essay about quarantine

Essays in Quarantine

In This Series

How embracing uncertainty might make me a better journalist.

As a journalist, it’s my job to find answers and tell the truth. But right now the truth is I feel like I have fewer answers than ever.

Practicing joy (and social distancing) in nature

When lockdown hit, I found myself suddenly with more free time than I’d had since childhood. To fill it, I started to take walks.

Starting a new job during COVID is lucky … and lonely

There were no handshakes, no in-person introductions. Leaving work is the equivalent of signing out of an app.

Obligations and graduations: What my time as a farmworker taught me about sacrifice

Many farmworkers not only miss family graduations, but also birthdays, anniversaries, and holidays to support their families.

Parenting may never be the same post-COVID. Maybe that’s a good thing.

While part of me is mourning the loss of my bubble, I realize nostalgia is not sustainable. At some point, it’s the same as regression.

Reflections on Father’s Day a decade after losing my dad

The COVID-19 pandemic is turning many people's parents into full-time patients. I know how that feels.

Social distancing while black? Let your community lift you up.

We spend the first hour of our weekly Zoom happy hour just catching up and making each other laugh — we need it.

Planning for my grandkids’ future

"I am more determined than ever to leave them a brighter, more hopeful future to look forward to."

Coronavirus canceled my favorite sports. Here’s why we need them more than ever.

Once it’s safe, sports can’t return fast enough for this fan.

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My Quarantine Fatigue: Life as a Teenager During COVID-19

By Katie Karlson

The hours stretched into days as I lazed around the empty house. Sleeping in, home alone, and no one to tell me to turn down the TV. I thought to myself, "I could get used to this." But the two-week break came and went, classes moved online, my parents started working from home, and I got lonelier and more bored by the minute.

Problems arose when online classes started, and I realized I had done the majority of the work for the rest of the year over the extended spring break. On top of that, the new work barely took any time for me to complete — once again leaving me with nothing to do other than sit around.

Online classes were still stressful though, since teachers had to work hard to provide us students with an education that would cover the majority of the work we were supposed to learn in class. Needless to say, not all of my teachers did this, and I found myself worried and irritable.

My parents also added to this stress , since they were working from home and were frequently on phone calls. I didn't want to take online classes in my bedroom, so my dad and I competed for the kitchen space. If I was giving a presentation, he would be vacuuming or cooking loudly in the background. My mom, when she came downstairs, did the same. Likewise, when either one of them was on a call, I would be banging dishes or asking loudly for them to move so I could hear my class. We had many family discussions about "respecting each other," but throughout the remainder of online school, I felt anything but respected. My school stress and all of our irritable moods swirled to create the perfect storm — and many heated disagreements.

After 53 endless days, school ended and I was left with months to hopefully do something productive. Personally, other people motivate me to be better and work harder, and so just like any other extroverted only child stuck in the house would do, I did nothing.

Of course, there was a list of stuff I should be doing, such as:

• SAT and ACT prep
• My summer reading
• My summer math packet
• Physical therapy for my knee and shins
• Reading for pleasure
• Driver's ed
• Starting to learn chemistry for next year
• Extra Latin work (I refuse to do anything not required for that class — it's by far my least favorite)

Instead, I filled my days with screen time. And with each passing minute, school got closer and reality started to hit. I had let the days slip by as I stayed up until 2, 3 and 4 a.m. texting my friends, and then sleeping until lunch. Then, when I did wake up, I would spend the remainder of the day on my phone.

For a little while, when the coronavirus cases had lowered, my school allowed us to have cross-country practices in the morning, and we were planning on having school. Finally, I could see the light at the end of the tunnel and my mood drastically improved. I had social interaction and other people to motivate me to run and be better. But just as quickly as we started practicing, the governor announced a spike in cases — and practices were canceled. I reverted back to being completely unproductive and dismal.

Besides other people, there's no bigger motivation than the fear of failure. Through many "discussions" that seemed more like arguments, my parents made it very clear that I was wasting my time, and that they were done trying to motivate me. "I have to let you fail in order for you to succeed," my dad said to me.

Still, to this day I'm struggling to find the motivation to do anything other than nothing. In my mind, online classes provided almost no mental stimulation, so there's no point in doing all of that work.

I signed up for an engineering class in the fall, but realistically, we won't be able to actually get hands-on and start a project remotely — so there's no point in working on that.

Until I've finished growing, my running injuries likely won't get better — so there's no point in doing my physical therapy.

I'm only going into sophomore year — so there's no point in studying for the SAT or ACT when I already have a very good PSAT score.

I'm a fast reader and I'll have a ton of time during online school to read — so there's no point in doing my summer reading now.

School doesn't even start for a few weeks — so there's no point in starting the math packet now, I'll forget it all.

The only thing I've actually been doing is driver's ed. Being trapped in the house makes me want to get out.

Every bad choice I've made to do nothing was — and to some extent still is — completely justifiable to me. The rational voice in the back of my mind is telling me to get out of this rut and do something, but some other part of me doesn't want to. I've lost all motivation. Despite being able to clearly picture the repercussions of doing no work and falling behind, I still can't seem to bring myself to do anything. Part of the reason is that most of the people I know aren't doing much either, and I've always been able to get by in school with minimal effort. Even if I do nothing until the day before online classes begin, I know I'll be able to get almost all of the required work done.

And that's where my problems start.

Quarantine made me realize that I've only ever done what's required. As a kid, my dad would have to force me to do extra math with him. I certainly saw the benefits of it, but by myself I was completely unmotivated. The instant something isn't mandatory, I don't want to do it — and this mindset brings me down in athletics and other aspects of my life.

Being a teenager during the coronavirus quarantine is the opposite of fun or enjoyable, and I feel many will agree that incentive is at an all-time low. But if you can try to use this remaining time to better yourself or do that one thing you've been putting off, I would say that's a quarantine well spent. Get ahead, and work to be better than you ever thought you could be.

So as I sit here writing this on July 28, 2020, with a mountain of schoolwork and college prep to do, I can say that this is the first completely optional thing I've done since March 13 — and I don't intend to make it the last.

About Katie Katie Karlson will be starting her sophomore year of high school this fall. She loves waterskiing, her cross-country team, her cats, and yes, even her parents.

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Teenagers are struggling in quarantine. This student is giving them an outlet.

Lauren davis '23 is helping provide a digital platform for young adults to reflect on the challenges they're facing during the coronavirus pandemic..

Lauren Davis '23

As the coronavirus became a global pandemic and life around the world changed drastically, Lauren Davis '23 and her friends noticed a trend.

“We felt like the young adult voice was not being recognized, as if these voices weren’t valid,” Davis said.

They decided to do something about it. 

Davis, along with childhood friends and acquaintances from her hometown of Sandy Hook, Connecticut, founded The Quaranteen Collection, a website to air their feelings and provide a platform for other young people. The site is an outlet to share perspectives and focus on critical issues that are further complicated by the coronavirus, like racism and mental health . 

“We really felt our age demographics’ needs weren’t being met,” Davis said. “In recognition of what we’re going through, we wanted to give young people a voice and allow everyone to get out how they feel. There are many sides to quarantine.”

The content consists of essays submitted by students, from middle school to college, that are authentic reactions and perspectives about COVID-19 and quarantine in the students’ own words. Common themes in the collection include navigating the switch to virtual learning, challenges with home life and the strain on teenagers’ friendships and social lives. 

“There are a few general themes, but ultimately there’s a desire to make one’s own story heard,” Davis added. “One of our goals is to give people a cathartic way to think through all that’s going on. Submitting a post can be therapeutic. And these reflections have been heartfelt.”

The Quaranteen Collection has posted about 50 submissions so far, and there’s a growing backlog as word about the platform spreads, Davis said. 

“These issues are real,” Davis said. “Many young people haven’t had a chance to process it, to think through how they feel about it and present their side to the world. We want to help and empower others to share.”

The following is an excerpt from Davis’ entry in The Quaranteen Collection titled “ A Shaky Transition ”

“Now that I’m able to think more clearly, I can see that quarantine is really a special opportunity in some ways. When was I ever gonna have quality time like this with my parents and brother again? It means so much to me to have this time to spend with them and my dog, in the town that I grew up in even if I can only drive around. I’m comfortable here, around people I love, and frankly I’ve always been socially anxious so it’s pretty nice to not have any expectations on me to go out. 

“In some ways, this isolation really sucks. We all know this. But I’ve found that it’s an unbelievable opportunity too at this time in my life to really sit down and think through things I haven’t had the time to, to appreciate my family and the friends I’ve made, and most of all appreciate that I’m so unbelievably lucky to be in the position I am in. I am happy to be home in a safe place with my family who loves each other, I miss school (who would’ve thought I’d say that ever), I have friends I miss every second, and I’m comfortable with where I am and with myself. 

“Five years ago, I never would have thought that I could make it to where I am now, which is something I think about a lot. I’m so amazed at it, and rather than lament not being at school right now, I’m reminding myself all the time to just be excited for when we get to go back and how great it will feel to have everything be normal again. Everything has its purpose, quarantine is no different. It’s just up to us to make it happen.”

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Reflections in a Time of Quarantine

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Quarantine allows each of us time to self-reflect and try to be the person we want to be.

A woman sitting on a rock overlooking a still lake reflecting nearby mountain range

Photo credit: Pixabay

Oscar Bulaong is a professor of philosophy at the Ateneo de Manila University and a former Visiting Scholar with the Markkula Center for Applied Ethics. Views are his own.

In the midst of the current quarantine, we look back and see how our lives have been upturned by the COVID-19 virus. We discuss and react, in a range of emotions, to how different people are responding to this crisis in different ways: from righteous indignation at the incompetence of some public officials to admiration for the heroic front-liners. This is an extraordinary time, which coincidentally occurs during Lent—a time of fasting, abstinence, and penitence. The following three reflection points are offered to those of us at home, whose main responsibility seems to be only to prevent the spread of the virus by staying home, and yet are seeking some ways to comport ourselves ethically in the coming weeks. How can we spend this time? 

1. Time to Deepen Self Knowledge —Almost all sources of wisdom around the world and across generations promote self-knowledge. Ancient greek philosophers invoked, know thyself. Buddha demonstrated the connection between meditation and enlightenment. Jesus promised mercy when we admit to a transgression against holiness. In different ways, they teach us that self-knowledge is the groundwork on which we can build any kind of spirituality. 

But self-knowledge is a vague thing. How can we recognize, even perhaps, assess it?   One valuable piece of counsel I received as a young person was to observe myself at a time of crisis. A crisis, after all, exposes character traits—both good and bad—that are often hidden by how we typically project ourselves to others during times of non-crisis. 

In observing myself in a crisis, it may be useful to ask: What did I do, what did I say? How did others react to me, what did they say? What triggered me, how did I feel in confronting the problem? Did I act in a unitive or divisive manner? It often helps to write the answers down, at once to objectify the observations, as well as to reveal to ourselves the patterns of our own behavior. 

Yes, of course there is time to call out others, to assess their competence in the face of crisis. But there is value in devoting an equal amount of time to look inward and deepen self-knowledge. 

2. Time to Practice Measured Detachment —Wise people also counsel us to nurture spiritual detachment. Of course this does not mean apathy. Instead it comprises, on the one hand, the admonition to not be slaves of worldly desires; and on the other, the appeal to sharpen our focus on our purpose and mission. 

Detachment might begin by listing down our “favorite” deadly sins and committing to stop nurturing them. Is it greed —in my last trip to the supermarket, did I purchase goods to the extent that others were deprived? Is it sloth — which deliverable that will create value for my organization have I been postponing for pointless activities? Is it pride —when was the last time I was rude to someone because they did not recognize my status? Is it gluttony —which food or substance do I plan the rest of my day around, to ensure maximal ingestion of it? Is it lust — who was the last person I looked at as an object of my pleasure?

I admit that these are some of the questions that I struggle with, in a recognition of my worldly desires. But the primary purpose of this recognition is not only to hold back from them and to put an end to the corresponding bad habits that diminish my person. The goal of spiritual detachment is to uncover the gaps in my life and to realize that those gaps are meant to be filled with my deepest yearning. To practice detachment is to clear a space to rediscover the proverbial “true north” of my life. Is it holiness and salvation? To contribute to a better world? Is it the welfare of those whose lives I affect? It also helps to write down the answers and describe that which our soul most desires. 

Whatever that may be, it is often the unspoken mission against which we will measure the entirety of our lives. And there are two wonderful results that a mission accomplishes in a life, especially when it becomes declared: (1) it organizes attitudes, beliefs, words, actions, and habits—even a career—around itself in a systematic way, and (2) it crowds out and replaces bad habits. Thus mission inspires, indeed breathes life into, our existence. 

Purpose orders our life. What a wonderful thing, isn’t it? Spiritual detachment entails that my main task is not merely to struggle against my worldly appetites, but to nourish my deepest spiritual desire, which thereby makes those self-diminishing appetites lose power over me. And this ordering is made possible by the measured detachment of spirituality.

3. Time to Reaffirm Ethical Commitments —What the two reflections above bring about is that we become better people. In the humble effort to deepen self-knowledge and nourish spiritual detachment, becoming a better person is no longer a vague motherhood statement. For self-knowledge and detachment (or the lack of them) create character traits—whether good or bad—that have real impact on our families and communities during a crisis. 

More than simply providing a standard for judging right from wrong, which in our black-and-white society today might cause more harm than good, ethics exposes the underlying process that creates our words and actions. In this case, the process is more important than the results. 

How then can we spend this time? This extraordinary situation offers to us an extraordinary occasion to stop and reflect, as well as to recommit to our deepest values, which ordinarily we may not be able to do. Doing so reveals the ethical way to help those in need, not only because it is fashionable or high-minded, but always because of a more and more focused mission that orients our words and action towards genuine impact. 

Donation is of course an outstanding way to help in relief efforts, especially for daily wage earners and front-liners. But donation is just one way to be ethical in a time of quarantine. For each day is a unique instance for enacting my mission. We are seeing inspiring stories of people who customize their responses, not limited by their constraints but inspired by a genuine desire to alleviate the suffering that surrounds them: Families that are repacking plastic bags of food to drop off in front of the village tricycle stop. Colleagues who put up a donation drive to buy materials to make PPEs for hospitals. In the news, there was a student who mixed a disinfectant solution and sprayed some streets around his community. Therefore, in this extraordinary time, we ought to respond to the need of others in our own special ways, which we figure out in the process of a deepening self-knowledge and an inspired mission. 

Maybe this is what spirituality concretely looks like—a person of focused action whose deep self-knowledge and clear mission make the world around her a better place to live in.

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Community Reflections

My life experience during the covid-19 pandemic.

Melissa Blanco Follow

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Affiliation with sacred heart university.

Undergraduate, Class of 2024

My content explains what my life was like during the last seven months of the Covid-19 pandemic and how it affected my life both positively and negatively. It also explains what it was like when I graduated from High School and how I want the future generations to remember the Class of 2020.

Class assignment, Western Civilization (Dr. Marino).

Recommended Citation

Blanco, Melissa, "My Life Experience During the Covid-19 Pandemic" (2020). Community Reflections . 21. https://digitalcommons.sacredheart.edu/covid19-reflections/21

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Coronavirus: My Experience During the Pandemic

Anastasiya Kandratsenka George Washington High School, Class of 2021

At this point in time there shouldn't be a single person who doesn't know about the coronavirus, or as they call it, COVID-19. The coronavirus is a virus that originated in China, reached the U.S. and eventually spread all over the world by January of 2020. The common symptoms of the virus include shortness of breath, chills, sore throat, headache, loss of taste and smell, runny nose, vomiting and nausea. As it has been established, it might take up to 14 days for the symptoms to show. On top of that, the virus is also highly contagious putting all age groups at risk. The elderly and individuals with chronic diseases such as pneumonia or heart disease are in the top risk as the virus attacks the immune system. 

