how to survive covid 19 pandemic essay

Read these 12 moving essays about life during coronavirus

Artists, novelists, critics, and essayists are writing the first draft of history.

by Alissa Wilkinson

The world is grappling with an invisible, deadly enemy, trying to understand how to live with the threat posed by a virus . For some writers, the only way forward is to put pen to paper, trying to conceptualize and document what it feels like to continue living as countries are under lockdown and regular life seems to have ground to a halt.

So as the coronavirus pandemic has stretched around the world, it’s sparked a crop of diary entries and essays that describe how life has changed. Novelists, critics, artists, and journalists have put words to the feelings many are experiencing. The result is a first draft of how we’ll someday remember this time, filled with uncertainty and pain and fear as well as small moments of hope and humanity.

• The Vox guide to navigating the coronavirus crisis

At the New York Review of Books, Ali Bhutto writes that in Karachi, Pakistan, the government-imposed curfew due to the virus is “eerily reminiscent of past military clampdowns”:

Beneath the quiet calm lies a sense that society has been unhinged and that the usual rules no longer apply. Small groups of pedestrians look on from the shadows, like an audience watching a spectacle slowly unfolding. People pause on street corners and in the shade of trees, under the watchful gaze of the paramilitary forces and the police.

His essay concludes with the sobering note that “in the minds of many, Covid-19 is just another life-threatening hazard in a city that stumbles from one crisis to another.”

Writing from Chattanooga, novelist Jamie Quatro documents the mixed ways her neighbors have been responding to the threat, and the frustration of conflicting direction, or no direction at all, from local, state, and federal leaders:

Whiplash, trying to keep up with who’s ordering what. We’re already experiencing enough chaos without this back-and-forth. Why didn’t the federal government issue a nationwide shelter-in-place at the get-go, the way other countries did? What happens when one state’s shelter-in-place ends, while others continue? Do states still under quarantine close their borders? We are still one nation, not fifty individual countries. Right?

• A syllabus for the end of the world

Award-winning photojournalist Alessio Mamo, quarantined with his partner Marta in Sicily after she tested positive for the virus, accompanies his photographs in the Guardian of their confinement with a reflection on being confined :

The doctors asked me to take a second test, but again I tested negative. Perhaps I’m immune? The days dragged on in my apartment, in black and white, like my photos. Sometimes we tried to smile, imagining that I was asymptomatic, because I was the virus. Our smiles seemed to bring good news. My mother left hospital, but I won’t be able to see her for weeks. Marta started breathing well again, and so did I. I would have liked to photograph my country in the midst of this emergency, the battles that the doctors wage on the frontline, the hospitals pushed to their limits, Italy on its knees fighting an invisible enemy. That enemy, a day in March, knocked on my door instead.

In the New York Times Magazine, deputy editor Jessica Lustig writes with devastating clarity about her family’s life in Brooklyn while her husband battled the virus, weeks before most people began taking the threat seriously:

At the door of the clinic, we stand looking out at two older women chatting outside the doorway, oblivious. Do I wave them away? Call out that they should get far away, go home, wash their hands, stay inside? Instead we just stand there, awkwardly, until they move on. Only then do we step outside to begin the long three-block walk home. I point out the early magnolia, the forsythia. T says he is cold. The untrimmed hairs on his neck, under his beard, are white. The few people walking past us on the sidewalk don’t know that we are visitors from the future. A vision, a premonition, a walking visitation. This will be them: Either T, in the mask, or — if they’re lucky — me, tending to him.

Essayist Leslie Jamison writes in the New York Review of Books about being shut away alone in her New York City apartment with her 2-year-old daughter since she became sick:

The virus. Its sinewy, intimate name. What does it feel like in my body today? Shivering under blankets. A hot itch behind the eyes. Three sweatshirts in the middle of the day. My daughter trying to pull another blanket over my body with her tiny arms. An ache in the muscles that somehow makes it hard to lie still. This loss of taste has become a kind of sensory quarantine. It’s as if the quarantine keeps inching closer and closer to my insides. First I lost the touch of other bodies; then I lost the air; now I’ve lost the taste of bananas. Nothing about any of these losses is particularly unique. I’ve made a schedule so I won’t go insane with the toddler. Five days ago, I wrote Walk/Adventure! on it, next to a cut-out illustration of a tiger—as if we’d see tigers on our walks. It was good to keep possibility alive.

At Literary Hub, novelist Heidi Pitlor writes about the elastic nature of time during her family’s quarantine in Massachusetts:

During a shutdown, the things that mark our days—commuting to work, sending our kids to school, having a drink with friends—vanish and time takes on a flat, seamless quality. Without some self-imposed structure, it’s easy to feel a little untethered. A friend recently posted on Facebook: “For those who have lost track, today is Blursday the fortyteenth of Maprilay.” ... Giving shape to time is especially important now, when the future is so shapeless. We do not know whether the virus will continue to rage for weeks or months or, lord help us, on and off for years. We do not know when we will feel safe again. And so many of us, minus those who are gifted at compartmentalization or denial, remain largely captive to fear. We may stay this way if we do not create at least the illusion of movement in our lives, our long days spent with ourselves or partners or families.

• What day is it today?

Novelist Lauren Groff writes at the New York Review of Books about trying to escape the prison of her fears while sequestered at home in Gainesville, Florida:

Some people have imaginations sparked only by what they can see; I blame this blinkered empiricism for the parks overwhelmed with people, the bars, until a few nights ago, thickly thronged. My imagination is the opposite. I fear everything invisible to me. From the enclosure of my house, I am afraid of the suffering that isn’t present before me, the people running out of money and food or drowning in the fluid in their lungs, the deaths of health-care workers now growing ill while performing their duties. I fear the federal government, which the right wing has so—intentionally—weakened that not only is it insufficient to help its people, it is actively standing in help’s way. I fear we won’t sufficiently punish the right. I fear leaving the house and spreading the disease. I fear what this time of fear is doing to my children, their imaginations, and their souls.

