Social isolation in Covid-19: The impact of loneliness

The world is facing a global public health crisis for the last three months, as the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) emerges as a menacing pandemic. Besides the rising number of cases and fatalities with this pandemic, there has also been significant socio-economic, political and psycho-social impact. Billions of people are quarantined in their own homes as nations have locked down to implement social distancing as a measure to contain the spread of infection. Those affected and suspicious cases are isolated. This social isolation leads to chronic loneliness and boredom, which if long enough can have detrimental effects on physical and mental well-being. The timelines of the growing pandemic being uncertain, the isolation is compounded by mass panic and anxiety. Crisis often affects the human mind in crucial ways, enhancing threat arousal and snowballing the anxiety. Rational and logical decisions are replaced by biased and faulty decisions based on mere ‘faith and belief’. This important social threat of a pandemic is largely neglected. We look at the impact of COVID-19 on loneliness across different social strata, its implications in the modern digitalized age and outline a way forward with possible solutions to the same. There is no doubt that national and global economies are suffering, the health systems are under severe pressure, mass hysteria has acquired a frantic pace and people’s hope and aspirations are taking a merciless beating. The uncertainty of a new and relatively unknown infection increases the anxiety, which gets compounded by isolation in lockdown. As global public health agencies like World Health Organization (WHO) and Centre for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) struggle to contain the outbreak, social distancing is repeatedly suggested as one of the most useful preventive strategies. It has been used successfully in the past to slow or prevent community transmission during pandemics (WHO, 2019). While certain countries like China have just started recovering from their three-month lockdown, countries like Iran, Italy and South Korea have been badly hit irrespective of these measures and those like India have initiated nation-wide shutdown and curfews to prevent the community transmission of COVID-19. Ironically however, the social distancing is a misnomer, which implies physical separation to prevent the viral spread. The modern world has rarely been so isolated and restricted. Multiple restrictions have been imposed on public movement to contain the spread of the virus. People are forced to stay at home and are burdened with the heft of quarantine. Individuals are waking up every day wrapped in a freezing cauldron of social isolation, sheer boredom and a penetrating feeling of loneliness. The modern man has known little like this, in an age of rapid travel and communication. Though during the earlier outbreaks of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS), Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Spanish flu, Ebola and Plague the world was equally shaken with millions of casualties, the dominance of technology was not as much as to make the distancing felt amplified (Smith, 2006). In this era of digitalization, social media, social hangouts, eateries, pubs, bars, malls, movie theatres to keep us distracted creating apparent ‘social ties’. Humankind has always known what to do next, with their lives generally following a regular trail. But this sudden cataclysmic turn of events have brought them face to face with a dire reckoning – how to live with oneself. It is indeed a frightening realization when a whole generation or two knows how to deal with a nuclear fallout but are at their wit’s end on how to spend time with oneself. Ironically, however, it has Social isolation in Covid-19: The impact of loneliness