The virus first appeared on the news and media platforms in the month of January of this year. The United States and many other countries all over the globe saw no reason to panic as it seemed that the virus presented no possible threat. Throughout the next upcoming months, the virus began to spread very quickly, alerting health officials not only in the U.S., but all over the world. As people started digging into the origin of the virus, it became clear that it originated in China. Based on everything scientists have looked at, the virus came from a bat that later infected other animals, making it way to humans. As it goes for the United States, the numbers started rising quickly, resulting in the cancellation of sports events, concerts, large gatherings and then later on schools. 

As it goes personally for me, my school was shut down on March 13th. The original plan was to put us on a two weeks leave, returning on March 30th but, as the virus spread rapidly and things began escalating out of control very quickly, President Trump announced a state of emergency and the whole country was put on quarantine until April 30th. At that point, schools were officially shut down for the rest of the school year. Distanced learning was introduced, online classes were established, a new norm was put in place. As for the School District of Philadelphia distanced learning and online classes began on May 4th. From that point on I would have classes four times a week, from 8AM till 3PM. Virtual learning was something that I never had to experience and encounter before. It was all new and different for me, just as it was for millions of students all over the United States. We were forced to transfer from physically attending school, interacting with our peers and teachers, participating in fun school events and just being in a classroom setting, to just looking at each other through a computer screen in a number of days. That is something that we all could have never seen coming, it was all so sudden and new. 

My experience with distanced learning was not very great. I get distracted very easily and   find it hard to concentrate, especially when it comes to school. In a classroom I was able to give my full attention to what was being taught, I was all there. However, when we had the online classes, I could not focus and listen to what my teachers were trying to get across. I got distracted very easily, missing out on important information that was being presented. My entire family which consists of five members, were all home during the quarantine. I have two little siblings who are very loud and demanding, so I’m sure it can be imagined how hard it was for me to concentrate on school and do what was asked of me when I had these two running around the house. On top of school, I also had to find a job and work 35 hours a week to support my family during the pandemic. My mother lost her job for the time being and my father was only able to work from home. As we have a big family, the income of my father was not enough. I made it my duty to help out and support our family as much as I could: I got a job at a local supermarket and worked there as a cashier for over two months. 

While I worked at the supermarket, I was exposed to dozens of people every day and with all the protection that was implemented to protect the customers and the workers, I was lucky enough to not get the virus. As I say that, my grandparents who do not even live in the U.S. were not so lucky. They got the virus and spent over a month isolated, in a hospital bed, with no one by their side. Our only way of communicating was through the phone and if lucky, we got to talk once a week. Speaking for my family, that was the worst and scariest part of the whole situation. Luckily for us, they were both able to recover completely. 

As the pandemic is somewhat under control, the spread of the virus has slowed down. We’re now living in the new norm. We no longer view things the same, the way we did before. Large gatherings and activities that require large groups to come together are now unimaginable! Distanced learning is what we know, not to mention the importance of social distancing and having to wear masks anywhere and everywhere we go. This is the new norm now and who knows when and if ever we’ll be able go back to what we knew before. This whole experience has made me realize that we, as humans, tend to take things for granted and don’t value what we have until it is taken away from us. 

Articles in this Volume

[tid]: dedication, [tid]: new tools for a new house: transformations for justice and peace in and beyond covid-19, [tid]: black lives matter, intersectionality, and lgbtq rights now, [tid]: the voice of asian american youth: what goes untold, [tid]: beyond words: reimagining education through art and activism, [tid]: voice(s) of a black man, [tid]: embodied learning and community resilience, [tid]: re-imagining professional learning in a time of social isolation: storytelling as a tool for healing and professional growth, [tid]: reckoning: what does it mean to look forward and back together as critical educators, [tid]: leader to leaders: an indigenous school leader’s advice through storytelling about grief and covid-19, [tid]: finding hope, healing and liberation beyond covid-19 within a context of captivity and carcerality, [tid]: flux leadership: leading for justice and peace in & beyond covid-19, [tid]: flux leadership: insights from the (virtual) field, [tid]: hard pivot: compulsory crisis leadership emerges from a space of doubt, [tid]: and how are the children, [tid]: real talk: teaching and leading while bipoc, [tid]: systems of emotional support for educators in crisis, [tid]: listening leadership: the student voices project, [tid]: global engagement, perspective-sharing, & future-seeing in & beyond a global crisis, [tid]: teaching and leadership during covid-19: lessons from lived experiences, [tid]: crisis leadership in independent schools - styles & literacies, [tid]: rituals, routines and relationships: high school athletes and coaches in flux, [tid]: superintendent back-to-school welcome 2020, [tid]: mitigating summer learning loss in philadelphia during covid-19: humble attempts from the field, [tid]: untitled, [tid]: the revolution will not be on linkedin: student activism and neoliberalism, [tid]: why radical self-care cannot wait: strategies for black women leaders now, [tid]: from emergency response to critical transformation: online learning in a time of flux, [tid]: illness methodology for and beyond the covid era, [tid]: surviving black girl magic, the work, and the dissertation, [tid]: cancelled: the old student experience, [tid]: lessons from liberia: integrating theatre for development and youth development in uncertain times, [tid]: designing a more accessible future: learning from covid-19, [tid]: the construct of standards-based education, [tid]: teachers leading teachers to prepare for back to school during covid, [tid]: using empathy to cross the sea of humanity, [tid]: (un)doing college, community, and relationships in the time of coronavirus, [tid]: have we learned nothing, [tid]: choosing growth amidst chaos, [tid]: living freire in pandemic….participatory action research and democratizing knowledge at knowledgedemocracy.org, [tid]: philly students speak: voices of learning in pandemics, [tid]: the power of will: a letter to my descendant, [tid]: photo essays with students, [tid]: unity during a global pandemic: how the fight for racial justice made us unite against two diseases, [tid]: educational changes caused by the pandemic and other related social issues, [tid]: online learning during difficult times, [tid]: fighting crisis: a student perspective, [tid]: the destruction of soil rooted with culture, [tid]: a demand for change, [tid]: education through experience in and beyond the pandemics, [tid]: the pandemic diaries, [tid]: all for one and 4 for $4, [tid]: tiktok activism, [tid]: why digital learning may be the best option for next year, [tid]: my 2020 teen experience, [tid]: living between two pandemics, [tid]: journaling during isolation: the gold standard of coronavirus, [tid]: sailing through uncertainty, [tid]: what i wish my teachers knew, [tid]: youthing in pandemic while black, [tid]: the pain inflicted by indifference, [tid]: education during the pandemic, [tid]: the good, the bad, and the year 2020, [tid]: racism fueled pandemic, [tid]: coronavirus: my experience during the pandemic, [tid]: the desensitization of a doomed generation, [tid]: a philadelphia war-zone, [tid]: the attack of the covid monster, [tid]: back-to-school: covid-19 edition, [tid]: the unexpected war, [tid]: learning outside of the classroom, [tid]: why we should learn about college financial aid in school: a student perspective, [tid]: flying the plane as we go: building the future through a haze, [tid]: my covid experience in the age of technology, [tid]: we, i, and they, [tid]: learning your a, b, cs during a pandemic, [tid]: quarantine: a musical, [tid]: what it’s like being a high school student in 2020, [tid]: everything happens for a reason, [tid]: blacks live matter – a sobering and empowering reality among my peers, [tid]: the mental health of a junior during covid-19 outbreaks, [tid]: a year of change, [tid]: covid-19 and school, [tid]: the virtues and vices of virtual learning, [tid]: college decisions and the year 2020: a virtual rollercoaster, [tid]: quarantine thoughts, [tid]: quarantine through generation z, [tid]: attending online school during a pandemic.

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I tried to write an essay about productivity in quarantine. It took me a month to do it.

Americans feel pressured to work under the best of times. What happens during a pandemic?

by Constance Grady

In the early days of the coronavirus pandemic, when it was just beginning to become clear that people who could stay at home would be doing so for a very long while, an argument began to emerge. It mostly played out on social media, but after a while it moved to news outlets, too: the New York Times, HuffPost, Forbes. It concerned working at home, because it is disproportionately easy for people like me who work in digital media to work at home, and the question it revolved around was: Is a pandemic the time to get extremely productive? Or is it the time to take a break?

First, there was the King Lear argument. Shakespeare, as people reminded each other, wrote King Lear when he was quarantined during a plague. And it soon became clear that Shakespeare was just one of the many geniuses of history who accomplished miraculous things while confined to his house. Sir Isaac Newton discovered the laws of gravity and invented calculus under quarantine . Mary Shelley, well, was not under quarantine when she wrote Frankenstein and invented science fiction, but she was at least cooped up in the house because of the year without summer , so truly, can’t she serve as an inspirational figure as well ? After a period, it began to seem somewhat astonishing that anyone ever managed to accomplish anything without some global catastrophe confining them to their home.

And then, inevitably, came the whispered implication: Shouldn’t you yourself be using this time at home — dare we say this gift — because you are at home and not working in an essential field? Shouldn’t you be using this time to become more productive? Shouldn’t you be buckling down and writing a masterpiece or inventing a genre or discovering fundamental laws of the universe? At the very least, shouldn’t you be taking up a new hobby, mastering a skill, or perhaps be reaching your fully fledged form as what Forbes termed a “ coronapreneur ?”

But then came the backlash. The push to be productive while sheltering in place during a once-a-century global catastrophe was the latest sign, critics argued, of capitalism corrupting our minds.

“Please don’t be guilted into being more productive during the coronavirus,” wrote Monica Torres at HuffPost .

“This mindset is the natural endpoint of America’s hustle culture — the idea that every nanosecond of our lives must be commodified and pointed toward profit and self-improvement,” wrote Nick Martin at the New Republic .

“I, too, am declining to write the next King Lear as protest against capitalism,” proclaimed Rosa Lyster at the Outline .

Since Lyster’s March 18 article, the Outline’s staff has been entirely laid off as a result of the pandemic’s toll on the economy. While I was working on this article, CNBC reported that Vox Media, Vox’s parent company, was planning to furlough multiple employees . That’s another layer of this fight: Many of the people who are arguing over how productive anyone should be right now are doing so with the knowledge that layoffs or furloughs or pay cuts are hanging over their heads. With that knowledge comes the whisper developing in the back of everyone’s minds that perhaps this is the time to get very productive indeed, because how else can they show their employer how valuable they are and ensure their continued employment?

Perhaps this is also the time to make our off hours very productive, because you never know when you’ll need a new hobby you can turn into a side hustle. At the very least, staying busy and using your time meaningfully will be the virtuous thing to do, and it will keep your mind off everything else that is happening ... right?

Unless that line of thought is yet another sign of capitalism getting into our heads, and we really need to process and mourn and deal with the overwhelming and exhausting anxiety of living through a once-a-century pandemic. Maybe?

In the end, it all boils down to one question: Under these very peculiar circumstances, should we be trying to be productive?

Time-oriented productivity was invented by industrial capitalism

The idea of productivity as we currently understand it — doing as much as possible, as efficiently as possible — is a product of industrial capitalism. In non-industrialized societies , human beings tend to organize their sense of time around how long it takes to complete certain tasks, measuring time not by hours but by how long it takes to boil a pot of rice, for instance. And instead of keeping to a strict work schedule from 9 am to 5 pm and reserving the rest of their lives for leisure, people in non-industrial societies tend not to establish strict divisions between their working lives and the rest of their lives.

Instead, they work on a task for as long as it takes to do it, with plenty of rest mixed in. Often they fall into what we might call the college student work system: long periods of idleness, and then sprees of frantic work as a deadline approaches (think harvest time, market time, or other similar markers). This way of thinking about work is called task-orientation .

As the West industrialized over the course of the 18th and 19th centuries, the rising capitalist bourgeoisie developed new ways of thinking about time, which, in turn, it passed on to the working class. A factory’s machines must be turned on at the same time every day, and so workers, it followed, must be at their posts at the same time every day. And as factory work became more common, workers learned to think of part of their time as their own, and part of it as belonging to the people they worked for. To the capitalist, time is money, and specifically, the worker’s time is the employer’s money.

To the capitalist, time is money, and specifically the worker’s time is the employer’s money

But the great switch from task-orientation to time-orientation did not happen overnight. It took centuries of social conditioning and moralizing, centuries of discussion of the importance of punctuality and the wickedness of idleness.

Moralizers wrote adages about how Satan finds work for idle hands. Factories instituted harsh punishments against lateness and loitering. Schools were designed to teach students that their time was not their own : If schools could manage to give poor students activities to work on for at least 12 hours a day, declared Bishop William Turner in 1770, “we hope that the rising generation will be so habituated to constant employment that it would at length prove agreeable and entertaining to them.” And over time, young children could become “habituated, not to say naturalized to Labour and Fatigue,” wrote the reformer John Powell in 1772.

The economist E.P. Thompson developed the ideas and examples I’ve outlined here in his classic 1967 essay, “Time, Work-Discipline, and Industrial Capitalism,” which examines England’s shift from task-orientation to time-orientation. Thompson argued that as capitalism and Puritanism rose together in the West, the pair taught human beings a different relationship to time from the one they had before: one in which time had a value, in which it was literally equivalent to money. And for Thompson in 1967, the rise of task-orientation prompted a new question: How were capitalist human beings going to handle leisure time?

“If Puritanism was a necessary part of the work-ethos which enabled the industrialized world to break out of the poverty-stricken economies of the past,” Thompson wrote, “will the Puritan value of time begin to decompose as the pressures of poverty relax?”

Put differently: Now that more people are living out of poverty than ever before , now that we have, once again, the concept of leisure time, is it possible for us to break away from the idea that productivity is a moral good and idleness evil?

In the 21st century, people work even when they’re not supposed to be

In the US, it looks as though the answer to Thompson’s question is no. Americans are not learning to treat productivity as anything but a moral good, or idleness as anything but wicked. Many people spend their time working, even when they are ostensibly off work. Even rich American men — theoretically the people with the opportunity for the most leisure time, since they have plenty of money and fewer household obligations than women do —  spend more time working than their peers in other countries . One economist postulated to the Atlantic in 2016 that wealthy American men, like the children William Turner wanted to educate in the 18th century, are so habituated to the accumulation of wealth that they treat it as a form of recreation: It’s the closest thing they have to fun.

But even those of us who are not wealthy and who are not men spend most of our time working. This is especially true for millennials. As BuzzFeed News’s Anne Helen Petersen pointed out in her viral 2019 essay on millennial burnout , the youth of today’s workforce spent their childhoods optimizing to become more effective workers, only to graduate into a job market that had been decimated by the 2008 recession. Raised to be problem solvers, millennials like me responded by optimizing ourselves en masse, becoming ever more efficient and ever more committed to their work, while that work, in turn, seeped invisibly into even more corners of their lives, carried by smartphones and push alerts and long hours at the office.

But that constant work, which was supposed to bring millennials a measure of the job security our parents took for granted, was unsuccessful.

“The more work we do, the more efficient we’ve proven ourselves to be, the  worse  our jobs become,” Petersen wrote: “lower pay, worse benefits, less job security. Our efficiency hasn’t bucked wage stagnation; our steadfastness hasn’t made us more valuable. If anything, our commitment to work, no matter how exploitative, has simply encouraged and facilitated our exploitation. We put up with companies treating us poorly because we don’t see another option. We don’t quit. We internalize that we’re not striving hard enough. And we get a second gig.”

We have become a society in which people feel constant pressure to work and to be productive, even when we are theoretically resting. And that’s under normal circumstances.

