interesting is the negative and statistically significant squared relationship between new Covid-19 deaths and happiness, indicating that this relationship initially was positive but became negative over time.

Considering the results mentioned above, it ultimately means that if policymakers want to increase happiness levels and increase the probability to achieve the happiness levels of 2019, they must consider those factors that matter most to peoples' happiness. These factors include allowing creatures of habits some of their lost comforts by reinstating the sale of alcohol and tobacco. In saying that, we do advocate for responsible alcohol use by all South Africans and note that the significant effect of the ban on the sale of alcohol could be confounded by the restriction on social gatherings as well.

These results are important for countries in similar well-being situations, thus low levels of happiness, a diverse state of the economy and an increasing number of Covid-19 cases to evaluate what the effect of a strict lockdown is.

Additionally, policymakers should assure citizens that there is a credible plan to get the economy, which is currently in dire straits, back on track. Such an economic plan should stimulate growth, create job opportunities and increase employment rates, supply the necessary infrastructure and deal with curbing vast budget deficits and debt burdens. Hopefully, such policies will fuel the dying embers of a dying economy and increase well-being levels.

Lastly, it would be remiss of us not to note the limitations of the study. First, we were restricted in the number of covariates we could add to our difference-in-difference model due to the limited observations and therefore potentially overidentifying the models. Second, regarding the inverted U-shaped relationship between new Covid-19 deaths and happiness, we acknowledge that there might be confounding factors at play, initially seen as ‘positives' of the lockdown, but later turned into negatives. However, using alternative sets of covariates in the regression analyses, the inverted U-shape between new Covid-19 deaths and happiness remained. Therefore we trust that the revealed relationship is robust.

Supporting information

S1 appendix. robustness checks..

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245546.s001

https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0245546.s002

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank our colleagues Professor Emeritus John Knight from Oxford University and Dr Kelsey O'Connor from STATEC Luxembourg, for their generosity in providing feedback on the study.

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• Published: 02 November 2022

Experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan leads to a lasting increase in social distancing

• Darija Barak 1   na1 ,
• Edoardo Gallo 1   na1 ,
• Ke Rong 2 ,
• Ke Tang 2 &

Scientific Reports volume  12 , Article number:  18457 ( 2022 ) Cite this article

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• Epidemiology
• Human behaviour

On 11th Jan 2020, the first COVID-19 related death was confirmed in Wuhan, Hubei. The Chinese government responded to the outbreak with a lockdown that impacted most residents of Hubei province and lasted for almost three months. At the time, the lockdown was the strictest both within China and worldwide. Using an interactive web-based experiment conducted half a year after the lockdown with participants from 11 Chinese provinces, we investigate the behavioral effects of this ‘shock’ event experienced by the population of Hubei. We find that both one’s place of residence and the strictness of lockdown measures in their province are robust predictors of individual social distancing behavior. Further, we observe that informational messages are effective at increasing compliance with social distancing throughout China, whereas fines for noncompliance work better within Hubei province relative to the rest of the country. We also report that residents of Hubei increase their propensity to social distance when exposed to social environments characterized by the presence of a superspreader, while the effect is not present outside of the province. Our results appear to be specific to the context of COVID-19 and are not explained by general differences in risk attitudes and social preferences.

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Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has brought the most significant and devastating global disruption since World War II with an estimated 5.5 million deaths worldwide 1 , 2 , 3 . Most countries implemented drastic lockdown policies to minimize infection levels, prevent healthcare systems from being overwhelmed, and reduce the number of deaths 4 , 5 , 6 , 7 . The first COVID-19 related lockdown started on 23rd Jan 2020 in Wuhan (Hubei) and for the subsequent 3 months the measures taken in Hubei were the strictest both within China and worldwide. In particular, according to the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT), the average government response index value for Hubei in this period was 75.8 (with 0 being no measures and 100 being the maximum) 4 . Meanwhile, China as a whole scored 58.5, and the closest scoring countries—Italy and Mongolia—had an average index of 53.0 and 49.9 respectively. It is estimated that the measures implemented by the Chinese government have potentially prevented 100,000 s of COVID-19 infections 8 , and possibly contributed significantly to public health in China overall 9 .

The policies aimed at containing the spread of the pandemic have had a profound impact. Research into the impact of lockdowns and other Non-Pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) has documented a deterioration in physical and mental health in China 10 , 11 as well as other countries 12 , 13 , 14 . Recent evidence shows there are mental health and burnout effects associated with the Zero-COVID policies 15 . However, to date, little attention has been paid to the effects of the pandemic on human behavior. Our paper addresses this gap.

Previous research suggests that shock events and/or drastic institutional interventions can have a long-lasting impact on behavior 16 , 17 . For example, colonial conscription rules in sixteenth century Bolivia and Peru led to differences in household consumption that survive to this day 18 . More recently, the 2004 tsunami in Thailand led to significant increases in prosocial behavior, risk aversion, and impatience in rural areas 19 . The sudden and drastic nature of the COVID-19 outbreak and associated lockdown policies in Hubei compared to the rest of China means they may have persistent effects on the behavior of Hubei’s residents in the short and medium term, especially when it comes to reacting to post-lockdown policies to contain the pandemic. The sudden and drastic nature of the COVID-19 outbreak and associated lockdown policies in Hubei compared to the rest of China means they may have persistent effects on the behavior of Hubei’s residents in the short and medium term, especially when it comes to reacting to post-lockdown policies to contain the pandemic.

Using an interactive web-based experiment conducted half a year after the end of the lockdown, we show that Hubei residents behave differently compared to inhabitants of other provinces in China in terms of social distancing, receptiveness to COVID-19 policies, and when exposed to a superspreader environment. In particular, we estimate that every extra 1000km between Wuhan and one’s place of residence contributes to a 7% decrease in social distancing. Using OxCGRT, we show that an increase in the harshness of lockdown measures is associated with an increase in distancing.