At ArtForum , Berlin-based critic and writer Kristian Vistrup Madsen reflects on martinis, melancholia, and Finnish artist Jaakko Pallasvuo’s 2018 graphic novel Retreat , in which three young people exile themselves in the woods:

In melancholia, the shape of what is ending, and its temporality, is sprawling and incomprehensible. The ambivalence makes it hard to bear. The world of Retreat is rendered in lush pink and purple watercolors, which dissolve into wild and messy abstractions. In apocalypse, the divisions established in genesis bleed back out. My own Corona-retreat is similarly soft, color-field like, each day a blurred succession of quarantinis, YouTube–yoga, and televized press conferences. As restrictions mount, so does abstraction. For now, I’m still rooting for love to save the world.

At the Paris Review , Matt Levin writes about reading Virginia Woolf’s novel The Waves during quarantine:

A retreat, a quarantine, a sickness—they simultaneously distort and clarify, curtail and expand. It is an ideal state in which to read literature with a reputation for difficulty and inaccessibility, those hermetic books shorn of the handholds of conventional plot or characterization or description. A novel like Virginia Woolf’s The Waves is perfect for the state of interiority induced by quarantine—a story of three men and three women, meeting after the death of a mutual friend, told entirely in the overlapping internal monologues of the six, interspersed only with sections of pure, achingly beautiful descriptions of the natural world, a day’s procession and recession of light and waves. The novel is, in my mind’s eye, a perfectly spherical object. It is translucent and shimmering and infinitely fragile, prone to shatter at the slightest disturbance. It is not a book that can be read in snatches on the subway—it demands total absorption. Though it revels in a stark emotional nakedness, the book remains aloof, remote in its own deep self-absorption.

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In an essay for the Financial Times, novelist Arundhati Roy writes with anger about Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s anemic response to the threat, but also offers a glimmer of hope for the future:

Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it.

From Boston, Nora Caplan-Bricker writes in The Point about the strange contraction of space under quarantine, in which a friend in Beirut is as close as the one around the corner in the same city:

It’s a nice illusion—nice to feel like we’re in it together, even if my real world has shrunk to one person, my husband, who sits with his laptop in the other room. It’s nice in the same way as reading those essays that reframe social distancing as solidarity. “We must begin to see the negative space as clearly as the positive, to know what we don’t do is also brilliant and full of love,” the poet Anne Boyer wrote on March 10th, the day that Massachusetts declared a state of emergency. If you squint, you could almost make sense of this quarantine as an effort to flatten, along with the curve, the distinctions we make between our bonds with others. Right now, I care for my neighbor in the same way I demonstrate love for my mother: in all instances, I stay away. And in moments this month, I have loved strangers with an intensity that is new to me. On March 14th, the Saturday night after the end of life as we knew it, I went out with my dog and found the street silent: no lines for restaurants, no children on bicycles, no couples strolling with little cups of ice cream. It had taken the combined will of thousands of people to deliver such a sudden and complete emptiness. I felt so grateful, and so bereft.

And on his own website, musician and artist David Byrne writes about rediscovering the value of working for collective good , saying that “what is happening now is an opportunity to learn how to change our behavior”:

In emergencies, citizens can suddenly cooperate and collaborate. Change can happen. We’re going to need to work together as the effects of climate change ramp up. In order for capitalism to survive in any form, we will have to be a little more socialist. Here is an opportunity for us to see things differently — to see that we really are all connected — and adjust our behavior accordingly. Are we willing to do this? Is this moment an opportunity to see how truly interdependent we all are? To live in a world that is different and better than the one we live in now? We might be too far down the road to test every asymptomatic person, but a change in our mindsets, in how we view our neighbors, could lay the groundwork for the collective action we’ll need to deal with other global crises. The time to see how connected we all are is now.

The portrait these writers paint of a world under quarantine is multifaceted. Our worlds have contracted to the confines of our homes, and yet in some ways we’re more connected than ever to one another. We feel fear and boredom, anger and gratitude, frustration and strange peace. Uncertainty drives us to find metaphors and images that will let us wrap our minds around what is happening.

Yet there’s no single “what” that is happening. Everyone is contending with the pandemic and its effects from different places and in different ways. Reading others’ experiences — even the most frightening ones — can help alleviate the loneliness and dread, a little, and remind us that what we’re going through is both unique and shared by all.

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Surviving and Thriving Simultaneously During a Pandemic

Dr. mark stebnicki addresses risk, resiliency, and the future of the virus..

Posted October 7, 2020

Factors related to risk and resiliency are dynamic processes that are situational across multiple life areas and environments; they are not static, especially not during a pandemic. How can we best describe, identify, and illustrate risk and resiliency traits across life areas in these pandemic times? Dr. Mark Stebnicki wrestles with this topic in his new book Counseling Practice During a Pandemic Virus. I had the opportunity to interview him about the book and his research on the unique aspects of healing the mind, body, and spirit during a pandemic virus.

Mark A. Stebnicki, Ph.D., LCMHC, DCMHS, CRC, CMCC is Professor Emeritus and former Coordinator of the Military and Trauma Counseling (MTC) certificate program in the Department of Addictions and Rehabilitation Services at East Carolina University. He developed the MTC certificate in 2015 and the Clinical Military Counseling Certificate (CMCC) program in 2016 offered through the Telehealth Certificate Institute. He is an active teacher, trainer, researcher, and practitioner with over 30 years’ experience in mental health and rehabilitation. His primary areas of interest relate to the medical, psychosocial, vocational, and mental health aspects of military and civilians with complex trauma. He is under contract with the American Counseling Association for his 10th professional work titled Counseling Practice During a Pandemic Virus .

Jamie Aten: Why did you set out to write Counseling Practice During a Pandemic Virus ?

Mark Stebnicki: We are in the midst of a paradigm shift in disaster mental health counseling. My extensive practice and research experience tells me that COVID-19 mimics the medical, physical, behavioral, psychosocial, and mental health aspects of other natural and person-made disasters. Accordingly, this pandemic virus takes on unique characteristics that require further exploration to differentiate this from other natural disasters. As Americans, COVID-19 juxtaposes politics and science, evaluating the public health concerns of individuals, communities, and cultures.

