Headline Diplomat eJournal – Issue 1, Series 2
The perilous lenses of COVID-19: The sociopolitical impact
Writes Charles Thomas, Journalist, Headline Diplomat eJournal
Social and family relationship during the pandemic is sometimes reduced to seeing life from the balcony of the house. The pandemic has changed the way humans coexist; the way of relating to others and with the environment. This is especially during its peak period, identified as April 14 in the U.S. by the HealthData.org.
According to a research by Sheryl Hamilton from Carleton University, in Ottawa, which was carried out with the anthropologist Neil Gerlach, we are entering what she calls a “pandemic culture,” which is going to modify the way we interact with friends, families, and with the external world.
According to her, awareness of the disease – more present today in general – is going to cause accelerated changes in social rituals and in the way we perceive and handle the “bubble of personal space.” For Hamilton, several of these changes may remain even when the worst of the pandemic has passed, something that could bring long-term cultural risks.
She said in an interview with the Wired UK: “It’s dangerous when a culture has no social contact rituals where groups mix, where families are in contact, where groups meet and do things together.” Hamilton says: “A culture loses a lot when it loses those things and doesn’t replace them with something else.”
Students with no option of returning home
When news about the outbreak came out of China late in 2019, none of the countries in the outside world expected the disease to break out of China. The lockdown began in the Hubei province of the Far East republic on January 23, and, like a wildfire was announced in hundreds of countries around the world, as of March 2020, affecting billions of people, according to the BBC.
While educational institutions around the world were forced to hit the kill switch, indefinitely, many students, one way or the other, the New York Times reported, were caught up in the middle of stifling lockdowns, in the epicenter of the crisis in the U.S. Stranded, they had no option of returning home to reunite with their parents.
According to NY Times’ Caitlin Dickerson, “Universities, which often receive a substantial share of their budgets from foreign students, moved quickly to help international students by opening a limited number of dorms when possible.” For Sam Brakarsh, a Zimbabwean student at Yale University, she had to stay behind after classes were called off, bunking temporarily with her classmate who was moving home to her family. According to Dickerson, the student could not return home to her parents as she dreaded being caught up by flight restrictions and feared taking the virus to her aging parents in Zimbabwe.
For Emilia Nkengmeyi, a Cameroonian journalist studying in the U.K., during the first weeks after the lockdown camera to effect, she hoped it would soon be discontinued so she could complete her dissertation. “But I still fear, I may not be able to complete the dissertation on time if this continues,” she expressed her fear in an interview with the AfricaNews. “I think she [mom] would have been very worried if she was not able to get through to me. Friends have been very supportive. I get a series of calls and messages from loved ones,” said the student journalist whose social life has been reduced to attending online trainings and webinars.
“Loneliness breeds depression”
Persistent panic attacks in lots of COVID-19 patients and survivors, who have experienced days and weeks of solitary confinements, have been reported. The fear of the unknown is the hardest part, according to Business Insider’s Anna Medaris Miller. “The survivors of the virus may be at particular risk for long-term psychological effects and in severe cases, medical post-traumatic stress disorder,” she wrote.
“Not knowing if the pull in your chest is pneumonia or residue inflammation [is scary],” Nathalie Eisenberg, a New York City survivor who got the virus several weeks ago and is still battling a scourge of anxiety over a possible relapse, told Business Insider. “Will you live? Will you die?”
In a recent interview with the German daily newspaper, Frankfurter Rundschau, the philosopher Jürgen Habermas described this moment, which he claimed is filled with uncertainties and the fear of the unknown, thus: “We have never had so much knowledge about our ignorance, nor about the pressure to act in the midst of insecurity. Although it is a natural part of life, uncertainty is difficult to carry. It is not easy to live day by day without certainties.”
While admitting that self-isolation is key to ending the pandemic and that informing everyone about the risks is inevitable, Habermas stressed that “the social consequences are not foreseeable.” According to him, “each individual is informed about the risks because the self-isolation of the individual person with regard to the overburdened health systems is the most important single variable for fighting the pandemic.”