The differences in social distancing behavior between residents within and outside Hubei may translate into differences in social distancing policies effectiveness. We examine the effect of soft and hard policy interventions to promote social distancing. The hard policy intervention—a fine—increases social distancing only in Hubei, while the soft intervention—an informational message or “nudge”—increases social distancing both within and outside Hubei. Finally, Hubei-based participants practice more social distancing in a social environment with a superspreader. Using data from incentivized preference elicitation tasks, we find that the observed differences in behavior between Hubei residents and those from the rest of China are not explainable by general differences in preferences.

Experimental design

Figure  1 presents the flow of a typical round of the experiment. Participants are randomly assigned to groups of five that stay the same throughout their involvement in the study. Within the group, in each round they are randomly assigned to five positions within the social structure—nodes on a network—as shown in Panel I. In every round each participant has to make a binary decision of whether or not to practice social distancing. Each participant has to privately decide whether to practice social distancing at a cost of 35 points. In the example in Panel II, the participant color-coded in blue is the only one who chose to practice social distancing. Once decisions are made, the computer picks one subject to be potentially infected by COVID-19 uniformly at random. If this patient zero subject practices distancing, she becomes infected with probability 50%. If patient zero does not practice distancing, infection happens for sure. COVID-19 then spreads from infected to healthy participants who do not practice social distancing with a commonly known probability of 65%. Note that those who practice social distancing cannot (a) infect others or (b) become infected through this contagious process.

Flow of a typical round of baseline and intervention. In the experiment, we use the following parameterization: f  = 0 points in baseline and in nudge intervention, and 15 points in fine intervention. Final payoffs for the round are a combination of individual social distancing choice and infection status. For example, a participant who practices social distancing and is healthy, receives (− 35 + 100) = 65 points. In the figure, the chosen social environment is the superspreader. In the experiment, half of the treatments had superspreader environment while the other half had a homogeneous environment.

An example of such contagious process is in panels III-V of Fig.  1 . Panel III shows patient zero color coded in red. Given that patient zero chose not to practice distancing, there is a 65% chance that the participant in the superspreader position, who does not practice distancing either, gets infected. Panel IV shows the case when the participant in the superspreader position gets infected, and can therefore spread COVID-19 to all other participants. Finally, Panel V shows the instance when infection occurs for one out of the two remaining participants who do not practice distancing and are connected to the superspreader. Panel VI shows the final outcome of the spreading process with three participants infected and two remaining healthy.

At the end of the round, healthy participants receive 100 points while those infected get 0 points, minus costs of social distancing if applicable. For example in panel VI of Fig.  1 , three participants receive a payoff of 0, one gets 65 points, and another one 100 points. Throughout both instructions and the experiment, participants are primed to think about COVID-19. For full details on the instructions and the experimental interface, consult the Supplementary Information ( SI ).

Participants play 20 rounds of the above social distancing game, which constitute the baseline part of the experiment. After these 20 rounds, they are treated with one of the policy interventions. The soft policy intervention is an informational message or nudge —participants must watch a 3-min video which explains how failure to practice distancing can harm others. The hard policy intervention is the introduction of a fine of 15 points for everyone who does not practice social distancing in a round of the game. Participants play another 20 rounds of the social distancing game under either the nudge or fine policy intervention. Note that the payoff structure remains unchanged in the nudge treatments (Fig.  1 with f  = 0 points), while in the fine treatments subjects receive the fine in every round where they do not practice distancing irrespective of their health status (Fig.  1 with f  = 15 points).

A second treatment dimension is the social environment. Participants are randomly assigned to either a homogeneous or a superspreader environment (as in Fig.  1 ), which stays the same throughout the 40 rounds of the experiment. In the homogeneous case, everyone is connected to everyone else in the group so an infected participant can spread COVID-19 to any other healthy participant that does not practice distancing. In the superspreader case, one participant is connected to all the others, and there are no other connections in the group. This means that any spread of infection beyond patient zero must involve the central participant either as the spreader or the recipient. A defining feature of COVID-19 is the crucial role of superspreaders in the diffusion of the disease 20 , 21 . For respiratory syndromes, an important determinant of being a superspreader is biological 22 , 23 , something that is typically unknown to the individual and outside the scope of this study. Another determinant is, however, the centrality of the individual in terms of the structure of social interactions—this is typically common knowledge and varies widely across individuals in most environments 24 . This treatment dimension, therefore, allows an investigation of how a social environment with a superspreader affects the propensity to social distance.

Using a full-factorial 2 × 2 design, we therefore obtain four treatments. As standard in the experimental literature, subjects were randomly assigned to treatments, so the effect of our treatment variables is causal. We collect at least 10 groups of 5 subjects for each of those treatments. Additionally, to investigate the impact of Hubei residence on behavior, we ran these four treatments separately in Hubei and rest of China. We summarize the details of our dataset next.

Using a local recruitment company, we sourced 415 participants from 11 Chinese provinces. Figure  2 displays the proportion of participants from each province. In the final sample, 205 subjects (41 groups) are from Hubei province and 210 (42 groups) from the rest of China. We verify the place of residence using (1) self-reported data from the recruitment survey, (2) data from the survey company, and (3) IPs of subjects collected when completing the experiment. Despite the possibility of selection bias, we obtain a diverse sample in terms of age and gender. In particular, 47.3% of our sample is female and the mean age is 35 years (s.d. 10 years). Figure  2 also shows the average stringency of lockdown measures in the 11 provinces in our sample over the period of the Hubei lockdown as measured by the 0–100 scale of the OxCGTR index. Note that throughout the paper we focus on the difference between Hubei and other 10 provinces which were under more moderate lockdown measures. Further note that since we have between 1 and 56 subjects from each of the other 10 provinces, we cannot comment on the differences between these provinces.

Distribution of subjects from different Chinese provinces. Color coding indicates the average values of the OxCGRT index for the provinces.

We analyze the data using a linear probability model, where the individual decision to practice social distancing is the dependent variable (binary), and the controls are (1) our treatments, (2) a set of demographic variables, and variables for personal preferences, plus (3) a variable capturing the distance of one’s place of residence from Wuhan. Estimated coefficients from this model are in M1 Table 1 .