It would be naïve to imagine that once a COVID-19 vaccine has been developed and distributed throughout the world, that the medical, physical, and psychological impacts of the virus would just disappear. For instance, rabies still exists today, despite Louis Pasteur’s development of a successful vaccine in 1885. Tetanus ( for which the vaccine was developed in 1927), measles, mumps, and rubella (1971), hepatitis B (1982), and hepatitis A (1995) all have the potential to be a public health crisis in certain occupational settings and regions of the world. However, the public perception is that these diseases have been eradicated. Many world-renowned scientists, medical practitioners, and research institutions predict that the first vaccines will only be 50 percent effective in treating mild cases of COVID-19 disease. Counseling Practice During a Pandemic Virus identifies, analyzes, and illustrates these unique differences between a pandemic virus and other natural disasters. This work offers guidelines for practice in the foundations of good mental, behavioral, and psychosocial health. The intention is to prevent further COVID fatigue and increase salient aspects of our mind, body, and spirit during this pandemic disaster.

JA: What is the primary takeaway you hope readers will learn from reading your book?

MS: Wars, famine, and infectious diseases have been the leading cause of death and disability in developing countries, as chronicled throughout the history of medicine. So, it may be helpful for readers to understand that there is no beginning and end to a viral contagion. At the time of this writing, there is no cure (the absence of disease after a specific treatment) for this novel coronavirus . Rather, there is a lifecycle of this highly infectious disease that infects us at the cellular level resulting in a range of symptoms. It carries the risk of mortality, particularly in vulnerable populations. Based on the medical, physical, and psychological impact of other pandemics, COVID-19 will linger in phases for many years to come.

A major takeaway to this work is the Pandemic Risk and Resiliency Continuum (PRRC) model I developed to depict how factors related to risk and resiliency are not static during a pandemic virus. Rather, risk and resiliency are a dynamic process and situational across multiple life areas and environments. The PRRC is currently under review by a national panel of experts in epidemiology, public health, disaster mental health counseling, traumatology, human behavior, and national security. Accordingly, my intention is to describe, identify, and illustrate risk and resiliency traits across multiple life areas during these pandemic times.

JA: What are some lessons from your book that can help people live more resiliently?

MS: Infectious viruses and disease have occurred since the beginning of time. Humankind has had to adjust and adapt to living along a continuum of medical, physical, and mental health risk and resiliency. Some world cultures spend generations in harsh environments challenged by clean water, food supply, and sanitation. There are immigrants, refugees, and asylum seekers fighting for survival. Cultures that live isolated on archipelagos in the Pacific have risks related to tsunamis, volcanoes, and adequate healthcare. Hence, cultures learn how to adapt, survive, and thrive. There are generations that cultivate coping and resiliency traits amidst extraordinarily stressful and traumatic events. As Americans living through a global pandemic, we are just now acquiring some of this same wisdom related to risk and resiliency that other global indigenous cultures have learned throughout their history. Thus, we are confronted with rediscovering a basic human instinct: how to survive and thrive simultaneously while in the face of adversity. So, the unique medical, physical, and psychological aspects of COVID-19 require us to reconstruct new meaning of such a disaster and integrate this within our mind, body, and spirit. Finding existential and/or spiritual meaning and solace throughout the pandemic cycle will assist us in cultivating resiliency resources for the next critical event that arises.

JA: What are some insights from your book that help readers support a friend or loved one?

MS: There is some degree of healing that occurs among individuals and groups that have all experienced the same traumatic event. From a healing perspective, it is therapeutic for others to know that they are “not going crazy” during these pandemic times. We are all having a normal response to an abnormal event. Healing in and out of the cycles of a pandemic virus is not a destination, it becomes a journey of the human spirit. Counseling Practice During a Pandemic Virus helps redefine what healthy-unhealthy and normal-abnormal behaviors are in the face of a pandemic disaster. For the mental, behavioral, and psychosocial health aspects of pandemic viruses to advance in theory and practice, a model for the identification, prevention, preparation, and mental health practice is essential. Thus, the PRRC theoretical model contributes to both practice and research within the essential task of protecting the mental health and well-being of coronavirus patients and clients. Experiencing the same critical event assists in developing natural support systems, coping skills, and resiliency traits that direct individuals and groups towards higher levels of resiliency.

JA: What are you working on these days?

MS: I continue to research the unique aspects of healing the mind, body, and spirit during a pandemic virus. There are many other teachings of risk and resiliency documented across multiple cultures and disciplines that relate to other pandemic viruses (i.e., The Black Plague, Spanish Flu, Ebola, H1N1, and SARS viruses). The research offers unique perspectives on issues of medical, physical, psychosocial, and mental health concerns. I have developed a free downloadable resource offered on the Telehealth Certificate Institute’s website where I have written a 130-page resource guide titled "The Psychosocial Aspects of Pandemic Viruses." The panel of subject matter experts reviewing my PRRC theoretical model will benefit medical, behavioral, and mental health practitioners in identifying individuals most at-risk and those that exhibit good coping and resiliency traits.

Jamie Aten , Ph.D. , is the founder and executive director of the Humanitarian Disaster Institute at Wheaton College.

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Life after COVID: most people don’t want a return to normal – they want a fairer, more sustainable future

Chair of Cognitive Psychology, University of Bristol

Professor of Cognitive Psychology and Australian Research Council Future Fellow, The University of Western Australia

Disclosure statement

Stephan Lewandowsky receives funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under grant agreement no. 964728 (JITSUVAX). He also receives funding from the Australian Research Council via a Discovery Grant to Ullrich Ecker, from Jigsaw (a technology incubator created by Google), from UK Research and Innovation (through the Centre of Excellence, REPHRAIN), and from the Volkswagen Foundation in Germany. He also holds a European Research Council Advanced Grant (no. 101020961, PRODEMINFO) and receives funding from the John Templeton Foundation (via Wake Forest University’s Honesty Project).

Ullrich Ecker receives funding from the Australian Research Council.

University of Western Australia provides funding as a founding partner of The Conversation AU.

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We are in a crisis now – and omicron has made it harder to imagine the pandemic ending. But it will not last forever. When the COVID outbreak is over, what do we want the world to look like?

In the early stages of the pandemic – from March to July 2020 – a rapid return to normal was on everyone’s lips, reflecting the hope that the virus might be quickly brought under control. Since then, alternative slogans such as “ build back better ” have also become prominent, promising a brighter, more equitable, more sustainable future based on significant or even radical change.