Millennials work; they cobble together side hustles and temporary jobs into something approaching a living wage; they post the result on social media for their friends to admire. But then social media, too, becomes a form of work, a place on which millennials are reminded that they must always continue optimizing their lives for clicks . Marie Kondo your home , cook your Alison Roman shallot pasta , organize your books by color , and post a picture of the shelf on Instagram.

We spend our time locked into the endless, infinite scroll of Twitter and Tumblr and Facebook and Instagram, all of which reward constant immersion and monitoring until they begin to feel like duties rather than products to use for fun. We listen to podcasts and audiobooks at 1.5 speed to consume them more efficiently; Netflix floated the idea of letting us speed up our binge-watches, too . We consult lists of the TV shows we must watch and the books we must read which come, over time, to look more and more like homework. Leisure today is not truly leisure; it is labor.

We have become a society in which people feel constant pressure to work and to be productive, even when they are theoretically resting. And that’s under normal circumstances.

So what happens during a pandemic?

It took me almost a month to write this essay. But I wanted desperately to produce something for that entire month.

My editor assigned this essay to me on March 19. “People keep talking about King Lear ,” she said. “Could you write something about that?”

“No problem,” I said. I started a file labeled “You don’t have to write King Lear ,” and then instead of writing anything in it I sat and stared at it for some time. Then I opened Twitter in another tab.

My mind felt as though it had been shattered. I couldn’t sustain a thought long enough to analyze anything. I just stared in a blank fury at that Rosanne Cash tweet reminding me that Shakespeare wrote King Lear during quarantine.

“What a stupid thing to say,” I thought. “We’re already dealing with a global emergency and now I’m supposed to write King Lear on top of that? Well, fuck you.”

Rosanne Cash was probably not trying to pressure anyone into writing King Lear . Probably she was just trying to remind us that great art can come out of very dark times, and that this too shall pass, and perhaps when it is over, it will have given us some great artistic gift. But I was in no place to think of her tweet that way.

Like nearly everyone else who is living through this, I was grieving. The world was a certain way, and then the pandemic came and changed things, and now that old world will never come back in quite the same way again: It’s dead. That’s a loss, and one we have to work through.

I was also angry. I am still angry. I am furious at the leadership in our government that has abdicated responsibility for handling this crisis. I’m furious that essential workers are putting their lives on the line without medical-grade protection. Looking at one industry and one city alone, at least 62 New York City transit workers are dead and over 6,000 more are in quarantine with suspected Covid-19 after management told them not to wear masks on the subway to prevent customers from panicking. How can anyone not be angry and afraid and sad right now? And how can anyone do meaningful work under those conditions?

I am also living through my second major financial crisis as a working adult at age 31. Those first few weeks, whenever I wasn’t listening to the sirens outside my apartment or trying to figure out safe ways to see my 72-year-old parents again, I was thinking about all the reports that said that traffic throughout digital media was high, but ad revenue was way down ; reports that showed layoffs and pay cuts and furloughs spreading through one media company after another.

I am a good well-behaved, high-achieving millennial. Every instinct I had said that now was the time to buckle down and put myself to work, to try to outwork whatever would come. But I couldn’t sustain a thought long enough to work on long-form analysis.

Still, I wanted to lose myself in a project, something I could finish, something that would give me a sense that I had produced something — and that I had thus been virtuous. I baked bread, and then bread pudding. I sewed masks. I started an advice column . I started a book club .

I felt like I still wasn’t being productive enough. I felt like I couldn’t ever be productive enough. The thought of this unfinished essay assignment haunted me every time I sat down to work.

“The thing is,” I told myself every time I looked at the empty file, “the thesis of this hypothetical piece is that capitalism is fake and you don’t actually have to be productive during a global crisis. So, capitalism is fake. Don’t be productive.”

I wanted to produce something, and I couldn’t do it, and the failure felt monumental

But the thought felt like cheating. It felt lazy and hackneyed. All I wanted was to produce something, and I knew where the desire came from, what historical and economic factors lent it moral weight and what quirks of my own brain chemistry made me internalize them so completely, but that didn’t make the desire less real. I wanted to produce something, and I couldn’t do it, and the failure felt monumental.

Eventually, I pulled myself together enough to be able to hold a thought in my head. I put this essay together, section by section, and the work felt soothing.

But I don’t have a good answer to the question of how hard you should be working or how productive you should be during a pandemic. We’re in a global crisis, and if we are extremely lucky, we’re sitting in our homes and trying to work through it. Taking on big and absorbing projects might be soothing right now, because we have been taught to experience labor as soothing and this is not the ideal moment to start deprogramming capitalism from our brains. But it also might feel impossible to take on any additional labor right now, because dealing with the loss we’re feeling is monumental enough.

Those are both perfectly reasonable, understandable reactions. Be kind to yourself. Do what feels good to you, and what you have to do to make it through this.

You don’t have to sit around and do nothing if the idea is scary to you. But also: You really don’t have to write King Lear .

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Coronavirus, Social and Physical Distancing and Self-Quarantine

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Lisa Lockerd Maragakis, M.D., M.P.H.

Now that the new coronavirus and COVID-19, the illness it causes, are spreading among communities in the United States and other countries, phrases such as “physical distancing,” “self-quarantine” and “flattening the curve” are showing up in the media.

What do they mean, and how might they apply to you, your family and your community?

Lisa Maragakis, M.D., M.P.H. , senior director of infection prevention at Johns Hopkins, helps clarify these concepts so you can understand better why they’re being recommended.

What is social distancing?

The practice of social distancing means staying home and away from others as much as possible to help prevent spread of COVID-19. The practice of social distancing encourages the use of things such as online video and phone communication instead of in-person contact.

As communities reopen and people are more often in public, the term “physical distancing” (instead of social distancing) is being used to reinforce the need to stay at least 6 feet from others, as well as wearing face masks.  Historically, social distancing was also used interchangeably to indicate physical distancing which is defined below.  However, social distancing is a strategy distinct from the physical distancing behavior.

COVID-19: When should physical distancing be practiced?

Infectious disease expert Lisa Maragakis explains how physical distancing can help prevent the spread of the coronavirus and offers tips to practice it correctly.

What is physical distancing?

Physical distancing is the practice of staying at least 6 feet away from others to avoid catching a disease such as COVID-19.

As noted above, “social distancing” is a term that was used earlier in the pandemic as many people stayed home to help prevent spread of the virus. Now as communities are reopening and people are in public more often, physical distancing is used to stress the importance of maintaining physical space when in public areas.

How can I practice physical distancing?

Wear a  face mask or covering  when you are not in your home and whenever you are around people who are not members of your household. Maintain at least 6 feet of distance between yourself and others. Avoid crowded places, particularly indoors, and events that are likely to draw crowds.

Other examples of social and physical distancing to avoid larger crowds or crowded spaces are:

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• Cancelling or postponing conferences and large meetings

What is self-quarantine?

People who have been exposed to the new coronavirus and who are at risk for coming down with COVID-19 might practice self-quarantine . Health experts recommend that self-quarantine lasts 14 days. Two weeks provides enough time for them to know whether or not they will become ill and be contagious to other people.

You might be asked to practice self-quarantine if you have recently returned from traveling to a part of the country or the world where COVID-19 is spreading rapidly, or if you have knowingly been exposed to an infected person.

Self-quarantine involves:

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• Not sharing things like towels and utensils
• Staying at home
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• Staying at least 6 feet away from other people in your household

Once your quarantine period has ended, if you do not have symptoms, follow your doctor’s instructions on how to return to your normal routine.

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For people who are confirmed to have COVID-19, isolation is appropriate. Isolation is a health care term that means keeping people who are infected with a contagious illness away from those who are not infected. Isolation can take place at home or at a hospital or care facility. Special personal protective equipment will be used to care for these patients in health care settings.

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Flattening the curve refers to using protective practices to slow the rate of COVID-19 infection so hospitals have room, supplies and doctors for all of the patients who need care.

A large number of people becoming very sick over the course of a few days could overwhelm a hospital or care facility. Too many people becoming severely ill with COVID-19 at roughly the same time could result in a shortage of hospital beds, equipment or doctors.

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In this situation, fewer patients would arrive at the hospital each day. There would be a better chance of the hospital being able to keep up with adequate supplies, beds and health care providers to care for them.

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COVID-19 and the ethics of quarantine: a lesson from the Eyam plague

Giovanni spitale.

Institute of Biomedical Ethics and History of Medicine, University of Zurich, Winterthurerstrasse 30, 8006 Zurich, Switzerland

The recent outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is posing many different challenges to local communities, directly affected by the pandemic, and to the global community, trying to find how to respond to this threat in a larger scale. The history of the Eyam Plague, read in light of Ross Upshur’s Four Principles for the Justification of Public Health Intervention, and of the Siracusa Principles on the Limitation and Derogation Provisions in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, could provide useful guidance in navigating the complex ethical issues that arise when quarantine measures need to be put in place.

Introduction

The recent outbreak of the SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus is not an exclusively medical issue. The history of medicine and contemporary reflection clearly teach how an epidemic may have deep and sometimes radical social implications (Cohn 2002 ). After all, it is sufficient to keep an eye on the news of the day to recognise the fact: in addition to information on the progress of the disease, on the efforts of the scientific community to find a cure, or on the conditions of cities under quarantine, since the beginning of the outbreak newspapers from all over the West reported unfriendly, suspicious and sometimes openly racist attitudes towards people of Asian origin (Hussain 2020 ; Iqbal 2020 ; Lindrea and Gillett 2020 ; Ling 2020 ). The Twitter hashtag #JeNeSuisPasUnVirus, "I am not a virus" has become—the pun is not intentional, but hard to avoid—viral, used by thousands of users around the world to raise the level of public attention on the upsurge of xenophobia, "justified" (quotes are a must) by the fear of contagion. As the outbreak progresses and hits new countries, accompanied by its toll of panic, the same irrational dynamics could easily regard people with different origins. After the initial phase of virus entry into a new country, other divisions emerged, in this case not based on ethnicity but between different social groups, accompanied by the same load of suspicion and distrust. In the USA face masks have been resemantized from personal protective equipment to political symbols and statements, visually marking the division between “smug liberals” and “reckless republicans” (Lizza and Lippman 2020 ; Vetterkind 2020 ). In Italy, during the hardest phase of the lockdown, categories allowed to leave their houses, like dog owners, have been heavily stigmatized by so-called “balcony watchdogs”, and multiple sources have reported dogs killed by poisoned bites (BresciaToday 2020 ; Berton 2020 ; La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno 2020 ). It seems that, together with the death toll and the incredible strain on health care systems, this pandemic brought us a steady corrosion of our societies’ social fabric. Although reactive institutions and social order are helping to avoid radical episodes, it is inevitable to note sociological affinities with the generalized and execrable suspicion towards entire human categories—Jewish people—that characterized many Black Plague outbreaks since 1348 (Finley and Koyama 2018 ). It is mandatory to point out that, in parallel with these divisive processes, many initiatives of diametrically opposite sign have punctuated lockdowns: togetherness has been expressed all over the world singing together from the balconies, applauding health care staff, volunteering for running errands for elders or other particularly vulnerable people, and so on. Nevertheless, social corrosion seems to be a stable companion of epidemics and quarantines, and as such an important side effect to consider, study and counteract.

This paper aims to offer two reflection standpoints for reflecting on whether and how it is possible to put in place ethically acceptable containment measures in the context of epidemics. One is historical, represented by the Eyam Plague, and one theoretical, offered by Upshur’s Four Principles for the Justification of Public Health Intervention and by the Siracusa Principles on the Limitation and Derogation Provisions in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights.

Eyam plague

A few years ago I had the opportunity to visit the Peak District, in the UK. In an isolated Derbyshire valley I found the village of Eyam, sadly known to anyone with at least some familiarity with the history of epidemiology. In September 1665 the village was hit by a very serious plague epidemic, which decimated the small community: in October 1666, at the end of the epidemic, 257 of the approximately 700 people living in Eyam had died (Whittles and Didelot 2016 ).

According to the tradition, based on local chronicles (Wallis 2006 ) and stratified in various nineteenth-century literary narratives, the contagion was caused by a box of clothes imported from London by Alexander Hadfield, the village tailor. A few days after receiving the package, probably infested with infected fleas, George Viccars, Hadfield's assistant, died of the plague. Although some modern epidemiological studies accept this version (Massad et al. 2004 ), the real cause of the epidemic remains unclear: several authors believe, for example, that the outbreak of the epidemic was rather caused by an enzootic reservoir of wild rodents (Coleman 1986 ) (Fig. ​ (Fig.1). 1 ).

"Plague Cottage", former residency of the Hadfield family

One point on which nineteenth-century chronicles and contemporary studies are in agreement is the management of the epidemic by the citizens of Eyam, at least peculiar for the time. Although the mechanics of the contagion were not clear, the first response to plague epidemics in the seventeenth century was often quarantine. This measure was detested by those who were subjected to it, and often violently opposed: in this sense, among the many, can be appreciated the contemporary testimonies of Samuel Pepys, an eyewitness to the Great Plague of London in 1665–1666 (Pepys 1893 , vol. IV).

In London, Pepys writes, the limitation of contagion required drastic measures: “a watch is constantly kept there night and day to keep the people in, the plague making us cruel, as doggs[sic], one to another” (Pepys 1893 ). It is a sentence that deeply echoes Hobbes’ “homo homini lupus”, depicting a rapid and radical disruption of social fabric, strong enough to cast back London to that state of nature intended as “bellum omnium contra omnes”.

In Eyam, however, things took a different turn: the parish priest William Mompesson persuaded the local population about the need to establish a cordon sanitaire, placing the village in voluntary quarantine to protect other communities in the region from contagion (Wallis 2006 ).

The concept of “voluntary quarantine” is of particular interest: “quarantine”, from the Italian word “quaranta” was a sanitary measure introduced for the first time by the Most Serene Republic of Venice in 1377, during a plague outbreak in Dubrovnik and on the Dalmatian coast. Plague was spread by ships sailing from the eastern Mediterranean, and thus “if there was suspicion of disease on the ship, the captain was ordered to proceed to the quarantine station, where passengers and crew were isolated and the vessel was thoroughly fumigated and retained for 40 days” (Tognotti 2013 ). Historically, all over Europe quarantine was always imposed, and often enforced with firm measures. This is the reason why the case of Eyam is so peculiar: the quarantine was not imposed by an external authority, but the result of a persuasion process—and of a negotiation process—between William Mompesson and the local residents. As Sharp reports, “When the plague become worse, his wife besought him to leave the place, but he refused to do so. Moreover, he induced a number of the villagers, who wished to leave, to abandon their intention, by pointing out to them that they would carry the disease with them, and be a danger where ever they went. At the same time he wrote to the Earl of Devonshire, stating that the people would stay in Eyam if they were supplied with the necessaries of life” (Sharp 1898 ).

I remember two of the most interesting points during my visit to Eyam. The first: Cucklett Church, a "church without a church". Concerned that mass might contribute to spreading contagion, William Mompesson began saying mass outdoors, at this limestone platform (Sharp 1898 ). The second: Mompesson's well, an exchange point on the northern border of the county, used by residents of neighbouring towns to leave food and medicine to the quarantined community (Sharp 1898 ).

Some contemporary authors have hypothesized that in reality these measures may have contributed to increasing the mortality rate among the citizens of Eyam: according to Massad et al. “the hypothesis that confinement facilitated the spread of the infection by increasing the contact rate through direct transmission is plausible” (Massad et al. 2004 ); nevertheless, it remains clear how this “voluntary quarantine policy was humanitarian in intent; it was logically consistent with prevailing knowledge of plague, and it was pursued with great courage in the face of huge losses” (Coleman 1986 ).