Hubei province versus the rest of China

Our first finding is that the individual propensity to practice social distancing in our experiment is inversely related to distance from Wuhan to one’s place of residence. We estimate that every extra 1000km between Wuhan and one’s place of residence contributes a 7 percentage point decrease in the probability of social distancing. In practical terms, this suggests that the individual propensity to do social distancing of residents of Chongqing, which is approximately 723km away from Wuhan, to be 5 percentage points less than that of Wuhan residents. The effect is statistically significant in all our specifications and robust (M1, p  = 0.02). Replacing the distance variable with a dummy equal to one for Hubei subjects (M2 Table 1 ), we estimate that the probability of social distancing is 8.5 percentage points higher in Hubei province than outside of it (M2, p  = 0.006).

We hypothesize that distance from Wuhan captures heterogeneity in the harshness of the lockdown policy experienced by people from different parts of China. While tight COVID-19 related restrictions were generally experienced throughout the world in early 2020, Wuhan was the first to go under total lockdown for a nearly 3-months period together with its 11 million residents 25 . According to the OxCGRT, Hubei province has spent the whole 23rd Jan–2nd May 2020 period in a very strict lockdown, whereas other provinces (with the exception of Heilongjiang) mostly experienced more moderate measures 4 . To test this hypothesis, we use data from the OxCGRT, which tracks harshness of government response to the COVID-19 pandemic globally. We focus on the 23rd Jan–2nd May 2020 period, and calculate the average of the overall government response index for each of the provinces in our sample. In this way we obtain a single index on a [0, 100] scale. The correlation between distance from Wuhan and this index for the 20 cities in our sample is − 0.6683 ( t test, p  = 0.001). Replacing distance of one’s place of residence from Wuhan by the index, we estimate that a 1 point increase in the response index corresponds to a 0.75 percentage point increase in individual propensity to do social distancing in our experiment, which is significant in all specifications considered (M3 Table 1 , p  = 0.03).

An important caveat is that the lockdown measures were not imposed randomly—stricter measures were put in place in provinces with more severe COVID-19 outbreaks. The Hubei outbreak was by far the largest in China, with over 68,300 infections and about 4500 COVID-19 related deaths confirmed at the time of writing 26 . Guangdong—the second province by the size of the outbreak—recorded approximately 3300 cases and 8 deaths. Indeed, the correlation between measures of harshness and number of confirmed cases for 11 provinces in our sample is 0.6835 ( t test, p  = 0.001). An alternative interpretation of our results is, therefore, that the experience of the severity of the outbreak, rather than the lockdown measures, is the primary driver of the behavioral difference. While we are unable to differentiate between these alternative channels, the central message remains that what Hubei participants experienced caused a lasting change in their social distancing behavior.

The association between social distancing behavior and the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic experience raises two natural questions. The first one is whether there is a difference between participants from Hubei, who lived through a larger outbreak and harsher lockdown, and those from the rest of China in terms of their behavioral responses to our treatment variables—fine/nudge policy interventions and homogeneous/superspreader social environments. The second one is whether the association is driven by specific demographic characteristics and/or risk/social preferences. In order to investigate this, we repeat our core analysis but interact every variable with a dummy equal to one if a subject is from the Hubei province and zero otherwise. This is equivalent to fitting the model separately on the two datasets. The results are reported below, and the full table with coefficients can be found in the SI .

Response to intervention

The hard policy intervention of introducing a fine increases the propensity to social distance in Hubei, but not in the rest of China. As shown in Fig.  3 a, the fine leads to a significant 6.0 percentage points increase in individual propensity to social distance in Hubei ( t test, p  = 0.04), while outside of Hubei the estimated effect is only 0.9 percentage point and not significant ( t test, p  = 0.7). The difference between the two effects is not statistically significant ( t test , p  = 0.2).

( a ) Estimated effect size on the probability of social distancing for treatment variables and selected controls, split by Hubei and rest of China. Note that: (1) risk score estimates are reported for an extra 25 points, (2) Prosocial = 1 for subjects with prosocial values as classified by the SVO scale, (3) Female = 1 for female subjects, (4) age estimates are reported for an extra 10 years, (5) Employed = 1 if subject is either employed or runs their own business. ( b ) Probability of doing social distancing separately for Hubei and rest of China in baseline part of the experiment (B), and under fine (F) and nudge (N) interventions split by social environment and positions in the superspreader environment.

In contrast, the soft policy intervention (the nudge) increases the propensity to social distance throughout China. As shown in Fig.  3 a, the estimated size of the effect is 5.4 percentage points ( t test, p  = 0.02) in Hubei province and 6.7 percentage points ( t test, p  = 0.0004) in the rest of China. The nudge is marginally more effective than the fine in the rest of China ( t test, p  = 0.06), while the effectiveness of the two policy interventions is indistinguishable in Hubei ( t test, p  = 0.9). Note that the difference in the effectiveness of the nudge in the Hubei province and outside of it is not statistically significant ( t test, p  = 0.7).

Response to social environment

A theoretical analysis of the social distancing game assuming self-interested rational individuals predicts that the individual propensity to do social distancing should be higher in the homogenous social environment. This stems from the fact that the density of connections is higher than in the superspreader case (see SI ). This may, however, differ behaviorally because the diffusion of COVID-19, especially on the outset, was driven by superspreading events 20 , 27 , 28 . Figure  3 a shows that the theoretical prediction is validated in the rest of China—participants’ propensity to do distancing is 11.1 percentage points higher in the homogeneous compared to the superspreader environment ( t test, p  = 0.02). In contrast, participants from Hubei do as much distancing in the superspreader environment as they do in the homogeneous one—the difference is only 1.8 percentage points and it is insignificant ( t test, p  = 0.5).

Figure  3 b delves deeper into the behavior in the superspreader environment between Hubei and rest of China participants. It reports average propensity to practice distancing split by place of residence, type of intervention, and position in the social environment. The left panel shows that Hubei-based participants in the superspreader position do significantly more social distancing relative to those in the homogeneous environment, while recipients do about as much as those in the homogeneous social structure. This is true for both the baseline part of the experiment (middle set of bars), and the two interventions (top and bottom sets of bars). The right panel shows that the behavior of the participants in the rest of China is quite different. Here, subjects in the superspreader position do as much social distancing as in the homogeneous environment particularly in the baseline part of the experiment and following a nudge intervention. In contrast, the recipients perform significantly less distancing relative to both the superspreader and the homogeneous environment throughout the experiment.

