The Reach of the Coronavirus

COVID-19 has had an effect on more than just health—it’s further divided the country and placed stress on our relationships with others and ourselves.

By: Sydni Rose, Marley Richmond, and Jemma Keleher

The sun continues to rise and set each day, whether you’re experiencing time linearly or not, which means the world is nearing the one-year anniversary of the emergence of the virus we’ve come to know so well. Despite re-openings, lifted restrictions, and an attempt to return to “normal,” COVID-19 is still here and still wreaking havoc on our lives. From the death of a social life to the death of a family member, this virus is taking away the smallest of life’s joys, and also the biggest.

Physical health has been of utmost importance during this pandemic, indicating a virus-free body. And though COVID-19 is painless and easy for some, it is fatal for others. Many people have presented long-term health effects, ranging from cardiovascular or respiratory issues to problems with sleeping and memory.

But mental health is of equal importance, especially during a pandemic that has brought more lows than highs. Amanda Hodel, a child psychology and neuroscience instructor at the University of Minnesota, said the lasting psychological effects may be just as devastating as the physical ones.

The nature of a pandemic sets in motion an array of emotional distress, which can be caused by many factors—fear of contracting the virus, self-isolation, less social interaction, job loss, school closures, interpersonal conflicts over precautions and beliefs surrounding the virus, and more. 

At the most basic level, we are all in survival mode. This reactionary “fight or flight” response has, in turn, made it difficult for the majority of people to focus on their hobbies, projects, and goals. Hodel said, “When you are preoccupied with your survival, your attention and cognitive processing is biased toward detecting threat, so it can be more difficult to control your attention toward your own goals.”

University of Minnesota student Matthew Voigt summed up this feeling well, saying, “I'm just [...] writing this little reading response on John Rawls, and the world's burning around me, and several thousand people are dying every day.” Focusing on schoolwork can feel pointless when the future is anything but certain. 

Experiencing the world in a time as uncertain as now has the potential to physically harm people. According to Hodel, we are all “calibrating our body’s stress systems to a pretty strange and atypical set of experiences.” Living through this time of repeated stress and trauma can cause dysfunction in the body’s stress system, altering “the ability to control, regulate, and plan our behavior.”

There are two sides to this coin: the collective and the personal experience. No two people can have identical experiences, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t a sense of relatability or empathy present.

Worldwide, the number of deaths has reached hundreds of thousands per day, which is gut-wrenching—or… it was? The height of COVID-19 related deaths—with higher numbers every day—can feel hard to process. It might be exhausting to feel the full range of emotion that comes with empathizing with an entire nation, much less the entire world.

Hodel said this feeling can be described as “ambiguous loss.” She said, “Many of the disruptions COVID has caused, there isn’t a clear, single time point that reflects the loss. Instead, it just permeates many aspects of our lives, as a series of ongoing and cascading losses.”

Joseph Aquino, a young adult working for CCC Information Services, contracted and recovered from COVID-19 in the fall. He said that the constantly rising number of deaths remains as upsetting and painful as it always has been, but he also thinks that “with a lot of people, there’s just a ton of fatigue, almost like a numbing to the stats and numbers.”

Not only are people’s emotional lives weighed down by the constant stream of suffering due to COVID-19, but non-pandemic-related grief also becomes more difficult to bear. Voigt, whose grandfather was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in April, shared how public health guidelines affected end-of-life care. “Hospice care in a pandemic... you can't go and visit the person in the hospice facility,” Voigt said.

When his grandfather passed away, Voigt faced a difficult choice: risk contracting the virus or stay home. At first, he said, “I'm not going to this funeral. I refuse—I'm not putting myself in that position.” While Voigt did end up attending, he called the experience “too close for comfort.” He said, “It's really uncomfortable to cry in a mask.”

Natalie Bagwell, another student at the University of Minnesota, faced a similar choice. She had to decide between putting a relative with a pre-existing condition at risk and continuing to see the rest of her family. Bagwell’s parents do not believe in the severity of COVID-19, but despite their opinion, she and her husband chose to fully self-isolate in order to continue visiting and supporting Bagwell’s mother-in-law, who suffers from kidney disease and lives alone.

“I'm close with my family, but I haven't really seen them since this started to protect my husband’s mom,” Bagwell said. This choice caused tension because her parents didn’t understand their caution.

Even when Bagwell herself got sick, her parents were convinced that she had nothing more than a bad cold. “It got to the point with my breathing, that I was in class on Zoom, and I couldn't pay attention because I just had to breathe,” Bagwell said. “I had to put all of my thought and effort into breathing, and it hurt and I couldn't get air in.” 