The plague of Eyam ended in October 1666, leaving behind 257 deaths and a series of questions, some of them of a markedly ethical nature. What measures should be taken to try to limit an epidemic? What are justifiable, and if so, by what principles? Where to draw the line between the rights of individuals and the interest of communities? How to manage the different (and competing) interests of neighbouring communities?

Disentangling causes and effects?

In order to understand what causes this corrosion of the social fabric that characterized most of the epidemic outbreaks (but not Eyam’s), it would be important to try untangling what can be imputed to the epidemic itself, and what to quarantine measures. In a recent review on the psychological impact of quarantine, Brooks et al. tried to summarize how this kind of measures impacts on people’s psychological health (Brooks et al. 2020 ). Considering recent epidemics and pandemics (2003–2019) they identified five stressors during quarantine (duration, fear of infection, frustration and boredom, lack of supplies, lack of information) and two post-quarantine stressors (finances and stigma).

Looking to this list it is immediately clear how deeply these issues are intertwined. “Fear of infection”, for instance, is clearly caused by an ongoing epidemic, even if quarantine measures can make people more aware of it and somehow hasten it. In this context we can definitely say that more research is needed, maybe comparing ethnographic studies conducted in places where quarantine measures were not imposed during the COVID-19 pandemic versus others conducted in quarantined areas.

What we know for sure is that epidemic outbreaks and quarantine measures to some degree contribute in creating a climate of fear, insecurity, and competition for scarce resources, resulting in the polarization of existing divisions. But, again, not in Eyam. Was it an idyllic village with no pre-existing differences that could be exacerbated by these phenomena? Not quite: as reported by Wallis, Mompesson had to craft and implement his plan together with Thomas Stanley, previous rector of Eyam (and still supported by many inhabitants) until his eviction for non-conformity, dating to 1662 (Wallis 2006 ). At least one, very deep social division based on religious credo was there, ready to blow. But it did not.

Principles of quarantine ethics

To date, the reflection on public ethics and ethical response in the context of epidemics and pandemics revolves mainly around four approaches: deontological (or Kantian), utilitarian, principlist and casuistry (Coughlin 2006 ). Ross Upshur proposed an interesting epidemiological adaptation of the standard principles of Beauchamp and Childress, introducing a framework specifically designed for situations where quarantine measures are necessary:

• Harm: the restriction of the freedoms of individuals or groups can only be justified if it is indispensable to avoid causing harm to others;
• Least restrictive or coercive means: any action justified by the first principle should always use the mildest possible measures. In other words, education and discussion should precede prohibition or regulation;
• Reciprocity: societies within which public health measures are taken must be prepared to compensate for any inconvenience caused to individuals or groups subject to such measures;
• Transparency: all stakeholders affected by public health measures must be involved in the whole decision-making process, and the decision-making process must be as clear as possible (Upshur 2002 , 2003 ).

The history of the Eyam pestilence proves to be a paradigmatic case, bearing in mind the limited medical knowledge available at the time, when read in the light of Upshur’s approach:

• The limitation of the freedom of movement of the citizens of Eyam, through the establishment of the cordon sanitaire, was justified by the risk of spreading the contagion in the region;
• The quarantine measures used were in fact concerted, relatively mild and accompanied by information on the prevention of contagion (such as outdoor masses);
• The surrounding villages provided continuous material support to the population of Eyam;
• In contrast to what happened in London—according to Pepys' diaries—quarantine decisions were not imposed in Eyam, but were rather discussed openly within the community.

The empirical test of theories in the field of public health ethics is often a problematic matter, if not a daunting task. But still it is needed, in order to assess the validity of a specific approach in managing complex situations in which decisions are critical and come with a price, often a heavy one. That is why the history of the Eyam plague is so valuable: because it gives some hints about how things could go, adopting a similar approach. Upshur’s principles could allow establishing a quarantine without having to impose it, in line with the suggestions of Brooks et al. in terms of mitigation strategies for quarantine’s psychological effects: keeping it as short as possible, providing adequate supplies, paying special attention to communication and quality information, reinforcing the altruistic effects (Brooks et al. 2020 ). Everything looks simple, on paper and retrospectively. It is not, especially when dealing with such a complex topic. Upshur’s principles are not so simple or straightforward to apply in a situation like the current one. First, and fundamental, drawing the line between individual rights and community interest is all but an easy task. One could argue that when an individual right (e.g. not having to bear the burden of a face mask) jeopardizes community interest (e.g. limiting the spread of an infectious disease) then it is fair to limit or suspend it. A straightforward libertarian would not accept such an argument, but should agree when considering “community interest” as an epiphenomenon resulting from the right to life and health of many other individuals. If this holds true for a trivial example as the “burden” of a face mask versus life and health, things become more tricky when confronting life and death of unknown others with the (potentially total) income loss due to social distancing, so the (potentially total) loss of livelihood to provide for one’s dear ones.

This is why, following the second principle, these measures need to be not only as mild as possible, but more properly as short as possible. Heavily uncertain scenarios demand flexibility, but people might be more willing to bear a stricter quarantine for a shorter period than a longer one, even if more relaxed (Brooks et al. 2020 ).

International solidarity risks to be hollowed to a bold claim with no substance, in a time in which Countries compete to be the first ones to secure themselves pre-emption rights on critical resources such as ventilators, face masks, drugs or vaccines (HHS 2020 ). Before embarking in such competitions, governments should seriously consider what kind of message they are giving, when on the one hand they ask their citizens to behave considerately and jointly, while on the other they act like the blindest utilitarian. This is something to take into account, when dealing with Upshur’s third principle, reciprocity, on a broader scale. In Upshur’s formulation, compensation is grounded on solidarity, and solidarity has nothing to deal with the aggressive international competition for scarce and critical resources mentioned above.

Upshur’s fourth principle—transparency—needs an important integration in order to be applicable in contemporary democracies bigger than a tiny English village of the seventeenth century, and this integration is offered by the Siracusa Principles on the Limitation and Derogation Provisions in the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: “every limitation of personal freedoms”, states the document, “should be discussed and applied by law, and not in an arbitrary manner”. As Brooks et al. note, we lack studies comparing the effects of voluntary versus enforced quarantine (Brooks et al. 2020 ). But it is legitimate to hypothesize that when a quarantine is perceived as the result of a discussion, either direct or by representatives, and when enough information is provided to stress how this could help keeping safe other members of a community, particularly the vulnerable ones, people could be more inclined to compliance in self-quarantining and suffer less adverse psychological outcomes.

Noncompliance will always be an issue. There will always be people that, even if properly informed, involved and compensated, will never accept even mild temporary measures. In a healthy democracy this is impossible to avoid. From a normative standpoint, the Siracusa Principles offer some guidance in whether and how it is justifiable to impose limitations to personal freedoms in order to protect and promote public health: Article 12 (freedom of movement), Article 18 (freedom of thought, conscience and religion), Article 19 (right to hold opinions), Article 21 (right of peaceful assembly) and Article 22 (freedom of association) include “protection of public health” as a reason for imposing limitations (The American Association for the International Commission of Jurists 1985 ).

In fact, during the 2005 outbreak of extensively drug-resistant tuberculosis in KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa (Singh et al. 2007 ), the WHO embraced this approach, stating that “if a patient wilfully refuses treatment and, as a result, is a danger to the public, the serious threat posed by XDR-TB means that limiting that individual's human rights may be necessary to protect the wider public. Therefore, interference with freedom of movement when instituting quarantine or isolation for a communicable disease such as MDR-TB and XDR-TB may be necessary for the public good, and could be considered legitimate under international human rights law” (WHO 2007 ), specifying that this approach must be considered a last resort. And a very sad one, one might argue.

As a side note, it is important to stress the fact that containing this pandemic and mitigating the transmission rate is a necessity, not only “just” to save human lives, but also in order to avoid much more critical situations in which much worse ethical issues arise. Italy already faced a hard time in this sense: the Italian Society of Anaesthesia Analgesia Reanimation and Intensive Care Therapy has recently released a document providing guidance on how to prevent, or at least postpone, the collapse of the health care system by changing the allocation criteria for ICU care. The document recommends to carefully assess, among other factors, age, severity of illness, comorbidities and life expectancy before deciding to admit patients to ICUs, because “It is not a question of making purely value choices, but of reserving resources that may be very scarce first for those who are more likely to survive, and secondly for those who may have more years of life saved, with a view to maximisation of the benefits for as many people as possible” (Vergano et al. 2020 ). Other countries followed shortly after in having to face this intense deliberation process (Joebges and Biller-Andorno 2020 ).

Allocation of scarce resources is a painful nut to crack, as widely discussed in the vast body of literature dealing with the topic (Dolan et al. 2005 ), and it is just an example of the kind of difficult ethical choices our societies will have to face, should we fail containing the pandemic. During a pandemic outbreak quarantine measures do need to be put in place as timely and efficiently as possible, and this needs to be done also ethically.

Today's world is certainly more complicated than the rural English society of the 1600 s and the COVID-19 pandemic did not have its main outbreak in a village of 700 souls, but in Wuhan, a city of 11 million inhabitants, and that main outbreak has been followed by several others, scattered all around the world. It would be quite naive to infer that the same actions undertaken in Eyam could magically sort things out. Nevertheless, the history of Eyam and its voluntary quarantine, read in the light of Upshur’s principles, can be an interesting ethical paradigm, useful in providing guidance on how to understand and deal with some aspects of the current situation.

First of all, we must bear in mind that the people living today are not radically different from the people of the fourteenth or seventeenth century, and that our instinctive responses to frightening and incomprehensible phenomena such as epidemics tend to converge. For this reason it is imperative to provide not only timely, but also politically coordinated and unambiguous information and actions in order to reduce the margins where social chaos tends to develop, of which the current attitudes of suspicion and xenophobia are the clear prodromes.

Secondly, both at local level (i.e. where the pandemic has active clusters) and at global level, it is necessary to employ only measures that are justified by an actual risk, that—considering in the first place their safety and efficacy—are as mild and short as possible, and that are as concerted as possible with all relevant stakeholders.

Above all, the international community must recognize that principle of reciprocity formalized by Upshur and also acknowledged by WHO (WHO 2016 , 30), providing continuous support—scientific, economic, logistical and human—to the communities affected by this pandemic. Recognizing the principle of reciprocity and writing policies based on it will not have the same symbolic power as bringing food to a place with romantic charm like the Mompesson well, but I do not see how this could reduce its validity.

A systematic reflection on these principles, before and while drafting measures meant to contain the pandemic, could help avoiding or at least mitigating that erosion of the social fabric and that radicalization of social conflicts that brought so much harm and that are again on the rise. We have a choice: to learn, reading the past in light of these reflections, or to constantly keep a watch, night and day, against the plague making us cruel as dogs one to another.

Acknowledgements

Open access funding provided by University of Zurich. The Author would like to warmly thank Edward A Benison, MbBCh, FRCA Liverpool University Hospitals, for the brilliant guided tour of Eyam, and for his long lasting friendship.

This work was supported by the Swiss National Science Foundation (Project Number 31CA30_195905).

Compliance with ethical standards

The author wrote this paper while being subject to preventive quarantine measures.

Publisher's Note

Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

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Essays reveal experiences during pandemic, unrest.

Field study students share their thoughts 

Members of Advanced Field Study, a select group of Social Ecology students who are chosen from a pool of applicants to participate in a year-long field study experience and course, had their internships and traditional college experience cut short this year. During our final quarter of the year together, during which we met weekly for two hours via Zoom, we discussed their reactions as the world fell apart around them. First came the pandemic and social distancing, then came the death of George Floyd and the response of the Black Lives Matter movement, both of which were imprinted on the lives of these students. This year was anything but dull, instead full of raw emotion and painful realizations of the fragility of the human condition and the extent to which we need one another. This seemed like the perfect opportunity for our students to chronicle their experiences — the good and the bad, the lessons learned, and ways in which they were forever changed by the events of the past four months. I invited all of my students to write an essay describing the ways in which these times had impacted their learning and their lives during or after their time at UCI. These are their voices. — Jessica Borelli , associate professor of psychological science

Becoming Socially Distant Through Technology: The Tech Contagion

The current state of affairs put the world on pause, but this pause gave me time to reflect on troubling matters. Time that so many others like me probably also desperately needed to heal without even knowing it. Sometimes it takes one’s world falling apart for the most beautiful mosaic to be built up from the broken pieces of wreckage. 

As the school year was coming to a close and summer was edging around the corner, I began reflecting on how people will spend their summer breaks if the country remains in its current state throughout the sunny season. Aside from living in the sunny beach state of California where people love their vitamin D and social festivities, I think some of the most damaging effects Covid-19 will have on us all has more to do with social distancing policies than with any inconveniences we now face due to the added precautions, despite how devastating it may feel that Disneyland is closed to all the local annual passholders or that the beaches may not be filled with sun-kissed California girls this summer. During this unprecedented time, I don’t think we should allow the rare opportunity we now have to be able to watch in real time how the effects of social distancing can impact our mental health. Before the pandemic, many of us were already engaging in a form of social distancing. Perhaps not the exact same way we are now practicing, but the technology that we have developed over recent years has led to a dramatic decline in our social contact and skills in general. 

The debate over whether we should remain quarantined during this time is not an argument I am trying to pursue. Instead, I am trying to encourage us to view this event as a unique time to study how social distancing can affect people’s mental health over a long period of time and with dramatic results due to the magnitude of the current issue. Although Covid-19 is new and unfamiliar to everyone, the isolation and separation we now face is not. For many, this type of behavior has already been a lifestyle choice for a long time. However, the current situation we all now face has allowed us to gain a more personal insight on how that experience feels due to the current circumstances. Mental illness continues to remain a prevalent problem throughout the world and for that reason could be considered a pandemic of a sort in and of itself long before the Covid-19 outbreak. 

One parallel that can be made between our current restrictions and mental illness reminds me in particular of hikikomori culture. Hikikomori is a phenomenon that originated in Japan but that has since spread internationally, now prevalent in many parts of the world, including the United States. Hikikomori is not a mental disorder but rather can appear as a symptom of a disorder. People engaging in hikikomori remain confined in their houses and often their rooms for an extended period of time, often over the course of many years. This action of voluntary confinement is an extreme form of withdrawal from society and self-isolation. Hikikomori affects a large percent of people in Japan yearly and the problem continues to become more widespread with increasing occurrences being reported around the world each year. While we know this problem has continued to increase, the exact number of people practicing hikikomori is unknown because there is a large amount of stigma surrounding the phenomenon that inhibits people from seeking help. This phenomenon cannot be written off as culturally defined because it is spreading to many parts of the world. With the technology we now have, and mental health issues on the rise and expected to increase even more so after feeling the effects of the current pandemic, I think we will definitely see a rise in the number of people engaging in this social isolation, especially with the increase in legitimate fears we now face that appear to justify the previously considered irrational fears many have associated with social gatherings. We now have the perfect sample of people to provide answers about how this form of isolation can affect people over time. 

Likewise, with the advancements we have made to technology not only is it now possible to survive without ever leaving the confines of your own home, but it also makes it possible for us to “fulfill” many of our social interaction needs. It’s very unfortunate, but in addition to the success we have gained through our advancements we have also experienced a great loss. With new technology, I am afraid that we no longer engage with others the way we once did. Although some may say the advancements are for the best, I wonder, at what cost? It is now commonplace to see a phone on the table during a business meeting or first date. Even worse is how many will feel inclined to check their phone during important or meaningful interactions they are having with people face to face. While our technology has become smarter, we have become dumber when it comes to social etiquette. As we all now constantly carry a mini computer with us everywhere we go, we have in essence replaced our best friends. We push others away subconsciously as we reach for our phones during conversations. We no longer remember phone numbers because we have them all saved in our phones. We find comfort in looking down at our phones during those moments of free time we have in public places before our meetings begin. These same moments were once the perfect time to make friends, filled with interactive banter. We now prefer to stare at other people on our phones for hours on end, and often live a sedentary lifestyle instead of going out and interacting with others ourselves. 