To confirm these observations, we repeat our core analysis, but instead of using a single dummy for a superspreader environment, we include one for each of the types of positions in this environment (see the SI for the full table with the coefficients). The results of this exercise confirm our observations. In Hubei the superspreader has a 8.9 percentage points higher propensity to social distance compared to participants in the homogeneous environment ( t test, p  = 0.02), and peripheral participants do as much distancing as participants in the homogeneous environment ( t test, p  = 0.3). In contrast, in the rest of China, superspreader participants do as much distancing as participants in a homogeneous environment ( t test, p  = 0.6), and peripheral participants have a 14.7 percentage points lower propensity to social distance compared to the ones in a homogeneous environment ( t test, p  = 0.002).

Risk aversion and social preferences

An alternative explanation for our findings on the behavioral differences between participants from Hubei and the rest of China is that the two subject pools differ in terms of their general attitudes toward risky behavior. In fact, past research shows that natural disasters can sometimes lead to persistent increases in risk aversion 19 . As part of the experiment, we collect subjects’ attitudes to risk using an incentive-compatible ‘Bomb’ risk elicitation task (BRET) 29 . The task amounts to deciding how many boxes to collect from a maximum of 100, with more boxes translating into potentially higher earnings, but also a higher risk of collecting a (hidden) bomb that destroys all earnings. Theory predicts that a risk-neutral subject collects 50 boxes with lower values indicating greater risk aversion. The average subject in our sample is moderately risk-averse with a BRET score of 42, which is consistent with previous findings in the literature 29 . Additionally, as part of recruitment, we collect subjects’ self-reported attitudes to risk 30 .

There is no difference in general risk attitudes between the Hubei and rest of China participants according to either the BRET score (Mann–Whitney test, p  = 1.0) or the self-reported risk index (Mann–Whitney test, p  = 0.2). In other words, the differences between Hubei and rest of China participants seem to be confined to behaviors related to the COVID-19 pandemic, i.e. social distancing, rather than general behavior. Interestingly, Fig.  3 a shows that the propensity to do social distancing is increasing with risk aversion (as captured by the BRET score) for participants in the rest of China ( t test, p  = 0.02), but there is no significant association for Hubei-resident participants ( t test, p  = 0.6). A potential explanation is that the harsh experience of the lockdown and/or pandemic in Hubei generates a widespread attitude toward social distancing that is independent of generalized risk preferences, while in the rest of China the propensity to practice social distancing is, as one would expect, increasing with risk aversion.

A second alternative explanation for our findings is that participants from Hubei have a less self-interested attitude compared to participants from other parts of China, and therefore they practice more social distancing to benefit others. The study of the effects of the 2004 tsunami in Thailand suggests that ‘shock’ events may lead to more prosocial behavior 19 . We collect subjects’ social preferences using an incentivized 6-item Social Value Orientation (SVO) task 31 . The underlying idea of the SVO framework is that people vary in terms of their motivations when evaluating different allocations of resources between themselves and others. In our sample, 51% of subjects are individualists and 49% are prosocials, and therefore we use a binary variable to capture social preferences.

There is no difference in social preferences between participants from Hubei and the rest of China according to the SVO score (Mann–Whitney test, p  = 0.5). This indicates that the observed differences in behavior by Hubei participants are specific to social distancing attitudes, rather than general differences in preferences. In general, we would expect that participants with prosocial values are more likely to practice social distancing in the experiment compared to individualists because social distancing benefits others in their group. Figure  3 a shows that subjects from Hubei province with prosocial values are marginally more likely to do social distancing with an average difference of 7.7 percentage points ( t test, p = 0.07), while the difference is only 0.6 percentage points in the rest of China and is not significant ( t test, p  = 0.9).

Demographic characteristics

When it comes to demographic characteristics, we find two heterogeneities between Hubei province and the rest of China (Fig.  3 a). First, while more education is associated with significantly more distancing outside of Hubei province, the effect is not present within Hubei. In particular, an extra year of education is associated with 5.2 percentage points more distancing in the rest of China ( t test, p  = 0.0005), while in Hubei the estimated size of the effect is 0.5 percentage point and is insignificant ( t test, p  = 0.8). Second, subjects from Hubei province who were either employed or owned a business at the time of conducting the experiment did significantly more social distancing in the experiment, but the same is not true outside of it. The estimated effect in Hubei is 13.1 percentage points ( t test, p  = 0.02), and 4.4 percentage points in the rest of China ( t test, p  = 0.5). Note that the effects of age and gender are not significant in our experiment. This may be partly explained by the fact that our sample is restricted to adults. In particular, existing research into adolescents suggests that younger people may differ in their attitudes to lockdowns and social distancing relative to an adult population 32 .

The sudden outbreak of COVID-19 in Wuhan in early 2020 demanded a quick and decisive response from the government. To limit the spread of the virus, and potentially save tens of thousands of lives, the Chinese government implemented a very strict lockdown which affected most of Hubei province and lasted almost three months. Our experiment is the first to shed light on the possible medium-/long-term effects brought by the outbreak and the associated lockdown.

Our first result is that the level of social distancing is significantly higher in our experiment in Hubei province than outside of it. Both the distance of one’s place of residence from the epicenter of the outbreak—Wuhan—and the strictness of government response to COVID-19 during the initial lockdown are robust predictors of individual propensity to social distance. Our experiment does not attempt to discriminate between the two plausible explanations—severity of the outbreak and strictness of lockdown—but it is clear that the overall experience of Hubei residents has created a behavioral difference that is persistent half a year after the end of the outbreak.

Our second result is that a soft intervention in the form of an informational video (a nudge), which highlights the harm caused to others by not practicing social distancing, is effective at increasing individual propensity to social distance throughout China. In contrast, a hard intervention in the form of a fine for non-compliance seems to work in Hubei province but not outside of it.