She relied on her mother-in-law’s oxygen tank to get through her school day and monitored her oxygen levels in case she needed to go to the hospital. Yet because Bagwell survived the virus, her parents ask, “Why are people dying? They're obviously dying from other things.”

After a little over a month, Bagwell and her husband were cleared to stop quarantining. Even though they were no longer positive, Bagwell said that she had trouble stringing words into sentences for weeks. This lingering brain fog is just one of many symptoms that some people continue to experience long after they have “recovered.” 

Anna Campbell, a student at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse, tested positive for COVID-19 in September. “I felt pretty okay after a couple days,” Campbell said, but “the only thing that's been consistent is that I have not tasted [or smelled] anything” since testing positive. She worries that her sense of taste and smell will never return. “That’s a very possible future,” Campbell said, and one with significantly less joy in her life. 

For Corrie Hermans-Webster, a previously healthy 29-year-old resident of Boston, the lasting effects of COVID-19 were even more serious. She contracted the virus in March and her body continues to be ravaged by it. “Before getting COVID, I would routinely walk or run 20 miles a day, I would do an hour long spin class in the morning, and I would do boxing two or three times a week for an hour,” she said. “Now I walk up a flight of stairs and have to sit down for ten minutes to recover.”

“My body just has so many issues, and there’s nothing [doctors] can really do to figure it out. They're just trying to maintain it and make sure I don't have a heart attack, basically,” Hermans-Webster explained. 

Every day, she takes fourteen medicines—and even that hasn’t been able to bring her anywhere near having the life she used to. “I could tell it wasn't getting better. I had to find a new job, even though I loved what I was doing.” Her entire life has changed because of a virus she caught nine months ago.

Behind each statistic is a story like this, even when the overwhelming number of cases and deaths means those stories blend together. It feels like society has begun to crumble, and it can be overwhelming to get through the day without any motivation or end in sight.

Aquino says the shock of seeing news headlines with sky-rocketing numbers of deaths is no longer there, but it reflects how poorly the US has responded to the virus. He noted that the United States’ response has not placed concern on “trying to take care of the larger society” and said that it’s translated to a “me versus my neighbor mentality” on an individual level.

Public health experts repeat the guidelines for controlling the pandemic that we have all come to know: Stay six feet apart from others, wash your hands, and wear a mask. Yet some people reject these provisions as an infringement of personal freedom, scientifically baseless, or just unnecessary. But even for those who believe in the effectiveness of these precautions, they can sometimes feel futile. 

“I was kind of surprised when I got it,” Campbell said, because she followed guidelines by staying home except for going to work and the grocery store, where she wore a mask. “I think now that I've had it I'm like, well, what the f*** is the point? I was following all the rules, and I still got it.” 

Some folks, including Campbell, don’t have the luxury of fully sheltering in place as guidelines suggest and may have been infected at work. The government’s failure to issue another stimulus check or offer support to workers and small businesses shows that it is not only the general population whose actions are failing to control the pandemic.

The skepticism the Trump administration has shown towards public health recommendations has also proven detrimental to our nation’s response to COVID-19. Bagwell said that despite her own illness and significant research, her parents believe in neither the severity of the virus nor the effectiveness of masks. “That's one of the most frustrating things, I think, where like, I could explain this to you, but you won't listen no matter how valid [and] educated my argument is,” Bagwell said. 

Aquino had friends who took the virus less-than-seriously. They continued to gather in large groups and saw wearing a mask as a “drag.” When he got COVID-19, they were concerned. But to them, his recovery served as reinforcement for the lack of severity of the virus. “It was almost like confirmation bias where they were like, ‘See, you got better, and you were fine.’” Some of those friends also tested positive for COVID-19 and recovered, again reaffirming their beliefs. However, Aquino said it hasn’t changed his view of the virus. He’s taken it seriously and will continue to do so.

Despite global tragedy, house parties continue. Masks are still seen by some as limitations on liberty and freedom, and they are worn incorrectly, if at all. Even when confronted by the lived experience of others who have suffered greatly from COVID-19, some people still don’t believe the virus is more than a cold. 

“It's like a battle between pride and ignorance and actually caring for people,” Buckland said. “I don't understand how you don't see that how to love people in this moment is to protect them.” Protecting those you love means wearing a mask and staying home. While it may feel impossible to mourn the monumental tragedies due to COVID-19, continuing to obey public health guidelines can help minimize future loss. Hopefully, the Biden administration will reinforce independent choices with policies to support all people, and a vaccine will further ease the struggles our country and world are facing.