These are just a few among many issues the advances to technology led to long ago. We have forgotten how to practice proper tech-etiquette and we have been inadvertently practicing social distancing long before it was ever required. Now is a perfect time for us to look at the society we have become and how we incurred a different kind of pandemic long before the one we currently face. With time, as the social distancing regulations begin to lift, people may possibly begin to appreciate life and connecting with others more than they did before as a result of the unique experience we have shared in together while apart.

Maybe the world needed a time-out to remember how to appreciate what it had but forgot to experience. Life is to be lived through experience, not to be used as a pastime to observe and compare oneself with others. I’ll leave you with a simple reminder: never forget to take care and love more because in a world where life is often unpredictable and ever changing, one cannot risk taking time or loved ones for granted. With that, I bid you farewell, fellow comrades, like all else, this too shall pass, now go live your best life!

Privilege in a Pandemic 

Covid-19 has impacted millions of Americans who have been out of work for weeks, thus creating a financial burden. Without a job and the certainty of knowing when one will return to work, paying rent and utilities has been a problem for many. With unemployment on the rise, relying on unemployment benefits has become a necessity for millions of people. According to the Washington Post , unemployment rose to 14.7% in April which is considered to be the worst since the Great Depression. 

Those who are not worried about the financial aspect or the thought never crossed their minds have privilege. Merriam Webster defines privilege as “a right or immunity granted as a peculiar benefit, advantage, or favor.” Privilege can have a negative connotation. What you choose to do with your privilege is what matters. Talking about privilege can bring discomfort, but the discomfort it brings can also carry the benefit of drawing awareness to one’s privilege, which can lead the person to take steps to help others. 

I am a first-generation college student who recently transferred to a four-year university. When schools began to close, and students had to leave their on-campus housing, many lost their jobs.I was able to stay on campus because I live in an apartment. I am fortunate to still have a job, although the hours are minimal. My parents help pay for school expenses, including housing, tuition, and food. I do not have to worry about paying rent or how to pay for food because my parents are financially stable to help me. However, there are millions of college students who are not financially stable or do not have the support system I have. Here, I have the privilege and, thus, I am the one who can offer help to others. I may not have millions in funding, but volunteering for centers who need help is where I am able to help. Those who live in California can volunteer through Californians For All  or at food banks, shelter facilities, making calls to seniors, etc. 

I was not aware of my privilege during these times until I started reading more articles about how millions of people cannot afford to pay their rent, and landlords are starting to send notices of violations. Rather than feel guilty and be passive about it, I chose to put my privilege into a sense of purpose: Donating to nonprofits helping those affected by COVID-19, continuing to support local businesses, and supporting businesses who are donating profits to those affected by COVID-19.

My World is Burning 

As I write this, my friends are double checking our medical supplies and making plans to buy water and snacks to pass out at the next protest we are attending. We write down the number for the local bailout fund on our arms and pray that we’re lucky enough not to have to use it should things get ugly. We are part of a pivotal event, the kind of movement that will forever have a place in history. Yet, during this revolution, I have papers to write and grades to worry about, as I’m in the midst of finals. 

My professors have offered empty platitudes. They condemn the violence and acknowledge the stress and pain that so many of us are feeling, especially the additional weight that this carries for students of color. I appreciate their show of solidarity, but it feels meaningless when it is accompanied by requests to complete research reports and finalize presentations. Our world is on fire. Literally. On my social media feeds, I scroll through image after image of burning buildings and police cars in flames. How can I be asked to focus on school when my community is under siege? When police are continuing to murder black people, adding additional names to the ever growing list of their victims. Breonna Taylor. Ahmaud Arbery. George Floyd. David Mcatee. And, now, Rayshard Brooks. 

It already felt like the world was being asked of us when the pandemic started and classes continued. High academic expectations were maintained even when students now faced the challenges of being locked down, often trapped in small spaces with family or roommates. Now we are faced with another public health crisis in the form of police violence and once again it seems like educational faculty are turning a blind eye to the impact that this has on the students. I cannot study for exams when I am busy brushing up on my basic first-aid training, taking notes on the best techniques to stop heavy bleeding and treat chemical burns because at the end of the day, if these protests turn south, I will be entering a warzone. Even when things remain peaceful, there is an ugliness that bubbles just below the surface. When beginning the trek home, I have had armed members of the National Guard follow me and my friends. While kneeling in silence, I have watched police officers cock their weapons and laugh, pointing out targets in the crowd. I have been emailing my professors asking for extensions, trying to explain that if something is turned in late, it could be the result of me being detained or injured. I don’t want to be penalized for trying to do what I wholeheartedly believe is right. 

I have spent my life studying and will continue to study these institutions that have been so instrumental in the oppression and marginalization of black and indigenous communities. Yet, now that I have the opportunity to be on the frontlines actively fighting for the change our country so desperately needs, I feel that this study is more of a hindrance than a help to the cause. Writing papers and reading books can only take me so far and I implore that professors everywhere recognize that requesting their students split their time and energy between finals and justice is an impossible ask.

Opportunity to Serve

Since the start of the most drastic change of our lives, I have had the privilege of helping feed more than 200 different families in the Santa Ana area and even some neighboring cities. It has been an immense pleasure seeing the sheer joy and happiness of families as they come to pick up their box of food from our site, as well as a $50 gift card to Northgate, a grocery store in Santa Ana. Along with donating food and helping feed families, the team at the office, including myself, have dedicated this time to offering psychosocial and mental health check-ups for the families we serve. 

Every day I go into the office I start my day by gathering files of our families we served between the months of January, February, and March and calling them to check on how they are doing financially, mentally, and how they have been affected by COVID-19. As a side project, I have been putting together Excel spreadsheets of all these families’ struggles and finding a way to turn their situation into a success story to share with our board at PY-OCBF and to the community partners who make all of our efforts possible. One of the things that has really touched me while working with these families is how much of an impact this nonprofit organization truly has on family’s lives. I have spoken with many families who I just call to check up on and it turns into an hour call sharing about how much of a change they have seen in their child who went through our program. Further, they go on to discuss that because of our program, their children have a different perspective on the drugs they were using before and the group of friends they were hanging out with. Of course, the situation is different right now as everyone is being told to stay at home; however, there are those handful of kids who still go out without asking for permission, increasing the likelihood they might contract this disease and pass it to the rest of the family. We are working diligently to provide support for these parents and offering advice to talk to their kids in order to have a serious conversation with their kids so that they feel heard and validated. 

Although the novel Coronavirus has impacted the lives of millions of people not just on a national level, but on a global level, I feel that in my current position, it has opened doors for me that would have otherwise not presented themselves. Fortunately, I have been offered a full-time position at the Project Youth Orange County Bar Foundation post-graduation that I have committed to already. This invitation came to me because the organization received a huge grant for COVID-19 relief to offer to their staff and since I was already part-time, they thought I would be a good fit to join the team once mid-June comes around. I was very excited and pleased to be recognized for the work I have done at the office in front of all staff. I am immensely grateful for this opportunity. I will work even harder to provide for the community and to continue changing the lives of adolescents, who have steered off the path of success. I will use my time as a full-time employee to polish my resume, not forgetting that the main purpose of my moving to Irvine was to become a scholar and continue the education that my parents couldn’t attain. I will still be looking for ways to get internships with other fields within criminology. One specific interest that I have had since being an intern and a part-time employee in this organization is the work of the Orange County Coroner’s Office. I don’t exactly know what enticed me to find it appealing as many would say that it is an awful job in nature since it relates to death and seeing people in their worst state possible. However, I feel that the only way for me to truly know if I want to pursue such a career in forensic science will be to just dive into it and see where it takes me. 

I can, without a doubt, say that the Coronavirus has impacted me in a way unlike many others, and for that I am extremely grateful. As I continue working, I can also state that many people are becoming more and more hopeful as time progresses. With people now beginning to say Stage Two of this stay-at-home order is about to allow retailers and other companies to begin doing curbside delivery, many families can now see some light at the end of the tunnel.

Let’s Do Better

This time of the year is meant to be a time of celebration; however, it has been difficult to feel proud or excited for many of us when it has become a time of collective mourning and sorrow, especially for the Black community. There has been an endless amount of pain, rage, and helplessness that has been felt throughout our nation because of the growing list of Black lives we have lost to violence and brutality.

To honor the lives that we have lost, George Floyd, Tony McDade, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery, Eric Garner, Oscar Grant, Michael Brown, Trayon Martin, and all of the other Black lives that have been taken away, may they Rest in Power.

Throughout my college experience, I have become more exposed to the various identities and the upbringings of others, which led to my own self-reflection on my own privileged and marginalized identities. I identify as Colombian, German, and Mexican; however navigating life as a mixed race, I have never been able to identify or have one culture more salient than the other. I am visibly white-passing and do not hold any strong ties with any of my ethnic identities, which used to bring me feelings of guilt and frustration, for I would question whether or not I could be an advocate for certain communities, and whether or not I could claim the identity of a woman of color. In the process of understanding my positionality, I began to wonder what space I belonged in, where I could speak up, and where I should take a step back for others to speak. I found myself in a constant theme of questioning what is my narrative and slowly began to realize that I could not base it off lone identities and that I have had the privilege to move through life without my identities defining who I am. Those initial feelings of guilt and confusion transformed into growth, acceptance, and empowerment.

This journey has driven me to educate myself more about the social inequalities and injustices that people face and to focus on what I can do for those around me. It has motivated me to be more culturally responsive and competent, so that I am able to best advocate for those around me. Through the various roles I have worked in, I have been able to listen to a variety of communities’ narratives and experiences, which has allowed me to extend my empathy to these communities while also pushing me to continue educating myself on how I can best serve and empower them. By immersing myself amongst different communities, I have been given the honor of hearing others’ stories and experiences, which has inspired me to commit myself to support and empower others.

I share my story of navigating through my privileged and marginalized identities in hopes that it encourages others to explore their own identities. This journey is not an easy one, and it is an ongoing learning process that will come with various mistakes. I have learned that with facing our privileges comes feelings of guilt, discomfort, and at times, complacency. It is very easy to become ignorant when we are not affected by different issues, but I challenge those who read this to embrace the discomfort. With these emotions, I have found it important to reflect on the source of discomfort and guilt, for although they are a part of the process, in taking the steps to become more aware of the systemic inequalities around us, understanding the source of discomfort can better inform us on how we perpetuate these systemic inequalities. If we choose to embrace ignorance, we refuse to acknowledge the systems that impact marginalized communities and refuse to honestly and openly hear cries for help. If we choose our own comfort over the lives of those being affected every day, we can never truly honor, serve, or support these communities.

I challenge any non-Black person, including myself, to stop remaining complacent when injustices are committed. We need to consistently recognize and acknowledge how the Black community is disproportionately affected in every injustice experienced and call out anti-Blackness in every role, community, and space we share. We need to keep ourselves and others accountable when we make mistakes or fall back into patterns of complacency or ignorance. We need to continue educating ourselves instead of relying on the emotional labor of the Black community to continuously educate us on the history of their oppressions. We need to collectively uplift and empower one another to heal and rise against injustice. We need to remember that allyship ends when action ends.

To the Black community, you are strong. You deserve to be here. The recent events are emotionally, mentally, and physically exhausting, and the need for rest to take care of your mental, physical, and emotional well-being are at an all time high. If you are able, take the time to regain your energy, feel every emotion, and remind yourself of the power you have inside of you. You are not alone.

The Virus That Makes You Forget

Following Jan. 1 of 2020 many of my classmates and I continued to like, share, and forward the same meme. The meme included any image but held the same phrase: I can see 2020. For many of us, 2020 was a beacon of hope. For the Class of 2020, this meant walking on stage in front of our families. Graduation meant becoming an adult, finding a job, or going to graduate school. No matter what we were doing in our post-grad life, we were the new rising stars ready to take on the world with a positive outlook no matter what the future held. We felt that we had a deal with the universe that we were about to be noticed for our hard work, our hardships, and our perseverance.

Then March 17 of 2020 came to pass with California Gov. Newman ordering us to stay at home, which we all did. However, little did we all know that the world we once had open to us would only be forgotten when we closed our front doors.

Life became immediately uncertain and for many of us, that meant graduation and our post-graduation plans including housing, careers, education, food, and basic standards of living were revoked! We became the forgotten — a place from which many of us had attempted to rise by attending university. The goals that we were told we could set and the plans that we were allowed to make — these were crushed before our eyes.

Eighty days before graduation, in the first several weeks of quarantine, I fell extremely ill; both unfortunately and luckily, I was isolated. All of my roommates had moved out of the student apartments leaving me with limited resources, unable to go to the stores to pick up medicine or food, and with insufficient health coverage to afford a doctor until my throat was too swollen to drink water. For nearly three weeks, I was stuck in bed, I was unable to apply to job deadlines, reach out to family, and have contact with the outside world. I was forgotten.

Forty-five days before graduation, I had clawed my way out of illness and was catching up on an honors thesis about media depictions of sexual exploitation within the American political system, when I was relayed the news that democratic presidential candidate Joe Biden was accused of sexual assault. However, when reporting this news to close friends who had been devastated and upset by similar claims against past politicians, they all were too tired and numb from the quarantine to care. Just as I had written hours before reading the initial story, history was repeating, and it was not only I who COVID-19 had forgotten, but now survivors of violence.

After this revelation, I realize the silencing factor that COVID-19 has. Not only does it have the power to terminate the voices of our older generations, but it has the power to silence and make us forget the voices of every generation. Maybe this is why social media usage has gone up, why we see people creating new social media accounts, posting more, attempting to reach out to long lost friends. We do not want to be silenced, moreover, we cannot be silenced. Silence means that we have been forgotten and being forgotten is where injustice and uncertainty occurs. By using social media, pressing like on a post, or even sending a hate message, means that someone cares and is watching what you are doing. If there is no interaction, I am stuck in the land of indifference.

This is a place that I, and many others, now reside, captured and uncertain. In 2020, my plan was to graduate Cum Laude, dean's honor list, with three honors programs, three majors, and with research and job experience that stretched over six years. I would then go into my first year of graduate school, attempting a dual Juris Doctorate. I would be spending my time experimenting with new concepts, new experiences, and new relationships. My life would then be spent giving a microphone to survivors of domestic violence and sex crimes. However, now the plan is wiped clean, instead I sit still bound to graduate in 30 days with no home to stay, no place to work, and no future education to come back to. I would say I am overly qualified, but pandemic makes me lost in a series of names and masked faces.

Welcome to My Cage: The Pandemic and PTSD

When I read the campuswide email notifying students of the World Health Organization’s declaration of the coronavirus pandemic, I was sitting on my couch practicing a research presentation I was going to give a few hours later. For a few minutes, I sat there motionless, trying to digest the meaning of the words as though they were from a language other than my own, familiar sounds strung together in way that was wholly unintelligible to me. I tried but failed to make sense of how this could affect my life. After the initial shock had worn off, I mobilized quickly, snapping into an autopilot mode of being I knew all too well. I began making mental checklists, sharing the email with my friends and family, half of my brain wondering if I should make a trip to the grocery store to stockpile supplies and the other half wondering how I was supposed take final exams in the midst of so much uncertainty. The most chilling realization was knowing I had to wait powerlessly as the fate of the world unfolded, frozen with anxiety as I figured out my place in it all.