Our third result is that subjects in Hubei and the rest of China react differently to a superspreader type of social environment. Participants in the rest of China largely respond in line with theoretical predictions based on a standard game-theoretic framework, while participants from Hubei province violate these predictions. In particular, in a superspreader environment the recipients do not decrease their social distancing relative to the homogeneous environment, while superspreaders increase their propensity to social distance. This leads to a higher level of social distancing overall.

We find that the above behavioral heterogeneities cannot be explained by standard measures of general risk aversion or social preferences. The data suggests that these differences in behavior are specific to the context of social distancing and COVID-19, rather than general differences in preferences between Hubei residents and those from the rest of the country. Note that our list of controls is non-exhaustive, and other potential explanations may contribute to the observed differences in behaviour. For example, it has been shown that in China people with anxiety and depression are more willing to pay for a COVID-19 vaccine 33 .

Finally, our study highlights the important role that interactive web-based experiments can play in investigating people’s behavior, and how behavior can be affected by ‘shock’ events. Even though the decision situation faced by subjects in our experiment is artificial, we find clear and robust differences in behavior of subjects from the Hubei province and the rest of China, even after controlling for demographic characteristics and social preferences.

Full details on methods, including theoretical framework, data collection and data analysis methods, together with a detailed description of the dataset are in the Supplementary Information ( SI ).

Ethical approval

This research received ethical approval for the use of human subjects from the Faculty of Economics Ethical Committee (University of Cambridge, ref.UCAM-FoE-20-02) and the Department of Psychology Ethics Committee (Tsinghua University, ref.THU202019). The experiment was performed in accordance with the relevant guidelines and regulations. Informed consent was obtained from all subjects before participation.

The experiment was coded in oTree (v2.2.4) 34 with a server hosted on Heroku ( http://www.heroku.com ).

Recruitment and sessions

Subjects were recruited using the local survey company Wenjuan which is affiliated with Zhongyan Technology. During recruitment, we collected information on basic demographics, including gender, age, and place of residence. The experiment was conducted between October 3rd and November 14th 2020, and involved a total of 30 sessions with 1–5 groups each. The experiment took an average of 59 min (s.d. 20 min) to complete, and subjects earned an average of 17.7 yuan (s.d. 3.5 yuan). Subjects remained anonymous throughout both recruitment and experiment, and repeated participation was not allowed.

Learning effects

We identify significant learning effects in the early rounds of baseline and intervention parts of the experiment. In effect, subjects tend to converge to a particular stable strategy (e.g. always practice social distancing) after several rounds of the experiment. Therefore, in the analysis we use the last 10 rounds of the baseline and intervention parts of the experiment, but all results are robust to using all data. Full details on convergence analysis and relevant robustness checks are in the SI .

Statistical analysis

Since our dependent variable is binary, our analysis relies on a Linear Probability Model 35 , 36 , but the estimates are robust to using a Logit or a Probit model instead (see SI ).

Data availability

The dataset collected and analyzed during the current study is available from the corresponding author (Edoardo Gallo, email: [email protected]) on reasonable request.

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Acknowledgements

We are grateful to Alastair Langtry and Ilia Shumailov for helpful discussions. We acknowledge support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (grant no. 71872098 for KR and grant no. 72192802 for KT), the Beijing Social Science Fund (KR grant no. 21DTR051), the Guoqiang Institute of Tsinghua University, Cambridge Humanities Research Grant Scheme (EG), Economic and Social Research Council and Trinity College Cambridge (DB). This work is the sole responsibility of the authors, and does not necessarily represent the official views of any of the funding agencies.

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These authors contributed equally: Darija Barak and Edoardo Gallo.

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Faculty of Economics, University of Cambridge, Sidgwick Avenue, Cambridge, CB3 9DD, UK

Darija Barak & Edoardo Gallo

Institute of Economics, School of Social Sciences, Tsinghua University, Haidian District, Beijing, 100084, China

Ke Rong & Ke Tang

School of Economics, Anhui University of Finance and Economics, Bengbu, 233030, Anhui, China

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D.B. and E.G. contributed to all parts of the paper and they share equal contribution. K.R., K.T. and W.D. contributed to data collection and writing of the paper. E.G. and K.R. are corresponding authors.

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Correspondence to Edoardo Gallo , Ke Rong or Ke Tang .

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Barak, D., Gallo, E., Rong, K. et al. Experience of the COVID-19 pandemic in Wuhan leads to a lasting increase in social distancing. Sci Rep 12 , 18457 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-23019-w

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-022-23019-w

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Experiences and challenges faced by the working population during COVID-19 Lockdown: A qualitative study

Shana shirin najeeb.

Department of Community Medicine and Public Health, Amrita Institute of Medical Sciences, Amrita Vishwa Vidyapeetham, Kochi, Kerala, India

Leyanna Susan George

Background:.

The largest COVID-19 national lockdown was declared on 25 March 2020 in India with a total shutdown of workplaces and transport sectors. A complete lockdown deemed the entire population of the country to stay wherever they were residing at that point of time with no entry or exit movements being permitted thereafter. This unique situation betwixt a menacing health crisis rolled out a scenario uncustomary to the nation`s citizens. The varied responses of the masses to the lockdown need to be captured in order to understand the difficulties and dilemmas faced by them. Hence, this qualitative analysis aimed to capture the immediate challenges and experiences faced by the working population during the first-ever declared nationwide lockdown.

Methodology:

After obtaining institutional ethical committee clearance, a qualitative study was conducted using grounded theory approach. Using purposive sampling, people representative of the working-class population in Kerala were selected from three districts of the state. Equal representation of males and females were maintained. In-depth interviews were conducted via telephone using an interview guide till data saturation was obtained. The audio recorded data were later transcribed verbatim and translated to English. The transcripts were then manually coded to identify the emerging themes and subthemes and conclusions were drawn after triangulation.

The age of the study participants ranged from 32 to 71 years, they were occupied in different vocations and belonged to middle-class families across three districts of Kerala. All of them were aware and were mentally prepared for a national lockdown. They also made arrangements such as purchase of food, drinking water, medicines, etc., for home but also for office as well. Even though most of them were initially excited about the lockdown it was then followed by fear of contracting the disease, worries about loss of work and financial security. The study participants identified the advantages of lockdown as having more time for self & for family, use of the online/digital medium for routine activities and many also appreciated the support provided by the government in the form of food kits and loans. The lockdown was found to have increased the workload especially for women who had to manage not only family but also online work from home.