Returning to how things were, or moving on to something new – these are very different desires. But which is it that people want? In our recent research , we aimed to find out.

Along with Keri Facer of the University of Bristol, we conducted two studies, one in the summer of 2020 and another a year later. In these, we presented participants – a representative sample of 400 people from the UK and 600 from the US – with four possible futures, sketched in the table below. We designed these based on possible outcomes of the pandemic published in early 2020 in The Atlantic and The Conversation .

We were concerned with two aspects of the future: whether it would involve a “return to normal” or a progressive move to “build back better”, and whether it would concentrate power in the hands of government or return power to individuals.

Four possible futures

In both studies and in both countries, we found that people strongly preferred a progressive future over a return to normal. They also tended to prefer individual autonomy over strong government. On balance, across both experiments and both countries, the “grassroots leadership” proposal appeared to be most popular.

People’s political leanings affected preferences – those on the political right preferred a return to normal more than those on the left – yet intriguingly, strong opposition to a progressive future was quite limited, even among people on the right. This is encouraging because it suggests that opposition to “building back better” may be limited.

Our findings are consistent with other recent research , which suggests that even conservative voters want the environment to be at the heart of post-COVID economic reconstruction in the UK.

The misperceptions of the majority

This is what people wanted to happen – but how did they think things actually would end up? In both countries, participants felt that a return to normal was more likely than moving towards a progressive future. They also felt it was more likely that government would retain its power than return it to the people.

In other words, people thought they were unlikely to get the future they wanted. People want a progressive future but fear that they’ll get a return to normal with power vested in the government.

We also asked people to tell us what they thought others wanted. It turned out our participants thought that others wanted a return to normal much more than they actually did. This was observed in both the US and UK in both 2020 and 2021, though to varying extents.

This striking divergence between what people actually want, what they expect to get and what they think others want is what’s known as “ pluralistic ignorance ”.

This describes any situation where people who are in the majority think they are in the minority. Pluralistic ignorance can have problematic consequences because in the long run people often shift their attitudes towards what they perceive to be the prevailing norm. If people misperceive the norm, they may change their attitudes towards a minority opinion, rather than the minority adapting to the majority. This can be a problem if that minority opinion is a negative one – such as being opposed to vaccination , for example.

In our case, a consequence of pluralistic ignorance may be that a return to normal will become more acceptable in future, not because most people ever desired this outcome, but because they felt it was inevitable and that most others wanted it.

Ultimately, this would mean that the actual preferences of the majority never find the political expression that, in a democracy, they deserve.

To counter pluralistic ignorance, we should therefore try to ensure that people know the public’s opinion. This is not merely a necessary countermeasure to pluralistic ignorance and its adverse consequences – people’s motivation also generally increases when they feel their preferences and goals are shared by others. Therefore, simply informing people that there’s a social consensus for a progressive future could be what unleashes the motivation needed to achieve it.

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How we can overcome the COVID-19 pandemic together

January 4, 2021, lucy ndungu.

Regional Manager, UNV East and Southern Africa Regional Office

For most of the past year, our lives have been disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Lives have been lost, livelihoods disrupted, and education adversely impacted. Poverty levels have increased in some countries, societal bonds have been strained, and the overall trend of development has been reversed.  Yet, despite the bleak outlook, we have witnessed stories of hope, courage, triumph and kindness towards one another: the spirit of oneness— Ubuntu, Obuntubulamu, Utu— as is commonly known in East and Southern Africa.

The spirit of volunteerism, innate in all of us, is what drives the selfless people who have during the COVID-19 pandemic, extended kindness to their neighbours, supported access to medical care for those in need, shopped for the elderly and other vulnerable people, among other acts of generosity. This resonates with a quote from former UN Secretary General, the late Kofi Annan: “Behind the progress lie many factors. One is the willingness of many individuals to donate their time, effort, resources and ideas to the well-beings and advancement of all. We call them volunteers.” Volunteers have been at the forefront of medical, community and societal responses across East and Southern Africa. The COVID-19 Strategic Preparedness and Response Plan developed by the WHO identifies community volunteers as key stakeholders for risk communication, community engagement and in provision of health services.

Since joining the UN Volunteers programme for East and Southern Africa in November, I have been humbled by the selflessness shown by volunteers of all ages, races, and genders across the region. In Zambia, more than 800 community youth volunteers have reached about 700,000 households through a door-to-door COVID-19 outreach initiative , debunking myths and spreading life-saving messages. In Kenya, Nicodemus Otieno and Cynthia Wandabwa are two among 50 UN Volunteer health professionals deployed by UNDP Kenya across the country to support the national COVID-19 response. In Mozambique, Ângela Macie, a UN Volunteer serving with the World Food Programme (WFP) , is on the frontlines supporting logistics for food distribution in vulnerable communities. In Somalia , there are many UN Volunteer medical doctors supporting UN clinics in remote regions. In moments like this, these and many other volunteers globally are supporting countries across the region and the world in combating COVID-19. 

As countries move to build back better their socio-economic foundations that have been greatly fissured by the pandemic, volunteers will play a vital role. According to the UNV 2018 State of the World’s Volunteerism Report , over a billion people volunteer every year globally , with many more willing to do so if given the opportunity. This translates to one in every seven people, an equivalent of 109 million full-time workers globally. If they constituted a country, the global volunteer workforce would be the fifth largest in the world, roughly equivalent to the number of employed people in Indonesia. The contribution of volunteerism to GDP cannot be underestimated. In Kenya volunteerism contributes to about 3.6 percent of the GDP according to research commissioned by Kenya’s State Department for Social Protection in 2017.

The most recent commemoration of the International Volunteer Day (IVD) recognized the contributions of such volunteers. Across this region, governments, UN partners, academia, civil society and volunteer involving organizations enumerated several benefits of volunteerism including; support building skills and services particularly in far-flung areas and ensuring building community resilience. Noting that volunteers at times work in challenging environments, they also advocated for support and care for volunteers. From lessons of 2020, anecdotes from partners showed that online volunteering works just as well as onsite volunteering where extenuating circumstances limit the latter.  Further evidence showed that the nimbleness of local volunteerism in particular flexibility, swiftness to act, the ability to self-organize were attributes that came in handy in response to COVID-19.