These feelings of powerlessness and isolation are familiar bedfellows for me. Early October of 2015, shortly after beginning my first year at UCI, I was diagnosed with Post-traumatic Stress Disorder. Despite having had years of psychological treatment for my condition, including Cognitive Behavior Therapy and Eye Movement Desensitization and Retraining, the flashbacks, paranoia, and nightmares still emerge unwarranted. People have referred to the pandemic as a collective trauma. For me, the pandemic has not only been a collective trauma, it has also been the reemergence of a personal trauma. The news of the pandemic and the implications it has for daily life triggered a reemergence of symptoms that were ultimately ignited by the overwhelming sense of helplessness that lies in waiting, as I suddenly find myself navigating yet another situation beyond my control. Food security, safety, and my sense of self have all been shaken by COVID-19.

The first few weeks after UCI transitioned into remote learning and the governor issued the stay-at-home order, I hardly got any sleep. My body was cycling through hypervigilance and derealization, and my sleep was interrupted by intrusive nightmares oscillating between flashbacks and frightening snippets from current events. Any coping methods I had developed through hard-won efforts over the past few years — leaving my apartment for a change of scenery, hanging out with friends, going to the gym — were suddenly made inaccessible to me due to the stay-at-home orders, closures of non-essential businesses, and many of my friends breaking their campus leases to move back to their family homes. So for me, learning to cope during COVID-19 quarantine means learning to function with my re-emerging PTSD symptoms and without my go-to tools. I must navigate my illness in a rapidly evolving world, one where some of my internalized fears, such as running out of food and living in an unsafe world, are made progressively more external by the minute and broadcasted on every news platform; fears that I could no longer escape, being confined in the tight constraints of my studio apartment’s walls. I cannot shake the devastating effects of sacrifice that I experience as all sense of control has been stripped away from me.

However, amidst my mental anguish, I have realized something important—experiencing these same PTSD symptoms during a global pandemic feels markedly different than it did years ago. Part of it might be the passage of time and the growth in my mindset, but there is something else that feels very different. Currently, there is widespread solidarity and support for all of us facing the chaos of COVID-19, whether they are on the frontlines of the fight against the illness or they are self-isolating due to new rules, restrictions, and risks. This was in stark contrast to what it was like to have a mental disorder. The unity we all experience as a result of COVID-19 is one I could not have predicted. I am not the only student heartbroken over a cancelled graduation, I am not the only student who is struggling to adapt to remote learning, and I am not the only person in this world who has to make sacrifices.

Between observations I’ve made on social media and conversations with my friends and classmates, this time we are all enduring great pain and stress as we attempt to adapt to life’s challenges. As a Peer Assistant for an Education class, I have heard from many students of their heartache over the remote learning model, how difficult it is to study in a non-academic environment, and how unmotivated they have become this quarter. This is definitely something I can relate to; as of late, it has been exceptionally difficult to find motivation and put forth the effort for even simple activities as a lack of energy compounds the issue and hinders basic needs. However, the willingness of people to open up about their distress during the pandemic is unlike the self-imposed social isolation of many people who experience mental illness regularly. Something this pandemic has taught me is that I want to live in a world where mental illness receives more support and isn’t so taboo and controversial. Why is it that we are able to talk about our pain, stress, and mental illness now, but aren’t able to talk about it outside of a global pandemic? People should be able to talk about these hardships and ask for help, much like during these circumstances.

It has been nearly three months since the coronavirus crisis was declared a pandemic. I still have many bad days that I endure where my symptoms can be overwhelming. But somehow, during my good days — and some days, merely good moments — I can appreciate the resilience I have acquired over the years and the common ground I share with others who live through similar circumstances. For veterans of trauma and mental illness, this isn’t the first time we are experiencing pain in an extreme and disastrous way. This is, however, the first time we are experiencing it with the rest of the world. This strange new feeling of solidarity as I read and hear about the experiences of other people provides some small comfort as I fight my way out of bed each day. As we fight to survive this pandemic, I hope to hold onto this feeling of togetherness and acceptance of pain, so that it will always be okay for people to share their struggles. We don’t know what the world will look like days, months, or years from now, but I hope that we can cultivate such a culture to make life much easier for people coping with mental illness.

A Somatic Pandemonium in Quarantine

I remember hearing that our brains create the color magenta all on their own. 

When I was younger I used to run out of my third-grade class because my teacher was allergic to the mold and sometimes would vomit in the trash can. My dad used to tell me that I used to always have to have something in my hands, later translating itself into the form of a hair tie around my wrist.

Sometimes, I think about the girl who used to walk on her tippy toes. medial and lateral nerves never planted, never grounded. We were the same in this way. My ability to be firmly planted anywhere was also withered. 

Was it from all the times I panicked? Or from the time I ran away and I blistered the soles of my feet 'til they were black from the summer pavement? Emetophobia. 

I felt it in the shower, dressing itself from the crown of my head down to the soles of my feet, noting the feeling onto my white board in an attempt to solidify it’s permanence.

As I breathed in the chemical blue transpiring from the Expo marker, everything was more defined. I laid down and when I looked up at the starlet lamp I had finally felt centered. Still. No longer fleeting. The grooves in the lamps glass forming a spiral of what felt to me like an artificial landscape of transcendental sparks. 

She’s back now, magenta, though I never knew she left or even ever was. Somehow still subconsciously always known. I had been searching for her in the tremors.

I can see her now in the daphnes, the golden rays from the sun reflecting off of the bark on the trees and the red light that glowed brighter, suddenly the town around me was warmer. A melting of hues and sharpened saturation that was apparent and reminded of the smell of oranges.

I threw up all of the carrots I ate just before. The trauma that my body kept as a memory of things that may or may not go wrong and the times that I couldn't keep my legs from running. Revelations bring memories bringing anxieties from fear and panic released from my body as if to say “NO LONGER!” 

I close my eyes now and my mind's eye is, too, more vivid than ever before. My inner eyelids lit up with orange undertones no longer a solid black, neurons firing, fire. Not the kind that burns you but the kind that can light up a dull space. Like the wick of a tea-lit candle. Magenta doesn’t exist. It is perception. A construct made of light waves, blue and red.

Demolition. Reconstruction. I walk down the street into this new world wearing my new mask, somatic senses tingling and I think to myself “Houston, I think we’ve just hit equilibrium.”

How COVID-19 Changed My Senior Year

During the last two weeks of Winter quarter, I watched the emails pour in. Spring quarter would be online, facilities were closing, and everyone was recommended to return home to their families, if possible. I resolved to myself that I would not move back home; I wanted to stay in my apartment, near my boyfriend, near my friends, and in the one place I had my own space. However, as the COVID-19 pandemic worsened, things continued to change quickly. Soon I learned my roommate/best friend would be cancelling her lease and moving back up to Northern California. We had made plans for my final quarter at UCI, as I would be graduating in June while she had another year, but all of the sudden, that dream was gone. In one whirlwind of a day, we tried to cram in as much of our plans as we could before she left the next day for good. There are still so many things – like hiking, going to museums, and showing her around my hometown – we never got to cross off our list.

Then, my boyfriend decided he would also be moving home, three hours away. Most of my sorority sisters were moving home, too. I realized if I stayed at school, I would be completely alone. My mom had been encouraging me to move home anyway, but I was reluctant to return to a house I wasn’t completely comfortable in. As the pandemic became more serious, gentle encouragement quickly turned into demands. I had to cancel my lease and move home.

I moved back in with my parents at the end of Spring Break; I never got to say goodbye to most of my friends, many of whom I’ll likely never see again – as long as the virus doesn’t change things, I’m supposed to move to New York over the summer to begin a PhD program in Criminal Justice. Just like that, my time at UCI had come to a close. No lasts to savor; instead I had piles of things to regret. In place of a final quarter filled with memorable lasts, such as the senior banquet or my sorority’s senior preference night, I’m left with a laundry list of things I missed out on. I didn’t get to look around the campus one last time like I had planned; I never got to take my graduation pictures in front of the UC Irvine sign. Commencement had already been cancelled. The lights had turned off in the theatre before the movie was over. I never got to find out how the movie ended.

Transitioning to a remote learning system wasn’t too bad, but I found that some professors weren’t adjusting their courses to the difficulties many students were facing. It turned out to be difficult to stay motivated, especially for classes that are pre-recorded and don’t have any face-to-face interaction. It’s hard to make myself care; I’m in my last few weeks ever at UCI, but it feels like I’m already in summer. School isn’t real, my classes aren’t real. I still put in the effort, but I feel like I’m not getting much out of my classes.

The things I had been looking forward to this quarter are gone; there will be no Undergraduate Research Symposium, where I was supposed to present two projects. My amazing internship with the US Postal Inspection Service is over prematurely and I never got to properly say goodbye to anyone I met there. I won’t receive recognition for the various awards and honors I worked so hard to achieve.

And I’m one of the lucky ones! I feel guilty for feeling bad about my situation, when I know there are others who have it much, much worse. I am like that quintessential spoiled child, complaining while there are essential workers working tirelessly, people with health concerns constantly fearing for their safety, and people dying every day. Yet knowing that doesn't help me from feeling I was robbed of my senior experience, something I worked very hard to achieve. I know it’s not nearly as important as what many others are going through. But nevertheless, this is my situation. I was supposed to be enjoying this final quarter with my friends and preparing to move on, not be stuck at home, grappling with my mental health and hiding out in my room to get some alone time from a family I don’t always get along with. And while I know it’s more difficult out there for many others, it’s still difficult for me.

The thing that stresses me out most is the uncertainty. Uncertainty for the future – how long will this pandemic last? How many more people have to suffer before things go back to “normal” – whatever that is? How long until I can see my friends and family again? And what does this mean for my academic future? Who knows what will happen between now and then? All that’s left to do is wait and hope that everything will work out for the best.

Looking back over my last few months at UCI, I wish I knew at the time that I was experiencing my lasts; it feels like I took so much for granted. If there is one thing this has all made me realize, it’s that nothing is certain. Everything we expect, everything we take for granted – none of it is a given. Hold on to what you have while you have it, and take the time to appreciate the wonderful things in life, because you never know when it will be gone.

Physical Distancing

Thirty days have never felt so long. April has been the longest month of the year. I have been through more in these past three months than in the past three years. The COVID-19 outbreak has had a huge impact on both physical and social well-being of a lot of Americans, including me. Stress has been governing the lives of so many civilians, in particular students and workers. In addition to causing a lack of motivation in my life, quarantine has also brought a wave of anxiety.

My life changed the moment the Centers of Disease Control and Prevention and the government announced social distancing. My busy daily schedule, running from class to class and meeting to meeting, morphed into identical days, consisting of hour after hour behind a cold computer monitor. Human interaction and touch improve trust, reduce fear and increases physical well-being. Imagine the effects of removing the human touch and interaction from midst of society. Humans are profoundly social creatures. I cannot function without interacting and connecting with other people. Even daily acquaintances have an impact on me that is only noticeable once removed. As a result, the COVID-19 outbreak has had an extreme impact on me beyond direct symptoms and consequences of contracting the virus itself.

It was not until later that month, when out of sheer boredom I was scrolling through my call logs and I realized that I had called my grandmother more than ever. This made me realize that quarantine had created some positive impacts on my social interactions as well. This period of time has created an opportunity to check up on and connect with family and peers more often than we were able to. Even though we might be connecting solely through a screen, we are not missing out on being socially connected. Quarantine has taught me to value and prioritize social connection, and to recognize that we can find this type of connection not only through in-person gatherings, but also through deep heart to heart connections. Right now, my weekly Zoom meetings with my long-time friends are the most important events in my week. In fact, I have taken advantage of the opportunity to reconnect with many of my old friends and have actually had more meaningful conversations with them than before the isolation.

This situation is far from ideal. From my perspective, touch and in-person interaction is essential; however, we must overcome all difficulties that life throws at us with the best we are provided with. Therefore, perhaps we should take this time to re-align our motives by engaging in things that are of importance to us. I learned how to dig deep and find appreciation for all the small talks, gatherings, and face-to-face interactions. I have also realized that friendships are not only built on the foundation of physical presence but rather on meaningful conversations you get to have, even if they are through a cold computer monitor. My realization came from having more time on my hands and noticing the shift in conversations I was having with those around me. After all, maybe this isolation isn’t “social distancing”, but rather “physical distancing” until we meet again.

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Seven short essays about life during the pandemic

The boston book festival's at home community writing project invites area residents to describe their experiences during this unprecedented time..

My alarm sounds at 8:15 a.m. I open my eyes and take a deep breath. I wiggle my toes and move my legs. I do this religiously every morning. Today, marks day 74 of staying at home.

My mornings are filled with reading biblical scripture, meditation, breathing in the scents of a hanging eucalyptus branch in the shower, and making tea before I log into my computer to work. After an hour-and-a-half Zoom meeting, I decided to take a long walk to the post office and grab a fresh bouquet of burnt orange ranunculus flowers. I embrace the warm sun beaming on my face. I feel joy. I feel at peace.

I enter my apartment and excessively wash my hands and face. I pour a glass of iced kombucha. I sit at my table and look at the text message on my phone. My coworker writes that she is thinking of me during this difficult time. She must be referring to the Amy Cooper incident. I learn shortly that she is not.

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I Google Minneapolis and see his name: George Floyd. And just like that a simple and beautiful day transitions into a day of sorrow.

Nakia Hill, Boston

It was a wobbly, yet solemn little procession: three masked mourners and a canine. Beginning in Kenmore Square, at David and Sue Horner’s condo, it proceeded up Commonwealth Avenue Mall.

S. Sue Horner died on Good Friday, April 10, in the Year of the Virus. Sue did not die of the virus but her parting was hemmed by it: no gatherings to mark the passing of this splendid human being.

David devised a send-off nevertheless. On April 23rd, accompanied by his daughter and son-in-law, he set out for Old South Church. David led, bearing the urn. His daughter came next, holding her phone aloft, speaker on, through which her brother in Illinois played the bagpipes for the length of the procession, its soaring thrum infusing the Mall. Her husband came last with Melon, their golden retriever.

I unlocked the empty church and led the procession into the columbarium. David drew the urn from its velvet cover, revealing a golden vessel inset with incandescent tiles. We lifted the urn into the niche, prayed, recited Psalm 23, and shared some words.

It was far too small for the luminous “Dr. Sue”, but what we could manage in the Year of the Virus.

Nancy S. Taylor, Boston

On April 26, 2020, our household was a bustling home for four people. Our two sons, ages 18 and 22, have a lot of energy. We are among the lucky ones. I can work remotely. Our food and shelter are not at risk.

As I write this a week later, it is much quieter here.

On April 27, our older son, an EMT, transported a COVID-19 patient to the ER. He left home to protect my delicate health and became ill with the virus a week later.

On April 29, my husband’s 95-year-old father had a stroke. My husband left immediately to be with his 90-year-old mother near New York City and is now preparing for his father’s discharge from the hospital. Rehab people will come to the house; going to a facility would be too dangerous.

My husband just called me to describe today’s hospital visit. The doctors had warned that although his father had regained the ability to speak, he could only repeat what was said to him.

“It’s me,” said my husband.

“It’s me,” said my father-in-law.

“I love you,” said my husband.

“I love you,” said my father-in-law.

“Sooooooooo much,” said my father-in-law.

Lucia Thompson, Wayland

Would racism exist if we were blind?

I felt his eyes bore into me as I walked through the grocery store. At first, I thought nothing of it. With the angst in the air attributable to COVID, I understood the anxiety-provoking nature of feeling as though your 6-foot bubble had burst. So, I ignored him and maintained my distance. But he persisted, glaring at my face, squinting to see who I was underneath the mask. This time I looked back, when he yelled, in my mother tongue, for me to go back to my country.