Conclusion:

The study was able to capture the different experiences and challenges faced by the middle-class working population. Even though they went through a cascade of initial excitement followed by fear of contracting the disease, it eventually turned into concerns of job and financial insecurities. The united frontline work of various sectors like police, health sector, local self-government, Kudumbashree and voluntary groups collectively aided in building community resilience enabling the southern state of Kerala to overcome the devastating effects of the pandemic and lockdown.

Introduction

The noxious COVID-19 disease was first reported by in Wuhan, China, in December 2019.[ 1 ] Due to globalisation and high transmission rate of the virus, the disease spread swiftly trans borders[ 2 ] and India reported its first case in the southern state of Kerala on January 30 th , 2020.[ 3 ] Cases started surging manifold globally and on 11 March 2020 the World Health Organization declared the outbreak as a pandemic.[ 4 ] In the effort to contain the pandemic, countries undertook different strategies for social restrictions and implementing lockdowns was at the forefront of these measures.[ 5 ]

The largest COVID-19 national lockdown in the world began on March 25 th , 2020 in India with a total shutdown of workplaces and transport sector.[ 6 ] A complete lockdown deemed that the entire population of the country had to abide by the rules and stay wherever they were residing at that point of time with no entry or exit movements being permitted thereafter.[ 7 ] This challenging proclamation of phase I lockdown was initially announced for a period of 21 days, and was later on extended till June 8 th , 2020 and thereafter restrictions were lifted in a phased manner across India.[ 8 ]

The unprecedented declaration of the lockdown had a drastic impact on the routine lives of employed people, especially those belonging to lower and middle-income groups. Anxiety, seclusion, increased family & work stress, excessive screen time have been reported to lead to compromised health and general well-being of men and women alike.[ 9 ] As offices and schools were closed, employed people had to accustom to a new “work-from-home” policy with their family around and in rather less-optimum work settings.

This unique situation betwixt a menacing health crisis rolled out a scenario uncustomary to the nation`s citizens. There is a paucity of data to understand the varied responses of the masses to the lockdown amidst the pandemic. Hence, this brings forth a necessity to study in detail the immediate challenges and experiences faced by the working population during the first-ever declared nationwide lockdown.

Methodology

After obtaining institutional ethical committee clearance, a qualitative study was conducted using grounded theory approach. Using purposive sampling, people representative of the working-class population in Kerala were selected from 3 districts of the state – namely Ernakulum, Kottayam and Alappuzha. Equal representation of males and females were maintained. Due to the strict travel restrictions amidst the lockdown, the in-depth interviews were conducted via telephone till data saturation was obtained. A total of ten interviews were conducted using an interviewed guide that was developed after extensive formative research. Probing questions were further asked to explore the topic in depth. Informed verbal consent was obtained for participating and audio recording of the interview. The interviews were conducted either in English or in the local language Malayalam, depending on the participants’ comfort. The audio recorded data was later transcribed verbatim and translated to English. The transcripts were then manually coded to identify the emerging themes and subthemes.

To augment the validity of the findings, it was subsequently verified by another researcher. The differences that evolved were resolved through discussion till consensus was reached between the two researchers. Eventually, conclusions were deduced by triangulation.

The age of the study participants ranged from 32 to 71 years, with a mean age and standard deviation of 43.8 years ± 10.37 years. In order to get the perspective of the working middle-class population of Kerala, those engaging in different occupations such as teachers, doctors, secretaries, priests, company managers and self-employed people were purposefully selected. Equal representation of both genders was maintained. The immediate challenges and experiences faced by them during the lockdown have been described under the following themes:

Lockdown declaration

An initial nationwide Janata curfew was conducted on 22 March 2020. This was followed by the Prime Minister`s sudden declaration of a complete lockdown from 25 March. Most of the study participants got a notion that the curfew was a predecessor of a lockdown, as the number of COVID-19 cases was rising multi-fold globally. The extensive media coverage on the topic through various news channels and social media gave a forecast of a stringent action likely to materialize soon. The fact that many countries had declared a lockdown, also suggested that India would be adopting a total closure soon. Hence, most of the participants were mentally prepared for the lockdown. However, an IELTS trainer admitted, in a visibly shocked tone:

“I had an idea it was coming but was busy with work. I thought they were just exploring the possibility. Once they actually locked down the entire country, I was shocked!” -40-year-old male IELTS trainer

The initial feelings varied between the participants. Some were engulfed with anxiety while others felt a sense of uncertainty prevailing over them.

“This was a new experience…I had a mixed feeling of anxiety and excitement!” – 41-year-old assistant professor.

However, a 40-year-old teacher stated that he felt the lockdown was unnecessary as every year people were dying more due to other reasons:

“When I looked at the mortality rate (due to COVID), I didn’t think it was too high because every year in US alone, flu causes 6 lakhs deaths.”

Lockdown preparation

Initially, the participants expected the lockdown to be for 2-3 weeks duration and had not anticipated it to be extended further. Therefore, they had bought things for a few days only, and not for the long run.

“Our belief was all will be back to normal in 2 weeks. So, everything was planned only till then.” -49-year-old female managing director

When asked about the different preparations that they carried out for the lockdown, most of them affirmed that they had done some form of preparation. Some had gone on a “ panic-buy” and hoarded a lot of items. Essential food commodities with longer shelf-life and those with farther expiry dates had been purchased.

“We get packaged (drinking) water here, so I ordered a 100 litres of water, some instant noodles and biscuits in the beginning.” –41-year-old male bank manager

Regularly-used medicines, emergency drugs for the elderly at home and hygiene-related products like sanitizers and masks were stocked by most.

“Didn’t know how this would pan out, so I withdrew money from the bank, I didn’t think the banks would be operational.” -40-year-old teacher. However, others felt it wasn`t necessary to keep cash in hand as most of the transactions are conducted online nowadays.