UNV ESARO will continue partnering with the UN and member states in the region to promote volunteerism as a “powerful and crosscutting means of implementation of the 2030 Agenda for Sustainable Development” as recognized, for the first time, in the Quadrennial Comprehensive Policy Review of operational activities of the United Nations system, adopted in December 2020.  

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Coronavirus: The world has come together to flatten the curve. Can we stay united to tackle other crises?

Watching the world come together gives me hope for the future, writes mira patel, a high school junior..

Mira Patel and her sister Veda. (Courtesy of Dee Patel)

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Before the pandemic, I had often heard adults say that young people would lose the ability to connect in-person with others due to our growing dependence on technology and social media. However, this stay-at-home experience has proven to me that our elders’ worry is unnecessary. Because isolation isn’t in human nature, and no advancement in technology could replace our need to meet in person, especially when it comes to learning.

As the weather gets warmer and we approach summertime, it’s going to be more and more tempting for us teenagers to go out and do what we have always done: hang out and have fun. Even though the decision-makers are adults, everyone has a role to play and we teens can help the world move forward by continuing to self-isolate. It’s incredibly important that in the coming weeks, we respect the government’s effort to contain the spread of the coronavirus.

In the meantime, we can find creative ways to stay connected and continue to do what we love. Personally, I see many 6-feet-apart bike rides and Zoom calls in my future.

If there is anything that this pandemic has made me realize, it’s how connected we all are. At first, the infamous coronavirus seemed to be a problem in China, which is worlds away. But slowly, it steadily made its way through various countries in Europe, and inevitably reached us in America. What was once framed as a foreign virus has now hit home.

Watching the global community come together, gives me hope, as a teenager, that in the future we can use this cooperation to combat climate change and other catastrophes.

As COVID-19 continues to creep its way into each of our communities and impact the way we live and communicate, I find solace in the fact that we face what comes next together, as humanity.

When the day comes that my generation is responsible for dealing with another crisis, I hope we can use this experience to remind us that moving forward requires a joint effort.

Mira Patel is a junior at Strath Haven High School and is an education intern at the Foreign Policy Research Institute in Philadelphia. Follow her on Instagram here.  

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Coronavirus Pandemic

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Writing about COVID-19 in a college admission essay

by: Venkates Swaminathan | Updated: September 14, 2020

Print article

For students applying to college using the CommonApp, there are several different places where students and counselors can address the pandemic’s impact. The different sections have differing goals. You must understand how to use each section for its appropriate use.

The CommonApp COVID-19 question

First, the CommonApp this year has an additional question specifically about COVID-19 :

Community disruptions such as COVID-19 and natural disasters can have deep and long-lasting impacts. If you need it, this space is yours to describe those impacts. Colleges care about the effects on your health and well-being, safety, family circumstances, future plans, and education, including access to reliable technology and quiet study spaces. Please use this space to describe how these events have impacted you.

This question seeks to understand the adversity that students may have had to face due to the pandemic, the move to online education, or the shelter-in-place rules. You don’t have to answer this question if the impact on you wasn’t particularly severe. Some examples of things students should discuss include:

• The student or a family member had COVID-19 or suffered other illnesses due to confinement during the pandemic.
• The candidate had to deal with personal or family issues, such as abusive living situations or other safety concerns
• The student suffered from a lack of internet access and other online learning challenges.
• Students who dealt with problems registering for or taking standardized tests and AP exams.

Jeff Schiffman of the Tulane University admissions office has a blog about this section. He recommends students ask themselves several questions as they go about answering this section:

• Are my experiences different from others’?
• Are there noticeable changes on my transcript?
• Am I aware of my privilege?
• Am I specific? Am I explaining rather than complaining?
• Is this information being included elsewhere on my application?

If you do answer this section, be brief and to-the-point.

Counselor recommendations and school profiles

Second, counselors will, in their counselor forms and school profiles on the CommonApp, address how the school handled the pandemic and how it might have affected students, specifically as it relates to:

• Grading scales and policies
• Graduation requirements
• Instructional methods
• Schedules and course offerings
• Testing requirements
• Your academic calendar
• Other extenuating circumstances

Students don’t have to mention these matters in their application unless something unusual happened.

Writing about COVID-19 in your main essay

Write about your experiences during the pandemic in your main college essay if your experience is personal, relevant, and the most important thing to discuss in your college admission essay. That you had to stay home and study online isn’t sufficient, as millions of other students faced the same situation. But sometimes, it can be appropriate and helpful to write about something related to the pandemic in your essay. For example:

• One student developed a website for a local comic book store. The store might not have survived without the ability for people to order comic books online. The student had a long-standing relationship with the store, and it was an institution that created a community for students who otherwise felt left out.
• One student started a YouTube channel to help other students with academic subjects he was very familiar with and began tutoring others.
• Some students used their extra time that was the result of the stay-at-home orders to take online courses pursuing topics they are genuinely interested in or developing new interests, like a foreign language or music.

Experiences like this can be good topics for the CommonApp essay as long as they reflect something genuinely important about the student. For many students whose lives have been shaped by this pandemic, it can be a critical part of their college application.

Want more? Read 6 ways to improve a college essay , What the &%$! should I write about in my college essay , and Just how important is a college admissions essay? .

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Greater Good Science Center • Magazine • In Action • In Education

The Many Ways We Helped Each Other During COVID

When the pandemic first came to California and lockdowns were instituted, many of my neighbors set out to help each other. Some called elderly neighbors to be sure they were OK. Others collaborated with local restaurants to create a low-cost food delivery service, feeding people around the city while helping restaurants find a source of income during closures. Still others began a drive to collect masks for essential workers.

These acts of altruism warmed my heart. But what motivated some neighbors to step up to do this, while others didn’t? And is altruism enough when it comes to disaster relief?

Those were the questions at the heart of a new study published in Analyses of Social Issues and Policy .

To better understand how altruism emerged during COVID-19, the researchers analyzed 104 stories of altruism appearing in major newspapers and blogs that were compiled by Ball State University between April and October 2020. They wanted to see if any themes emerged around who the helpers were, why they stepped up, whom they helped, and what kinds of help they offered. The ultimate goal was to paint a picture of how people ally with each other when disaster strikes and how they expand their sense of community.

