Did Covid Make Us Socially Inept?

When looking back on the pandemic, and the big bad that was months of isolation, I often struggle to reconcile it with its common, overwhelmingly negative response. For me, as someone who considers themselves deeply introverted, lockdown felt more like a dream than a nightmare.

However, despite my own admittedly privileged point of view on the matter, it’s clear to see the effect Covid has had on our world and more importantly, the people in it. While the pandemic may have been declared over in 2023, the question remains: have we really recovered? Not just from the disease, but from the symptoms of lockdown.

Credit: The New York Times.

When considering how Covid negatively impacted socialisation, we often look at it more prominently from the perspective of children. While this is certainly an important and fascinating point, children are adaptable creatures. They accept the norm (as of a couple of years ago, the pandemic) as it is presented to them, and resultantly, can bounce back from stifling situations like lockdowns in ways that adults cannot.

To understand this, we can simply look at Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, where social interaction and a sense of belonging, and the subsequent self-esteem and self-actualisation which is ranked above even safety and basic needs like food, water and shelter. While we may all be able to acknowledge the why of quarantine, obviously, we all thought we were in danger of a deadly, unknown disease, I’m guessing none of us expected how potentially awkward we would feel when we were finally allowed to step outside of the confines of our homes.

Firstly, the lack of face-to-face interaction created a stark and sudden shift in our everyday socialisation. Seemingly overnight, we were no longer seeing our friends and family in person, but through a cold, disconnected computer screen. Even interactions as basic as handshakes had to be adapted to this new terrifying disease. I mean, touching elbows seemed somewhat gratuitous when we could barely see each other behind those masks.

This leads me to another point; even on the rare occasions where we could see each other, these interactions barely constituted face-to-face. I distinctly remember meeting people during the pandemic whose whole faces I didn’t know once the masks came off. At least over Zoom (or Google Classroom in my case) it was possible to actually recognise our peers.

Moreover, one of the most negative aspects of the Pandemic was its exacerbation of mental health issues. Beyond the universal feelings of isolation and loneliness augmented by years of Covid, there was also a deep sense that, in addition to the disease itself, the fear it induced was also contagious.

A study conducted by the WHO in 2021 states that, even in light of this unique sense of anxiety, many people would refuse to seek mental health treatment out of fear of contracting the disease, thus intensifying the existing issues.

In the most saddening of statistics, the WHO also reported that in the first year of the Pandemic, following the prolonged, mandatory quarantine of 2020, 45% of women experienced some form of domestic violence, leading to greater amounts of stress at home and even instances of PTSD once it had ended.

I believe that myself and the rest of my cohort should consider themselves rather lucky to not have entered university during the peak Covid years. St Andrews, while so small and so tight-knit, can feel ironically incredibly isolating at times, and so I can only imagine how the current fourth years may have felt, being forced to meet people with a surgical mask essentially acting as a brick wall between them and new friends.

To reiterate, when considering the adverse effects of the pandemic, we typically avoid considering how it affected us, as people, over fear of introspection within ourselves. Talking about how Covid affected the economy (I mean, the price of rent in this town is evidence enough), politics and government systems is all well and good, but perhaps the most profound impact lies in how it reshaped our sense of self, our ability to connect with others and how we navigate the world on a personal level.