With respect to work-related arrangements, granting leave to subordinates, paper correction and shifting of office work to home were done. However, due to the undetermined duration of the lockdown, people felt a lack of preparation in the measures they took.

Change in the pattern of concerns and fears

Initial concerns.

The dominant fear of the participants at the onset of the lockdown was the fear of getting inflicted with COVID-19 and its consequences. They were afraid of being exposed to the disease by mingling with other people and hence saw the lockdown as a good preventative measure.

“When I used to see the number of cases increasing day by day on T.V, I used to feel scared. (Therefore) I saw the lockdown in a positive light.” – 40-year-old Priest

He further went on to explain his fear of shortage of food supplies and its likely grave repercussions, which was similarly voiced by others too.

“Kerala is a state dependent on its neighboring states for food supplies - from rice to fruits. So there is a chance of a break in the food supply.”

Another pressing concern among majority of the participants was the uncertainty brewing over them – about how long the lockdown would last. People were also worried about the economic crisis that would arise and how it would affect the social balance of the system as many were losing their jobs. Few of the participants shared the plight of those who are separated from their families.

“There are many like me stuck in other districts, states and countries. Our concern is when and whether we will be able to meet our families.” -41-year-old male bank manager.

Change in concerns with the progression of the pandemic

The initial concerns of fear of shortage of basic necessities, COVID-19 illness, other medical emergency conditions and uncertainty regarding the future slowly evolved with advancement of the pandemic. These early concerns were later overtaken by the fear of financial instability and job insecurity.

“We have learned to cope up living with limited resources, we have slowly adjusted to it.” –40 year male teacher

Multiple reasons were stated for this marked change in concerns, such as people`s acclimatisation to the new circumstances, police department`s work and the robust state governance for their timely and effective measures in handling the crisis.

“The Kerala government and health system has been able to effectively reduce the case fatality rates.” –41-year-old female secretary

Financial instability and job insecurity was the supreme fear in the later phases of the lockdown as all sectors were affected and there was an undeniable drain on the resources. People were also worried about their health as they had been sitting idly at home and their daily routine and sleeping patterns had been disrupted. The fear regarding COVID differed between the participants - some had lost the fear of getting infected while others still feared being exposed to the disease.

“There are different mutations for this virus.so the fear is still there.” -41-year-old male assistant professor

Positive outcomes of the lockdown

Regarding the benefits of the lockdown, participants stated that it had provided them with ample spare time which they wouldn’t have got otherwise. Hence, they could utilize this period for personal development and spending quality time with family.

“We got time as a family and started to exercise and play badminton with our child” -32-year-old female teacher

Majority agreed that unnecessary medicine consumption and visits to the doctor for trivial reasons had reduced. A sudden sharp hike in the number of COVID cases was also prevented by avoiding intermixing of the people due to the restrictions placed. Another common factor among the people were that they resorted to farming and gardening and realized the importance of cultivating their own produce.

“I used to do gardening and growing vegetables as a pastime before, but now I realize we are mutually dependent on each other for our survival and I water them with a renewed mindset now.” –40-year-old male

It was observed that the grocery kits provided by the government, local parties and NGOs benefited many in the lower strata of the society. The loan schemes offered by the Kudumbashree also helped them.

“We got 18 kits of commodities needed for our daily lives! We got 15 kg rice free of cost and got to buy 10 kg of rice from the ration shop at a very meagre amount.” –41-year-old female.

Furthermore, people started thinking innovatively to the situation and began using the digital platforms to navigate their problems and found new arenas of scope in proceeding with their work. People felt that the crisis had opened new doors for the IT sector as they ventured into the work-at-home pattern:

“We can work and have meetings from home…its lot easier and cheaper. That’s quite a transformation!” -49 years old MD of an IT company

Some of the participants expressed that the lockdown experience had made them resilient and more empowered than before.

“I was alone, I understood there is no point in worrying. Later all my fears went away. Am ready to live in any circumstance now!” –71 year-old businesswoman who was residing alone in her house during the lockdown.

Disadvantages of the lockdown

One of the most prominent problems was the financial constraint which the lockdown brought down on the society. It was observed that migration plans of people had been halted and scores of people had lost their jobs amidst the pandemic.

“I had plans to migrate to Canada in September 2020, but couldn’t because of the lockdown. It brought a major change in my life.” –40-year-old male

Majority stated that they faced difficulties in repaying loans, as their income had decreased. The lack of freedom and the feeling of others having control over one`s personal movements were detested by the people.

“I realized that the government or system is very powerful and felt external forces are controlling my freedom. It was a realization with fear for me as I had never thought it would ever happen.” –40–year–old principal

Fear-mongering was another issue raised – participants felt that the public was over-reacting to the disease to the point one couldn’t cough/sneeze in public without being stigmatized. The monotony of playing a single defined role each day was taxing for the people and although family spending time together was seen as a comfort generally, the participants felt that being stuck in the same environment for long triggered ill temper.

“My irritation and anger lasts longer now, I don’t have any other way of giving a vent. I am seeing the same people again and again. Familiarity breeds contempt!” -42-year-old female.

Workload and gendered perspective

The participants felt that as there were more people at home round the clock and house-helps were on leave, there was an undeniable increase in workload at homes. When the interviewer enquired about the gendered differences regarding the lockdown, without exception, all the participants agreed that women bore the brunt of the workload at home. However, it was noticed that men who had never ventured into the kitchen before, took advantage of the lockdown phase and started learning new culinary skills and helping out spouses.

“My husband cooks and cleans now.” –32-year-old teacher

The situation at home, however, was not similar for everyone. It was observed that the continuous and demanding household work, childcare pressures and online office work proved to be laborious for women during the lockdown. Therefore, women were generally perceived to be in a more disadvantaged position due to their challenging and multifaceted nature of roles. Furthermore, as interactions within and beyond the house became indifferent and infrequent, the opportunities for refreshment receded too, leading to their frustration lasting longer.

“In my house, I don’t think men lift a finger for anything. For everything I need to do the running about. The irritation is double or triple than when I would go for work.” -42-year-old lady stated in exasperation.