“We were trying to understand how people come together,” says lead author Selin Tekin. “We wanted to know what kind of strategies people used to support each other and how the wider community can support those most affected.”

While some of the stories she and her team analyzed came from different parts of the world—India, Australia, and England, for example—the majority came from the United States, so the results are somewhat American-centric. But the stories do give a picture of a phenomenon that’s frequently seen when disaster strikes. 

“A sense of community often appears in disasters when there are not adequate responses from the authorities or the government, or when there are contradictory messages from the government,” says Tekin. “Community members come together and share whatever resources they have.”

How people stepped up during COVID

Here’s what Tekin and her colleagues found when analyzing the stories.

Who helped. Many people who helped others during the pandemic belonged to organizations, associations, and faith communities that generally provide help to others, although some were volunteers who spontaneously decided to help. And many were economically or physically advantaged.

It makes sense that organizations set up to provide assistance would do so during the pandemic, and many did, including Catholic Social Services of Alaska, for example. When it became clear homeless people in Anchorage would be at risk of catching COVID in crowded shelters, the organization searched for private places for homeless people to live and helped move them into safer quarters.

Others stepped up once they became aware that certain groups were disproportionately impacted by COVID. Those with greater economic resources gave more generously, while younger people tended to offer their labor. As an example, one Yale college student and his friend put together a group of 1,300 volunteers in 72 hours to deliver groceries and medicine to older New Yorkers and other vulnerable people.

Many people volunteered spontaneously, too, after seeing a pressing need. At one petrochemical plant , 43 employees volunteered to work 12-hour shifts for a month just to produce raw materials needed for face masks and surgical gowns. This kind of volunteer spirit was similar to what I saw with my neighbors—a response that is fairly typical, according to Tekin.

“There are always volunteers who are willing to help their communities,” she says.

Why people stepped up to help. The main reasons people chose to help were that they felt an emerging sense of identity with those most affected by COVID, they wanted to be an ally of disadvantaged groups, and they felt grateful for those risking their own health to help.

Research has shown that those who have a strong sense of “we are in it together” are more likely to help in a crisis than those who don’t, and that was true during COVID, too. In many instances, people expressed feeling a sense of identity with those who were suffering. For example, one artist in Los Angeles sent thousands of paintings of flowers to health care workers in New York City to let them know, “You’re loved by millions of people you’ll never meet. You’re not a stranger to anyone.”

There were also many examples of people wanting to help the disadvantaged. One café owner in Australia withdrew 10,000 Australian dollars from his bank and gave out $100 bills to people standing in line for the social security offices. In India, a group of women began cooking extra food for immigrant workers who were suffering during the lockdown.

In other cases, people wanted to express their thanks to those who were doing essential work during the pandemic. One neighborhood in Miami Beach organized an early-morning surprise for their garbage collectors, lining their street with people holding up signs and putting together gift bags, cards, and presents as a token of their gratitude.

Who was helped. The people most targeted for altruistic help were the elderly, those with health conditions or disabilities, essential workers, working-class people, or marginalized social groups.

For example, many store owners created special store hours when only the elderly or disabled could shop to reduce their risks of getting COVID. One woman created a mask that had a clear, plastic window over the mouth so that people who are deaf or hard of hearing could still use lip reading to understand those around them. When food insecurity rose during COVID, the FarmLink Project stepped up to deliver food that was being left unused at farms, delivering almost 240,000 pounds of food to food banks, and paid wages to farmworkers and other workers affected economically by COVID.

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How people were helped. People provided material help, support for psychological or physical well-being, and social-emotional support.

Some people donated money, cooked and distributed food, or ran errands for those who couldn’t leave their house. Others distributed masks to those who had trouble procuring them or offered free counseling services to those suffering emotionally. Still others made calls to lonely, isolated folks or participated in rituals aimed at thanking health care workers on the frontlines (like clapping from their balconies).

Of all of these findings, the latter surprised Tekin most. “I was fascinated by how, even if people can’t give any kind of material support, they show their gratitude; they show that they’re aware of the support that they are receiving,” she says.

She notes many working-class and ethnic minority populations were disproportionately affected by the pandemic and didn’t receive an adequate response from authorities. So, it was heartening to Tekin to see that, when confronted with an outside threat, people can choose to help, whether or not government authorities intervene.

“People share an emergent identity, a human identity,” she says. “Here, we saw people with more financial or material resources willing to share with the disproportionately affected. It wasn’t surprising, exactly, because we’d seen this in previous research. But it’s always interesting.”

Lessons for times of crisis

All in all, these patterns show that in a crisis, people do often step up to help one another. This is good news that can be obscured by news reports of less ideal behavior—like hoarding toilet paper or jumping the line for vaccinations. When there is a sense of common humanity—that we’re in it together—it can encourage more people to feel more moved to help.

“Even though the system is not structured in a way that everybody can receive the same amount of resources under the principles of equity, community members can come together and support each other,” says Tekin. “People just need to be aware of that.”

On the other hand, our altruistic impulses are not enough, says Tekin. As the pandemic drags on, people’s enthusiasm to give tends to wane, even though the need continues. To combat that, it’s incumbent upon community aid groups and government agencies to provide support to those who continue to suffer disproportionately, she says.

“You need change at the systemic level—policies that deal with injustice or that help community aid groups to be more sustainable, because they are usually the people who know their communities best,” says Tekin.

In the meantime, it’s good to see that people are usually capable of expanding their circle of care and stepping up to help.

“Though there is a gap between the advantaged and disadvantaged, there’s also support,” says Tekin. “People don’t always know what to do to help, but they’re willing to do something.”

About the Author

Jill Suttie

Jill Suttie, Psy.D. , is Greater Good ’s former book review editor and now serves as a staff writer and contributing editor for the magazine. She received her doctorate of psychology from the University of San Francisco in 1998 and was a psychologist in private practice before coming to Greater Good .