In shock, I just laughed. How could he tell what I was under my mask? Or see anything through the sunglasses he was wearing inside? It baffled me. I laughed at the irony that he would use my own language against me, that he knew enough to guess where I was from in some version of culturally competent racism. I laughed because dealing with the truth behind that comment generated a sadness in me that was too much to handle. If not now, then when will we be together?

So I ask again, would racism exist if we were blind?

Faizah Shareef, Boston

My Family is “Out” There

But I am “in” here. Life is different now “in” Assisted Living since the deadly COVID-19 arrived. Now the staff, employees, and all 100 residents have our temperatures taken daily. Everyone else, including my family, is “out” there. People like the hairdresser are really missed — with long straight hair and masks, we don’t even recognize ourselves.

Since mid-March we are in quarantine “in” our rooms with meals served. Activities are practically non-existent. We can sit on the back patio 6 feet apart, wearing masks, do exercises there, chat, and walk nearby. Nothing inside. Hopefully June will improve.

My family is “out” there — somewhere! Most are working from home (or Montana). Hopefully an August wedding will happen, but unfortunately, I may still be “in” here.

From my window I wave to my son “out” there. Recently, when my daughter visited, I opened the window “in” my second-floor room and could see and hear her perfectly “out” there. Next time she will bring a chair so we can have an “in” and “out” conversation all day, or until we run out of words.

Barbara Anderson, Raynham

My boyfriend Marcial lives in Boston, and I live in New York City. We had been doing the long-distance thing pretty successfully until coronavirus hit. In mid-March, I was furloughed from my temp job, Marcial began working remotely, and New York started shutting down. I went to Boston to stay with Marcial.

We are opposites in many ways, but we share a love of food. The kitchen has been the center of quarantine life —and also quarantine problems.

Marcial and I have gone from eating out and cooking/grocery shopping for each other during our periodic visits to cooking/grocery shopping with each other all the time. We’ve argued over things like the proper way to make rice and what greens to buy for salad. Our habits are deeply rooted in our upbringing and individual cultures (Filipino immigrant and American-born Chinese, hence the strong rice opinions).

On top of the mundane issues, we’ve also dealt with a flooded kitchen (resulting in cockroaches) and a mandoline accident leading to an ER visit. Marcial and I have spent quarantine navigating how to handle the unexpected and how to integrate our lifestyles. We’ve been eating well along the way.

Melissa Lee, Waltham

It’s 3 a.m. and my dog Rikki just gave me a worried look. Up again?

“I can’t sleep,” I say. I flick the light, pick up “Non-Zero Probabilities.” But the words lay pinned to the page like swatted flies. I watch new “Killing Eve” episodes, play old Nathaniel Rateliff and The Night Sweats songs. Still night.

We are — what? — 12 agitated weeks into lockdown, and now this. The thing that got me was Chauvin’s sunglasses. Perched nonchalantly on his head, undisturbed, as if he were at a backyard BBQ. Or anywhere other than kneeling on George Floyd’s neck, on his life. And Floyd was a father, as we all now know, having seen his daughter Gianna on Stephen Jackson’s shoulders saying “Daddy changed the world.”

Precious child. I pray, safeguard her.

Rikki has her own bed. But she won’t leave me. A Goddess of Protection. She does that thing dogs do, hovers increasingly closely the more agitated I get. “I’m losing it,” I say. I know. And like those weighted gravity blankets meant to encourage sleep, she drapes her 70 pounds over me, covering my restless heart with safety.

As if daybreak, or a prayer, could bring peace today.

Kirstan Barnett, Watertown

Until June 30, send your essay (200 words or less) about life during COVID-19 via bostonbookfest.org . Some essays will be published on the festival’s blog and some will appear in The Boston Globe.

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The health effects of quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic

Affiliations.

• 1 Department of Occupational Health Engineering, School of Health, Torbat Heydariyeh University of Medical Sciences, Torbat Heydariyeh, Iran.
• 2 Health Sciences Research Center, Torbat Heydariyeh University of Medical Sciences, Torbat Heydariyeh, Iran.
• 3 Department of Occupational Health Engineering, School of Health, Ardabil University of Medical Sciences, Ardabil, Iran.
• PMID: 33164969
• DOI: 10.3233/WOR-203306

Background: Quarantine is considered as an effective solution in the early stages of an epidemic. In the case of the coronavirus epidemic, quarantine was also recommended and implemented as a significant guideline to prevent the disease. However, despite the benefits of quarantine, there are also complications and problems.

Objective: The present study aimed to investigate the health effects of quarantine during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Methods: This study was conducted as a literature review through searching the databases Google Scholar, PubMed, and Science Direct for papers published before July 2020. The research was conducted based on the keywords "Coronavirus," "COVID-19," and "quarantine." The references of the papers were also reviewed to find the ones not found in the databases. The guidelines published by reputable organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) were used in this study.

Results: Although quarantine is applied as an important and primary solution in the outbreak of epidemics, in cases of pandemics, it may not be free of negative effects on individuals and public health. However, because of the need to reopen and restart social and economic activities, some changes should be made in lifestyles and work activities. Using cyberspace and telework can be helpful. As the findings showed, COVID-19 bubbles can be used to restore social communications.

Conclusion: Using masks, avoiding unnecessary gatherings, complying with personal and social hygiene, and respecting social distancing can be valuable solutions that, if implemented properly, can decrease the rate of the disease significantly. It is also emphasized that quarantine is still necessary and important as the best solution for sick people and individuals who are suspected carriers of the disease.

Keywords: COVID-19; Personal protection equipment; health effects; pandemic; quarantine; social distancing.

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Why the Pandemic Probably Started in a Lab, in 5 Key Points

By Alina Chan

Dr. Chan is a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, and a co-author of “Viral: The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.”

This article has been updated to reflect news developments.

On Monday, Dr. Anthony Fauci returned to the halls of Congress and testified before the House subcommittee investigating the Covid-19 pandemic. He was questioned about several topics related to the government’s handling of Covid-19, including how the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases, which he directed until retiring in 2022, supported risky virus work at a Chinese institute whose research may have caused the pandemic.

For more than four years, reflexive partisan politics have derailed the search for the truth about a catastrophe that has touched us all. It has been estimated that at least 25 million people around the world have died because of Covid-19, with over a million of those deaths in the United States.

Although how the pandemic started has been hotly debated, a growing volume of evidence — gleaned from public records released under the Freedom of Information Act, digital sleuthing through online databases, scientific papers analyzing the virus and its spread, and leaks from within the U.S. government — suggests that the pandemic most likely occurred because a virus escaped from a research lab in Wuhan, China. If so, it would be the most costly accident in the history of science.

Here’s what we now know:

1 The SARS-like virus that caused the pandemic emerged in Wuhan, the city where the world’s foremost research lab for SARS-like viruses is located.

• At the Wuhan Institute of Virology, a team of scientists had been hunting for SARS-like viruses for over a decade, led by Shi Zhengli.
• Their research showed that the viruses most similar to SARS‑CoV‑2, the virus that caused the pandemic, circulate in bats that live r oughly 1,000 miles away from Wuhan. Scientists from Dr. Shi’s team traveled repeatedly to Yunnan province to collect these viruses and had expanded their search to Southeast Asia. Bats in other parts of China have not been found to carry viruses that are as closely related to SARS-CoV-2.

The closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2 were found in southwestern China and in Laos.

Large cities

Mine in Yunnan province

Cave in Laos

South China Sea

The closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2

were found in southwestern China and in Laos.

philippines

The closest known relatives to SARS-CoV-2 were found

in southwestern China and Laos.

Sources: Sarah Temmam et al., Nature; SimpleMaps

Note: Cities shown have a population of at least 200,000.

There are hundreds of large cities in China and Southeast Asia.

There are hundreds of large cities in China

and Southeast Asia.

The pandemic started roughly 1,000 miles away, in Wuhan, home to the world’s foremost SARS-like virus research lab.

The pandemic started roughly 1,000 miles away,

in Wuhan, home to the world’s foremost SARS-like virus research lab.

The pandemic started roughly 1,000 miles away, in Wuhan,

home to the world’s foremost SARS-like virus research lab.

• Even at hot spots where these viruses exist naturally near the cave bats of southwestern China and Southeast Asia, the scientists argued, as recently as 2019 , that bat coronavirus spillover into humans is rare .
• When the Covid-19 outbreak was detected, Dr. Shi initially wondered if the novel coronavirus had come from her laboratory , saying she had never expected such an outbreak to occur in Wuhan.
• The SARS‑CoV‑2 virus is exceptionally contagious and can jump from species to species like wildfire . Yet it left no known trace of infection at its source or anywhere along what would have been a thousand-mile journey before emerging in Wuhan.

2 The year before the outbreak, the Wuhan institute, working with U.S. partners, had proposed creating viruses with SARS‑CoV‑2’s defining feature.

• Dr. Shi’s group was fascinated by how coronaviruses jump from species to species. To find viruses, they took samples from bats and other animals , as well as from sick people living near animals carrying these viruses or associated with the wildlife trade. Much of this work was conducted in partnership with the EcoHealth Alliance, a U.S.-based scientific organization that, since 2002, has been awarded over $80 million in federal funding to research the risks of emerging infectious diseases.
• The laboratory pursued risky research that resulted in viruses becoming more infectious : Coronaviruses were grown from samples from infected animals and genetically reconstructed and recombined to create new viruses unknown in nature. These new viruses were passed through cells from bats, pigs, primates and humans and were used to infect civets and humanized mice (mice modified with human genes). In essence, this process forced these viruses to adapt to new host species, and the viruses with mutations that allowed them to thrive emerged as victors.
• By 2019, Dr. Shi’s group had published a database describing more than 22,000 collected wildlife samples. But external access was shut off in the fall of 2019, and the database was not shared with American collaborators even after the pandemic started , when such a rich virus collection would have been most useful in tracking the origin of SARS‑CoV‑2. It remains unclear whether the Wuhan institute possessed a precursor of the pandemic virus.
• In 2021, The Intercept published a leaked 2018 grant proposal for a research project named Defuse , which had been written as a collaboration between EcoHealth, the Wuhan institute and Ralph Baric at the University of North Carolina, who had been on the cutting edge of coronavirus research for years. The proposal described plans to create viruses strikingly similar to SARS‑CoV‑2.
• Coronaviruses bear their name because their surface is studded with protein spikes, like a spiky crown, which they use to enter animal cells. T he Defuse project proposed to search for and create SARS-like viruses carrying spikes with a unique feature: a furin cleavage site — the same feature that enhances SARS‑CoV‑2’s infectiousness in humans, making it capable of causing a pandemic. Defuse was never funded by the United States . However, in his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci explained that the Wuhan institute would not need to rely on U.S. funding to pursue research independently.

The Wuhan lab ran risky experiments to learn about how SARS-like viruses might infect humans.

1. Collect SARS-like viruses from bats and other wild animals, as well as from people exposed to them.

2. Identify high-risk viruses by screening for spike proteins that facilitate infection of human cells.

2. Identify high-risk viruses by screening for spike proteins that facilitate infection of

human cells.

In Defuse, the scientists proposed to add a furin cleavage site to the spike protein.

3. Create new coronaviruses by inserting spike proteins or other features that could make the viruses more infectious in humans.

4. Infect human cells, civets and humanized mice with the new coronaviruses, to determine how dangerous they might be.

• While it’s possible that the furin cleavage site could have evolved naturally (as seen in some distantly related coronaviruses), out of the hundreds of SARS-like viruses cataloged by scientists, SARS‑CoV‑2 is the only one known to possess a furin cleavage site in its spike. And the genetic data suggest that the virus had only recently gained the furin cleavage site before it started the pandemic.
• Ultimately, a never-before-seen SARS-like virus with a newly introduced furin cleavage site, matching the description in the Wuhan institute’s Defuse proposal, caused an outbreak in Wuhan less than two years after the proposal was drafted.
• When the Wuhan scientists published their seminal paper about Covid-19 as the pandemic roared to life in 2020, they did not mention the virus’s furin cleavage site — a feature they should have been on the lookout for, according to their own grant proposal, and a feature quickly recognized by other scientists.
• Worse still, as the pandemic raged, their American collaborators failed to publicly reveal the existence of the Defuse proposal. The president of EcoHealth, Peter Daszak, recently admitted to Congress that he doesn’t know about virus samples collected by the Wuhan institute after 2015 and never asked the lab’s scientists if they had started the work described in Defuse. In May, citing failures in EcoHealth’s monitoring of risky experiments conducted at the Wuhan lab, the Biden administration suspended all federal funding for the organization and Dr. Daszak, and initiated proceedings to bar them from receiving future grants. In his testimony on Monday, Dr. Fauci said that he supported the decision to suspend and bar EcoHealth.
• Separately, Dr. Baric described the competitive dynamic between his research group and the institute when he told Congress that the Wuhan scientists would probably not have shared their most interesting newly discovered viruses with him . Documents and email correspondence between the institute and Dr. Baric are still being withheld from the public while their release is fiercely contested in litigation.
• In the end, American partners very likely knew of only a fraction of the research done in Wuhan. According to U.S. intelligence sources, some of the institute’s virus research was classified or conducted with or on behalf of the Chinese military . In the congressional hearing on Monday, Dr. Fauci repeatedly acknowledged the lack of visibility into experiments conducted at the Wuhan institute, saying, “None of us can know everything that’s going on in China, or in Wuhan, or what have you. And that’s the reason why — I say today, and I’ve said at the T.I.,” referring to his transcribed interview with the subcommittee, “I keep an open mind as to what the origin is.”

3 The Wuhan lab pursued this type of work under low biosafety conditions that could not have contained an airborne virus as infectious as SARS‑CoV‑2.

• Labs working with live viruses generally operate at one of four biosafety levels (known in ascending order of stringency as BSL-1, 2, 3 and 4) that describe the work practices that are considered sufficiently safe depending on the characteristics of each pathogen. The Wuhan institute’s scientists worked with SARS-like viruses under inappropriately low biosafety conditions .

In the United States, virologists generally use stricter Biosafety Level 3 protocols when working with SARS-like viruses.

Biosafety cabinets prevent

viral particles from escaping.

Viral particles

Personal respirators provide

a second layer of defense against breathing in the virus.

DIRECT CONTACT

Gloves prevent skin contact.

Disposable wraparound

gowns cover much of the rest of the body.

Personal respirators provide a second layer of defense against breathing in the virus.

Disposable wraparound gowns

cover much of the rest of the body.

Note: ​​Biosafety levels are not internationally standardized, and some countries use more permissive protocols than others.

The Wuhan lab had been regularly working with SARS-like viruses under Biosafety Level 2 conditions, which could not prevent a highly infectious virus like SARS-CoV-2 from escaping.

Some work is done in the open air, and masks are not required.

Less protective equipment provides more opportunities

for contamination.

Some work is done in the open air,

and masks are not required.

Less protective equipment provides more opportunities for contamination.

