WHow did the pandemic change well-being – and what was decisive for this? The past 2.5 years have led to significant stress for many people, but it is unclear what exactly caused this. “Children and young people have made the greatest sacrifices since the beginning of the pandemic,” explained Thomas Fischbach, President of the Professional Association of Paediatricians. They would have suffered more from the “lockdown measures” than other population groups.
Researchers at the University of California in Irvine have now tried to find out what people suffer from. In the spring and fall of 2020, they conducted surveys among around 6,000 American participants – and asked how the test subjects rated their worries, loneliness and traumatic stress. It was also recorded whether they were acutely ill with Covid, how many people who were suffering from Corona and who had died they knew at the time and how many hours per day they consumed pandemic-related news on average. The researchers also included in their analyzes how strict the corona restrictions imposed in the states of the participants were, i.e. whether there was a mask requirement or lockdowns.
Restrictions hardly played a role
The team then calculated to what extent the various factors can explain changes in the well-being of the study participants. As report in the journal “Health Psychology”., their analyzes did not show that the level of government-enforced restrictions had a significant impact on the worry, loneliness, and traumatic stress reported by survey participants—at least for the time period and regions examined, they found virtually no association. Rather, the team reports that infections with Sars-CoV-2 in test persons and relatives were significantly more associated with psychological stress – as was media consumption. According to the survey, the worst was for participants who contracted Covid-19 within the first six months of the pandemic. If a person in your circle of acquaintances had died from the disease, this made your condition considerably worse.
If possible, no doom scrolling
“Therefore, future waves of Covid-19, as well as possible further pandemics, should be countered with targeted interventions that prevent deaths,” says study author Rebecca Thompson. Her team also emphasizes the influence of media consumption. “During the first year of the pandemic, bad news was everywhere,” says her colleague Roxane Cohen Silver. The psychologist recommends that people themselves should keep an eye on how much they become engrossed in bad news, also to avoid so-called “doomscrolling” – and only read the news at certain times, for example. In their article, the research team also emphasizes the limitations of their study: The year 2020 could have been unique due to the presidential election and social polarization in the USA.
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