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What Life Was Like for Students in the Pandemic Year

• Share article

In this video, Navajo student Miles Johnson shares how he experienced the stress and anxiety of schools shutting down last year. Miles’ teacher shared his experience and those of her other students in a recent piece for Education Week. In these short essays below, teacher Claire Marie Grogan’s 11th grade students at Oceanside High School on Long Island, N.Y., describe their pandemic experiences. Their writings have been slightly edited for clarity. Read Grogan’s essay .

“Hours Staring at Tiny Boxes on the Screen”

By Kimberly Polacco, 16

I stare at my blank computer screen, trying to find the motivation to turn it on, but my finger flinches every time it hovers near the button. I instead open my curtains. It is raining outside, but it does not matter, I will not be going out there for the rest of the day. The sound of pounding raindrops contributes to my headache enough to make me turn on my computer in hopes that it will give me something to drown out the noise. But as soon as I open it up, I feel the weight of the world crash upon my shoulders.

Each 42-minute period drags on by. I spend hours upon hours staring at tiny boxes on a screen, one of which my exhausted face occupies, and attempt to retain concepts that have been presented to me through this device. By the time I have the freedom of pressing the “leave” button on my last Google Meet of the day, my eyes are heavy and my legs feel like mush from having not left my bed since I woke up.

Tomorrow arrives, except this time here I am inside of a school building, interacting with my first period teacher face to face. We talk about our favorite movies and TV shows to stream as other kids pile into the classroom. With each passing period I accumulate more and more of these tiny meaningless conversations everywhere I go with both teachers and students. They may not seem like much, but to me they are everything because I know that the next time I am expected to report to school, I will be trapped in the bubble of my room counting down the hours until I can sit down in my freshly sanitized wooden desk again.

“My Only Parent Essentially on Her Death Bed”

By Nick Ingargiola, 16

My mom had COVID-19 for ten weeks. She got sick during the first month school buildings were shut. The difficulty of navigating an online classroom was already overwhelming, and when mixed with my only parent essentially on her death bed, it made it unbearable. Focusing on schoolwork was impossible, and watching my mother struggle to lift up her arm broke my heart.

My mom has been through her fair share of diseases from pancreatic cancer to seizures and even as far as a stroke that paralyzed her entire left side. It is safe to say she has been through a lot. The craziest part is you would never know it. She is the strongest and most positive person I’ve ever met. COVID hit her hard. Although I have watched her go through life and death multiple times, I have never seen her so physically and mentally drained.

I initially was overjoyed to complete my school year in the comfort of my own home, but once my mom got sick, I couldn’t handle it. No one knows what it’s like to pretend like everything is OK until they are forced to. I would wake up at 8 after staying up until 5 in the morning pondering the possibility of losing my mother. She was all I had. I was forced to turn my camera on and float in the fake reality of being fine although I wasn’t. The teachers tried to keep the class engaged by obligating the students to participate. This was dreadful. I didn’t want to talk. I had to hide the distress in my voice. If only the teachers understood what I was going through. I was hesitant because I didn’t want everyone to know that the virus that was infecting and killing millions was knocking on my front door.

After my online classes, I was required to finish an immense amount of homework while simultaneously hiding my sadness so that my mom wouldn’t worry about me. She was already going through a lot. There was no reason to add me to her list of worries. I wasn’t even able to give her a hug. All I could do was watch.

“The Way of Staying Sane”

By Lynda Feustel, 16

Entering year two of the pandemic is strange. It barely seems a day since last March, but it also seems like a lifetime. As an only child and introvert, shutting down my world was initially simple and relatively easy. My friends and I had been super busy with the school play, and while I was sad about it being canceled, I was struggling a lot during that show and desperately needed some time off.

As March turned to April, virtual school began, and being alone really set in. I missed my friends and us being together. The isolation felt real with just my parents and me, even as we spent time together. My friends and I began meeting on Facetime every night to watch TV and just be together in some way. We laughed at insane jokes we made and had homework and therapy sessions over Facetime and grew closer through digital and literal walls.

The summer passed with in-person events together, and the virus faded into the background for a little while. We went to the track and the beach and hung out in people’s backyards.

Then school came for us in a more nasty way than usual. In hybrid school we were separated. People had jobs, sports, activities, and quarantines. Teachers piled on work, and the virus grew more present again. The group text put out hundreds of messages a day while the Facetimes came to a grinding halt, and meeting in person as a group became more of a rarity. Being together on video and in person was the way of staying sane.

In a way I am in a similar place to last year, working and looking for some change as we enter the second year of this mess.

“In History Class, Reports of Heightening Cases”

By Vivian Rose, 16

I remember the moment my freshman year English teacher told me about the young writers’ conference at Bread Loaf during my sophomore year. At first, I didn’t want to apply, the deadline had passed, but for some strange reason, the directors of the program extended it another week. It felt like it was meant to be. It was in Vermont in the last week of May when the flowers have awakened and the sun is warm.

I submitted my work, and two weeks later I got an email of my acceptance. I screamed at the top of my lungs in the empty house; everyone was out, so I was left alone to celebrate my small victory. It was rare for them to admit sophomores. Usually they accept submissions only from juniors and seniors.

That was the first week of February 2020. All of a sudden, there was some talk about this strange virus coming from China. We thought nothing of it. Every night, I would fall asleep smiling, knowing that I would be able to go to the exact conference that Robert Frost attended for 42 years.

Then, as if overnight, it seemed the virus had swung its hand and had gripped parts of the country. Every newscast was about the disease. Every day in history, we would look at the reports of heightening cases and joke around that this could never become a threat as big as Dr. Fauci was proposing. Then, March 13th came around--it was the last day before the world seemed to shut down. Just like that, Bread Loaf would vanish from my grasp.

“One Day Every Day Won’t Be As Terrible”

By Nick Wollweber, 17

COVID created personal problems for everyone, some more serious than others, but everyone had a struggle.

As the COVID lock-down took hold, the main thing weighing on my mind was my oldest brother, Joe, who passed away in January 2019 unexpectedly in his sleep. Losing my brother was a complete gut punch and reality check for me at 14 and 15 years old. 2019 was a year of struggle, darkness, sadness, frustration. I didn’t want to learn after my brother had passed, but I had to in order to move forward and find my new normal.