• In one experiment, Dr. Shi’s group genetically engineered an unexpectedly deadly SARS-like virus (not closely related to SARS‑CoV‑2) that exhibited a 10,000-fold increase in the quantity of virus in the lungs and brains of humanized mice . Wuhan institute scientists handled these live viruses at low biosafet y levels , including BSL-2.
• Even the much more stringent containment at BSL-3 cannot fully prevent SARS‑CoV‑2 from escaping . Two years into the pandemic, the virus infected a scientist in a BSL-3 laboratory in Taiwan, which was, at the time, a zero-Covid country. The scientist had been vaccinated and was tested only after losing the sense of smell. By then, more than 100 close contacts had been exposed. Human error is a source of exposure even at the highest biosafety levels , and the risks are much greater for scientists working with infectious pathogens at low biosafety.
• An early draft of the Defuse proposal stated that the Wuhan lab would do their virus work at BSL-2 to make it “highly cost-effective.” Dr. Baric added a note to the draft highlighting the importance of using BSL-3 to contain SARS-like viruses that could infect human cells, writing that “U.S. researchers will likely freak out.” Years later, after SARS‑CoV‑2 had killed millions, Dr. Baric wrote to Dr. Daszak : “I have no doubt that they followed state determined rules and did the work under BSL-2. Yes China has the right to set their own policy. You believe this was appropriate containment if you want but don’t expect me to believe it. Moreover, don’t insult my intelligence by trying to feed me this load of BS.”
• SARS‑CoV‑2 is a stealthy virus that transmits effectively through the air, causes a range of symptoms similar to those of other common respiratory diseases and can be spread by infected people before symptoms even appear. If the virus had escaped from a BSL-2 laboratory in 2019, the leak most likely would have gone undetected until too late.
• One alarming detail — leaked to The Wall Street Journal and confirmed by current and former U.S. government officials — is that scientists on Dr. Shi’s team fell ill with Covid-like symptoms in the fall of 2019 . One of the scientists had been named in the Defuse proposal as the person in charge of virus discovery work. The scientists denied having been sick .

4 The hypothesis that Covid-19 came from an animal at the Huanan Seafood Market in Wuhan is not supported by strong evidence.

• In December 2019, Chinese investigators assumed the outbreak had started at a centrally located market frequented by thousands of visitors daily. This bias in their search for early cases meant that cases unlinked to or located far away from the market would very likely have been missed. To make things worse, the Chinese authorities blocked the reporting of early cases not linked to the market and, claiming biosafety precautions, ordered the destruction of patient samples on January 3, 2020, making it nearly impossible to see the complete picture of the earliest Covid-19 cases. Information about dozens of early cases from November and December 2019 remains inaccessible.
• A pair of papers published in Science in 2022 made the best case for SARS‑CoV‑2 having emerged naturally from human-animal contact at the Wuhan market by focusing on a map of the early cases and asserting that the virus had jumped from animals into humans twice at the market in 2019. More recently, the two papers have been countered by other virologists and scientists who convincingly demonstrate that the available market evidence does not distinguish between a human superspreader event and a natural spillover at the market.
• Furthermore, the existing genetic and early case data show that all known Covid-19 cases probably stem from a single introduction of SARS‑CoV‑2 into people, and the outbreak at the Wuhan market probably happened after the virus had already been circulating in humans.

An analysis of SARS-CoV-2’s evolutionary tree shows how the virus evolved as it started to spread through humans.

SARS-COV-2 Viruses closest

to bat coronaviruses

more mutations

Source: Lv et al., Virus Evolution (2024) , as reproduced by Jesse Bloom

The viruses that infected people linked to the market were most likely not the earliest form of the virus that started the pandemic.

• Not a single infected animal has ever been confirmed at the market or in its supply chain. Without good evidence that the pandemic started at the Huanan Seafood Market, the fact that the virus emerged in Wuhan points squarely at its unique SARS-like virus laboratory.

5 Key evidence that would be expected if the virus had emerged from the wildlife trade is still missing.

In previous outbreaks of coronaviruses, scientists were able to demonstrate natural origin by collecting multiple pieces of evidence linking infected humans to infected animals.

Infected animals

Earliest known

cases exposed to

live animals

Antibody evidence

of animals and

animal traders having

been infected

Ancestral variants

of the virus found in

Documented trade

of host animals

between the area

where bats carry

closely related viruses

and the outbreak site

Infected animals found

Earliest known cases exposed to live animals

Antibody evidence of animals and animal

traders having been infected

Ancestral variants of the virus found in animals

Documented trade of host animals

between the area where bats carry closely

related viruses and the outbreak site

For SARS-CoV-2, these same key pieces of evidence are still missing , more than four years after the virus emerged.

For SARS-CoV-2, these same key pieces of evidence are still missing ,

more than four years after the virus emerged.

• Despite the intense search trained on the animal trade and people linked to the market, investigators have not reported finding any animals infected with SARS‑CoV‑2 that had not been infected by humans. Yet, infected animal sources and other connective pieces of evidence were found for the earlier SARS and MERS outbreaks as quickly as within a few days, despite the less advanced viral forensic technologies of two decades ago.
• Even though Wuhan is the home base of virus hunters with world-leading expertise in tracking novel SARS-like viruses, investigators have either failed to collect or report key evidence that would be expected if Covid-19 emerged from the wildlife trade . For example, investigators have not determined that the earliest known cases had exposure to intermediate host animals before falling ill. No antibody evidence shows that animal traders in Wuhan are regularly exposed to SARS-like viruses, as would be expected in such situations.
• With today’s technology, scientists can detect how respiratory viruses — including SARS, MERS and the flu — circulate in animals while making repeated attempts to jump across species . Thankfully, these variants usually fail to transmit well after crossing over to a new species and tend to die off after a small number of infections. In contrast, virologists and other scientists agree that SARS‑CoV‑2 required little to no adaptation to spread rapidly in humans and other animals . The virus appears to have succeeded in causing a pandemic upon its only detected jump into humans.

The pandemic could have been caused by any of hundreds of virus species, at any of tens of thousands of wildlife markets, in any of thousands of cities, and in any year. But it was a SARS-like coronavirus with a unique furin cleavage site that emerged in Wuhan, less than two years after scientists, sometimes working under inadequate biosafety conditions, proposed collecting and creating viruses of that same design.

While several natural spillover scenarios remain plausible, and we still don’t know enough about the full extent of virus research conducted at the Wuhan institute by Dr. Shi’s team and other researchers, a laboratory accident is the most parsimonious explanation of how the pandemic began.

Given what we now know, investigators should follow their strongest leads and subpoena all exchanges between the Wuhan scientists and their international partners, including unpublished research proposals, manuscripts, data and commercial orders. In particular, exchanges from 2018 and 2019 — the critical two years before the emergence of Covid-19 — are very likely to be illuminating (and require no cooperation from the Chinese government to acquire), yet they remain beyond the public’s view more than four years after the pandemic began.

Whether the pandemic started on a lab bench or in a market stall, it is undeniable that U.S. federal funding helped to build an unprecedented collection of SARS-like viruses at the Wuhan institute, as well as contributing to research that enhanced them . Advocates and funders of the institute’s research, including Dr. Fauci, should cooperate with the investigation to help identify and close the loopholes that allowed such dangerous work to occur. The world must not continue to bear the intolerable risks of research with the potential to cause pandemics .

A successful investigation of the pandemic’s root cause would have the power to break a decades-long scientific impasse on pathogen research safety, determining how governments will spend billions of dollars to prevent future pandemics. A credible investigation would also deter future acts of negligence and deceit by demonstrating that it is indeed possible to be held accountable for causing a viral pandemic. Last but not least, people of all nations need to see their leaders — and especially, their scientists — heading the charge to find out what caused this world-shaking event. Restoring public trust in science and government leadership requires it.

A thorough investigation by the U.S. government could unearth more evidence while spurring whistleblowers to find their courage and seek their moment of opportunity. It would also show the world that U.S. leaders and scientists are not afraid of what the truth behind the pandemic may be.

More on how the pandemic may have started

Where Did the Coronavirus Come From? What We Already Know Is Troubling.

Even if the coronavirus did not emerge from a lab, the groundwork for a potential disaster had been laid for years, and learning its lessons is essential to preventing others.

By Zeynep Tufekci

Why Does Bad Science on Covid’s Origin Get Hyped?

If the raccoon dog was a smoking gun, it fired blanks.

By David Wallace-Wells

A Plea for Making Virus Research Safer

A way forward for lab safety.

By Jesse Bloom

The Times is committed to publishing a diversity of letters to the editor. We’d like to hear what you think about this or any of our articles. Here are some tips . And here’s our email: [email protected] .

Follow the New York Times Opinion section on Facebook , Instagram , TikTok , WhatsApp , X and Threads .

Alina Chan ( @ayjchan ) is a molecular biologist at the Broad Institute of M.I.T. and Harvard, and a co-author of “ Viral : The Search for the Origin of Covid-19.” She was a member of the Pathogens Project , which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists organized to generate new thinking on responsible, high-risk pathogen research.

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My experience with covid-19, fighting infection, coping with quarantine and why vaccines matter.

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I believe that getting vaccinated will improve my chances of not getting infected again and will help protect my beloved family Maher Ghafari

Aleppo, Syria, 22 August 2021 - Today I got my second dose of the COVID-19 vaccine because we are all responsible for fighting this pandemic. I believe that getting vaccinated will improve my chances of not getting infected again and will help protect my beloved family, colleagues at the office and friends.

Last year, both my wife and I got infected with COVID-19. Although we did not panic, we felt rather alert and had consciously been prepared for such a scenario. On the first few days, symptoms included the loss of taste and smell as well as muscle pain, which we used pain relief medications to reduce. Thankfully we did not have any respiratory symptoms.

We were taken aback when we first got the test results. Being unable to predict potential deterioration to our health was also worrisome. There was an incessant flow of information about the virus, and the more we saw what came on the media outlets and digital platforms, the more confused we became. Thus, we decided only to go to reliable sources for information. We did not feel alone during the whole time because of the support we received from our family and colleagues daily via video calls, chat applications and mobile phone messages.

We feared developing respiratory symptoms that could complicate our medical situation and that we might not be able to protect Laura, our four-year-old daughter. As the pain and fatigue started to subside after the first few days, we were reassured that it was unlikely that we develop respiratory symptoms. The challenge now became how to cope with self-isolation and quarantine for at least 15 days while we focus on getting better.

It was important to explain to our little Laura that there will be no more hugging or kissing. She cried at first and wondered whether that meant we had stopped loving her. Laura, 4

It was important to explain to our little Laura that there will be no more hugging or kissing. She cried at first and wondered whether that meant we had stopped loving her. But as we explained that it was something temporary, which we had to do because we loved her so much, she was okay.

Being quarantined at home for about 20 days affected our daily routine and forced us to find new ways of doing things. When I felt ready to work, I had to attend all my meetings remotely, via the internet or phone. It was difficult to explain to Laura that I was working and that being home did not mean I can spend all my time with her. For her, it felt like we were on a constant weekend but none of us could go out. I let her join during some of my video meetings to help her grasp the idea of working from home.

We learnt how to take advantage of our time in quarantine to strengthen the relationship among our small family, away from the internet and mobile phones. We came up with new games for Laura. Her favourite was dressing up as a doctor to treat us. She would even excitedly deliver awareness messages about COVID-19 and its preventive measures to us. A while after, we learned that she explains to her friends at the nursery what she had memorized about the pandemic, its prevention and our time in quarantine.

As a water, sanitation and hygiene (WASH) officer with UNICEF in Aleppo field office, I work on ensuring that people in need are provided with life-saving assistance as well as longer-term durable WASH support. The COVID-19 pandemic came posing a major risk to the health and hygiene of whole communities in such a short time. In Aleppo, since June last year, we had to focus on supporting the most vulnerable people, especially those displaced in camps, by increasing the daily water delivery and thus enabling the promotion of handwashing and hygiene practices. In addition, UNICEF provided remote awareness sessions about the pandemic and its preventive measures, using speakerphones on mobile vehicles to avoid the crowding of people in the camps.

Also, preparing for the reopening of schools, last year, following a period of interruption caused by the first wave of COVID-19 spread and restrictions, was a real challenge. We needed to launch a huge campaign among WASH sector partners to rehabilitate water, sanitation and hygiene facilities in schools, ensuring the functionality of handwashing facilities. We also provided infection prevention control and sanitization supplies to students alongside a hygiene awareness campaign.

*Maher Ghafari is a water, sanitation and hygiene officer working with UNICEF in Aleppo, Syria.

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I lost over 200 pounds without surgery or drugs. I just got really strict with what I was eating.

• Ian Karmel is a comedian who has appeared on Netflix and The Late Late Show.
• He lost 220 pounds through diet and exercise alone.
• He says he's realized we need more compassion and nuance while talking about weight.

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Ian Karmel , who wrote " T-Shirt Swim Club: Stories from being fat in a world of thin people ," along with his sister, Alisa Karmel. It has been edited for length and clarity.

No one knows more about losing weight than a fat person. After all, we've tried anything and everything. We know exactly why each miracle diet doesn't work — and the ultimate truth is that any of them can if you stick with them strictly enough.

As a fat guy, I also learned that I had to fit into certain roles. There's the fat villain, à la Fat Bastard in Austin Powers . Then there's the funny, fat party guy. That's the approach I took: partying and making people laugh to avoid the anxiety that was dictating my life.

Then, I lost over 200 pounds and realized that we need more compassion and nuance when it comes to talking about weight. Fat people don't need pity or judgment; we need understanding — and a bit of radical honesty.

I started a strict diet during the pandemic quarantine

Like lots of people, I started the pandemic ordering plenty of takeout . It was a stressful time, and I was an anxious eater. Well, I ate for all emotions: if things went well, I ate. If they went poorly, I ate then, too.

Soon it became clear that we weren't all sheltering for a short time to flatten the curve. After about three weeks of Panda Express , I realized things were going to end badly if I didn't change my pandemic habit. At the time, I weighed about 420 pounds, and my blood pressure was getting dangerously high.

Related stories

I started intermittent fasting and built my meals around vegetables, proteins, and fruit. I was super strict, and over the next 14 months I lost 200 pounds. I never used any weight loss drugs, although, to be honest, I was a bit bitter that they became available only a few months after I was done losing weight!

I'm still learning about moderation

Part of my dieting success was because I was so strict. I had no idea of moderation — it was all or nothing. But as I reached my goal weight, I realized that wasn't going to work long term. I wanted to balance a long life with a life well lived.

If it's a beautiful day and I'm getting coffee with a friend, I want to be able to eat a cookie with that. Later, if I stroll around and pass an ice cream shop, I want to be able to stop there, too. Joy in food is part of what makes life beautiful.

I'm still working on learning moderation . It helps to realize that my relationship with food will last my entire life and needs to be sustainable.

No amount of body positivity would save me from bad health

Growing up, I was fat, and so was my sister Alisa, who co-authored my book with me. Our mom did her best, but as a single working mom she was often pulling casseroles from the freezer. We never learned that you shouldn't eat lasagne multiple times each week.

As adults, Alisa and I are both much healthier than we were growing up, though we're still fat. These days there's a lot of talk about body positivity, almost in opposition to weight loss. I hate how body positivity can be used to sell me shit.

I've learned to make way for both mindsets. I can love my (still fat) body while also making it as healthy as possible, which might involve losing weight. On the other hand, no amount of body love would save me from the fact that I was slowly killing myself with food.

I want other people to know they can make changes to get healthier too

I wanted to write a book for fat people by a fat person. We're often handled with pity or disgust, but I wanted to bring empathy and compassion to the conversation. I wanted to share a story from two people who have felt utter desperation to lose weight and who have managed to do it.

People who are naturally thin or bookish doctors who have never had to work at losing weight don't realize how daunting the prospect can feel. When I weighed 420 pounds, the idea of climbing Mount Everest would have seemed more reasonable than losing 200 pounds.

When I did get healthier and lost weight, I felt like I had dodged a car crash. It felt urgent to share that personal accountability is important. I was killing myself slowly. If I had abused heroin the way I used food, my family would have intervened. I wish they had, but I also realize I had dug myself into a deep hole, and I was the only one who could get myself out. I want other fat people to know they can do the same.

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