Purpose of the lockdown

When questioned whether the purpose of the lockdown was fulfilled, majority of the participants felt that the lockdown definitely did serve its purpose in Kerala in reducing the chain of transmission. Even though they felt the government`s declaration as one which was imposing and controlling them, they realized it was for the better good of the society.

“I think it was a good initiative. People would misuse opportunities otherwise.” -71-year-old woman

The people stated that the government was able to build awareness among the masses regarding the illness and make them realize the importance of hygienic measures via the lockdown. Also, the transmission rates and case fatality rates decreased due to the measure. Nevertheless, people felt that extending the lockdown further had its negative repercussions.

“A couple of weeks of lockdown is fine. Extending it further and further is disastrous.” –40-year-old male teacher

Anticipations regarding the future

When probed about their thoughts on the future, majority of the participants felt optimistic. Although the participants anticipated an economic recession to prevail, they felt there might not be a dearth of opportunities as they were hopeful that newer initiatives will crop up and presumed that there would be a transformation in many sectors. However, the participants stated the concerns they had regarding the survival of the tourism and hospitality sector as travel restrictions are expected to remain for an extended time period.

“How the tourism and hospitality sectors will endure – that remains a question.” -41-year-old male teacher

With regard to the post-COVID sanitation practices, participants felt that although the masses were currently following hygienic measures, they were likely to forget about it as soon as the pandemic tides over. However, a 41-year-old professor classically stated:” Is it going to be a life-after-COVID or life-with-COVID - that cannot be said yet! ”

The key findings of the study were that despite the sudden imposition of the lockdown, majority of the participants had presumed a nationwide closure and were mostly prepared for a short period of restrictions. However, prolonged annexure of the lockdown had not been anticipated, leading to a spectrum of varied emotions among the masses with the progression of the pandemic. A crisp demarcation was identified in the participants’ concerns during the different phases of the lockdown. The prime concern of being inflicted with Covid-19 and fear of shortage of basic amenities slowly gave way to apprehensions regarding financial insecurity and job instability over the course of the lockdown.

In the early months of the year 2020, countries across the globe started to impose lockdowns, with China and European countries like Italy taking the lead.[ 10 ] The vast media coverage of the contagion and the Janatha curfew alerted the people regarding the forthcoming lockdown, a finding similar to that reported by Barkur et al .[ 11 ] However, as the duration and austerity of the lockdown was unforeseen, people were largely overwhelmed with anxiety at the beginning of the lockdown. A study by Rehman et al .[ 12 ] found that there was an increased burden of stress and anxiety during the lockdown in India which was significantly associated with the fear of shortage of daily needs.

It was observed that the looming fear drove people into panic-buying and stockpiling of groceries, hygiene-related products and medicines. This finding is similar to a study in Germany, where the lockdown was associated with a significant surge in purchase of medicines and pharmaceuticals[ 13 ] Similarly, hoarding of basic materials like toilet paper was rampant in western countries.[ 14 ] These findings can be substantiated by the well-known Maslow`s pyramid of “Hierarchy of needs”, which illustrates that the basic physiological and safety needs lower down in the hierarchy must be first satisfied, before individuals can attend to the psychological and self-fulfilment needs higher up.[ 15 ]

The study highlights the marked transition in the fears and attitude of the people during the course of the lockdown. People had adjusted themselves to the situation and also efforts on the part of the government helped build resilience. The government started COVID treatment centres[ 16 ] and telemedicine units in each district and ambulances and medicines were arranged for the people at their doorstep.[ 17 ] The local self-government along with the Kudumbashree mission launched the popular community kitchen initiative and supplied free and subsidised cooked meals three times a day to warrant that no one goes hungry during the lockdown.[ 18 ]

The positive experiences cherished by the people were the abundant time they had for self-development and pursuing long-lost passions. Gardening was found to be one of the commonest constructive hobbies during the lockdown, akin to a study by Posthumus et al .[ 19 ] Moreover, the lockdown was viewed as a good time by the people to ruminate on their individual and social identity and family cohesion was found to have considerably improved in the population, as was seen in similar studies.[ 20 ]

The study was also able to shed light on the plight of women due to the persistent patriarchal traditional gendered roles. Women were found to be shouldering a greater burden due to the typical unequal divisions in household chores, a finding similar to a study by Farré et al .[ 21 ] in Spain However, unlike other studies in India, there were no reported instances of women abusive behaviours and domestic violence.[ 22 , 23 ] This finding can be justified with the latest NFHS -5 data where Kerala has the low domestic violence rate of 9.9% compared to the rest of the nation.[ 24 ]

Although the research has made significant contributions, it is admissible that there are a few lacunae and limitations in the study. Firstly, as the study was conducted during the fiery face of the lockdown, face-to-face personal interviews could not be taken. Also, the researchers had difficulty in including more representative people from the population due to arduous circumstances. This was a short term study conducted during the lockdown, long-term experience of the respondents would prove a better understanding of the post-lockdown ramifications.

The lockdown was a novel phenomenon and it disrupted the routine lives of the working class population employed in the various sectors, across the globe[ 25 ] The study was able to capture a holistic view of the common people`s experiences, perspectives and challenges during this period, which can help primary care providers to better understand the after-effects of the crisis and accordingly cater to the needs of the masses. It can further aid in subsequent research in the development of psychometric measures to address people`s mental health and anxiety issues and to palliate their suffering at the time of future crises and calamities.

The united frontline work of various sectors including the police, health sector, state and local self-government, the Kudumbashree and voluntary groups were found to be the flagbearers in curbing the transmission and death rate in Kerala. High levels of education in the civil society especially among females, ensured that the masses were aware of trends and developments of the illness. These factors collectively aided in building community resilience and narrates the story of the populous southern-state overcoming the odds against a devastating pandemic and lockdown.

Declaration of patient consent

The authors certify that they have obtained all appropriate patient consent forms. In the form the patient (s) has/have given his/her/their consent for his/her/their images and other clinical information to be reported in the journal. The patients understand that their names and initials will not be published and due efforts will be made to conceal their identity, but anonymity cannot be guaranteed.

Financial support and sponsorship

Conflicts of interest.

There are no conflicts of interest.