With families spending long periods of time apart and as figures of casualties keep increasing in various corners of the world, there has been a sharp rise in cases relating to anxiety, depression, and panic attacks, experts warn.
In India, the Director of the Institute of Mental Health, Dr. Purna Chandrika, reported having about 3, 632 received calls, towards the end of April 2020. Also, Chandrika said that 2, 603 callers requested for psychiatric counseling around this period.
According to Jonathan Kanter and Katherine Manbeck, researchers from the University of Washington, interpersonal isolation due to the impact of the pandemic further adds to the existential risks in this period.
“Prolonged social isolation – our primary strategy to reduce the spread of the virus – adds another layer of risk. Our bodies are not designed to handle social deprivation for long,” they posit in an exposé for The Conversation. “Past studies suggest that people forced to “shelter in place” will experience more depression. Those living alone and lacking social opportunities are at risk. Loneliness breeds depression,” they write, warning that the crisis could lead to an uncontrollable “epidemic of clinical depression,” which the health system isn’t even ready for.
Coronavirus, the new weapon to separate families in detention centers
Spanish-speaking mothers held in detention centers in Dilley and Karnes (both in Texas) and Berks (in Pennsylvania) have told the Time Magazine that they had received offers from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to sign documents written in English (which they could not read). After signing this, they report that they were told they’ll hand over custody of their children to guardians in the United States so that they can accelerate their deportation procedures, amid the fear raised by the coronavirus pandemic.
“Some mothers believed that by signing, they would be deported without their children,” Shay Fluharty, a lawyer for the Dilley Project organisation said about what some of the migrants told him in a press teleconference with journalists, as reported by The Voice of America in Spanish. According to Fluharty, mothers in the centers they represent are facing the “horrible” decision to keep their children in a place that they do not consider safe to avoid family separation. “They are against the sword and the wall,” he said.
“That paper is in English, it is not translated, and even so they wanted to be signed. Some mothers understood that if they signed, they were going to leave, others that they were going to be deported, but they did not have concrete information about the document,” he explained.
Couples living at a distance
Although in theory, you choose your partner to spend your entire life together, that life also involves working, going out to eat with friends, and basically making plans that do not always include that one person in the same household. But the coronavirus changed the rules of the game and now many couples are forced to spend day and night locked in their homes for weeks, perhaps months, without seeing anyone else. Even in situations of love and mutual care, patience can be exhausted.
“At first, we didn’t really understand the rules — we kind of thought, it will be fine, we’ll be able to see each other once or twice a week,” 25-year-old Ansell who has been with her boyfriend of five years told CNN. “And then it kind of dawned on us that that’s probably not good.”
“It’s very tempting (to meet up), and it’s frustrating because it’s like, oh surely we could just meet up and hug,” Ansell says. “But you can’t — that destroys the whole purpose of it.”
Rate of divorce doubling up
In China, where cities are slowly returning to normal after the critical moment of the coronavirus crisis has passed, several civil registry offices are reaching record numbers of divorce applications, reported the official Chinese newspaper Global Times.
After the 76-day lockdown was lifted in Wuhan, the epicenter of the disease in China, Zhang Fujian, the director of the city’s Marriage and Family Committee, told the Global Times that the divorce rate was doubling the numbers recorded prior to the pandemic.
“To my knowledge, one needs to wait for three to four days before applying for divorce at the local marriage administration because there are so many people applying,” Zhang said.
Many spouses were confined to small spaces with their partners, with little or no respite. They must balance personal lives, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. Then add young children (or even teenagers) to the mix and it can be a recipe for disaster — or worse, a divorce. “Before the outbreak, some couples rarely spent much time together. During the outbreak, arguments between couples on childcare, housework, cooking, and grocery shopping was enough to increase tensions,” Zhang said.
Conclusion:
To survive the pandemic, new, forced, and necessary “rules” of existence have emerged – separation and self-isolation. This so-called pandemic culture has come with an increase in depression, excessive worries, fear of the unknown, panic attacks, anxiety, and distrust in government authorities. It’s a wake-up call to world governments, private organisations, NGOs, and IGOs, as well as the health workers at the frontline of the outbreak response about the psychological aftermath of the pandemic.
