Two years after the first pandemic-induced lockdown in the UK, a new study by King’s College London and Ipsos MORI shows just how harmful COVID and its control measures are. In a representative sample of just over 1,200 people, a third say they have become lonely and are sleeping less than before the pandemic. About half are meeting less friends and less leaving the house – and half spending more time on screen. So it’s no surprise that a third of people feel they have poor mental or physical health.
The pandemic has changed so much that some groups are feeling its effects more acutely, with youth and women more likely to experience many of these negative effects. For example, 42% and 38% of 16-34-year-olds say their mental health is worse than it was before the pandemic. Of course, not all these worrying effects will be due to the pandemic and the lockdown. The cost of living is now troubling, and a war in Europe is undoubtedly adding to our problems. We also have to keep in mind that people always think that things are going to get worse. We social psychologists always refer to the good seer, where we forget the bad things of the past. It can be a useful psychological tool to help us stay away from the effects of things we can’t change, but it can also make the present feel worse than it is.
However, many are indeed suffering, and the pandemic has undoubtedly played a significant role in shaking both our personal relationships and trust in the institutions we rely on deeply. Despite all this, there is a clear pattern in all our studies that the greater part of the public supports more restrictive measures than those taken by the government. The government was rated the lowest by the public at the end of 2020, when it was felt that things were opening up too quickly. Now, the UK government’s rating of its handling of the crisis is the most positive we have seen since the start of the pandemic.
Although the restrictions have been largely lifted now, most of us do not think that the pandemic is completely over. Only one in five supports that view, while, at the other end, a quarter of people think life will never be “normal” or say we don’t know when it will be. Everything else that is worrying us now, the pandemic is still affecting many of us deeply. One of the most surprising results of the study is how often people are scouring social media for information on COVID-19. In April 2020, a third of people were doing this several times a day, which might have been understandable – but surprisingly, things are no different today. The social impact of a pandemic reflects how variable the effect of the virus on individuals is, with some suffering relatively mild illness and others actually suffering. For many of us, the full effects are still manifesting themselves, and this means that for society as a whole, we are only the beginning of a long journey.