Routine and always having things to do and places to go is what let me cope in the year after Joe died. Then COVID came and gave me the option to let up and let down my guard. I struggled with not wanting to take care of personal hygiene. That was the beginning of an underlying mental problem where I wouldn’t do things that were necessary for everyday life.

My “coping routine” that got me through every day and week the year before was gone. COVID wasn’t beneficial to me, but it did bring out the true nature of my mental struggles and put a name to it. Since COVID, I have been diagnosed with severe depression and anxiety. I began taking antidepressants and going to therapy a lot more.

COVID made me realize that I’m not happy with who I am and that I needed to change. I’m still not happy with who I am. I struggle every day, but I am working towards a goal that one day every day won’t be as terrible.

Coverage of social and emotional learning is supported in part by a grant from the NoVo Foundation, at www.novofoundation.org . Education Week retains sole editorial control over the content of this coverage. A version of this article appeared in the March 31, 2021 edition of Education Week as What Life Was Like for Students in the Pandemic Year

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How COVID-19 pandemic changed my life

Table of Contents

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic is one of the biggest challenges that our world has ever faced. People around the globe were affected in some way by this terrible disease, whether personally or not. Amid the COVID-19 pandemic, many people felt isolated and in a state of panic. They often found themselves lacking a sense of community, confidence, and trust. The health systems in many countries were able to successfully prevent and treat people with COVID-19-related diseases while providing early intervention services to those who may not be fully aware that they are infected (Rume & Islam, 2020). Personally, this pandemic has brought numerous changes and challenges to my life. The COVID-19 pandemic affected my social, academic, and economic lifestyle positively and negatively.

Social and Academic Changes

One of the changes brought by the pandemic was economic changes that occurred very drastically (Haleem, Javaid, & Vaishya, 2020). During the pandemic, food prices started to rise, affecting the amount of money my parents could spend on goods and services. We had to reduce the food we bought as our budgets were stretched. My family also had to eliminate unhealthy food bought in bulk, such as crisps and chocolate bars. Furthermore, the pandemic made us more aware of the importance of keeping our homes clean, especially regarding cooking food. Lastly, it also made us more aware of how we talked to other people when they were ill and stayed home with them rather than being out and getting on with other things.

Furthermore, COVID-19 had a significant effect on my academic life. Immediately, measures to curb the pandemic were announced, such as closing all learning institutions in the country; my school life changed. The change began when our school implemented the online education system to ensure that we continued with our education during the lockdown period. At first, this affected me negatively because when learning was not happening in a formal environment, I struggled academically since I was not getting the face-to-face interaction with the teachers I needed. Furthermore, forcing us to attend online caused my classmates and me to feel disconnected from the knowledge being taught because we were unable to have peer participation in class. However, as the pandemic subsided, we grew accustomed to this learning mode. We realized the effects on our performance and learning satisfaction were positive, as it seemed to promote emotional and behavioral changes necessary to function in a virtual world. Students who participated in e-learning during the pandemic developed more ownership of the course requirement, increased their emotional intelligence and self-awareness, improved their communication skills, and learned to work together as a community.

If there is an area that the pandemic affected was the mental health of my family and myself. The COVID-19 pandemic caused increased anxiety, depression, and other mental health concerns that were difficult for my family and me to manage alone. Our ability to learn social resilience skills, such as self-management, was tested numerous times. One of the most visible challenges we faced was social isolation and loneliness. The multiple lockdowns made it difficult to interact with my friends and family, leading to loneliness. The changes in communication exacerbated the problem as interactions moved from face-to-face to online communication using social media and text messages. Furthermore, having family members and loved ones separated from us due to distance, unavailability of phones, and the internet created a situation of fear among us, as we did not know whether they were all right. Moreover, some people within my circle found it more challenging to communicate with friends, family, and co-workers due to poor communication skills. This was mainly attributed to anxiety or a higher risk of spreading the disease. It was also related to a poor understanding of creating and maintaining relationships during this period.

Positive Changes

In addition, this pandemic has brought some positive changes with it. First, it had been a significant catalyst for strengthening relationships and neighborhood ties. It has encouraged a sense of community because family members, neighbors, friends, and community members within my area were all working together to help each other out. Before the pandemic, everybody focused on their business, the children going to school while the older people went to work. There was not enough time to bond with each other. Well, the pandemic changed that, something that has continued until now that everything is returning to normal. In our home, it strengthened the relationship between myself and my siblings and parents. This is because we started spending more time together as a family, which enhanced our sense of understanding of ourselves.

The pandemic has been a challenging time for many people. I can confidently state that it was a significant and potentially unprecedented change in our daily life. By changing how we do things and relate with our family and friends, the pandemic has shaped our future life experiences and shown that during crises, we can come together and make a difference in each other’s lives. Therefore, I embrace wholesomely the changes brought by the COVID-19 pandemic in my life.

• Haleem, A., Javaid, M., & Vaishya, R. (2020). Effects of COVID-19 pandemic in daily life.  Current medicine research and practice ,  10 (2), 78.
• Rume, T., & Islam, S. D. U. (2020). Environmental effects of COVID-19 pandemic and potential strategies of sustainability.  Heliyon ,  6 (9), e04965.
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Only together can we end this pandemic and recover

About the author, antónio guterres.

António Guterres is the ninth Secretary-General of the United Nations, who took office on 1st January 2017.

11 March 2021

One full year into the COVID-19 pandemic, our world has faced a tsunami of suffering. So many lives have been lost. Economies have been upended and societies left reeling. The most vulnerable have suffered the most. Those left behind are being left even further behind.

It has been a year of empty office buildings, quiet streets and closed schools in much of the world. I commend women, men and young people everywhere for adapting to work, learn and live in new ways. I honour health workers for their dedication and sacrifice and all other essential workers who have kept societies running. I salute all those who have stood up to the deniers and disinformation, and have followed science and safety protocols. You have helped save lives. 

The United Nations will continue mobilizing the international community to make vaccines affordable and available for all, to recover better, and to put a special focus on the needs of those who have borne the burden of this crisis on so many levels — women, minorities, older persons, persons with disabilities, refugees, migrants and indigenous peoples.

With the vaccine roll-out, there’s some light at the end of the tunnel.

COVAX —the global vaccine equity mechanism —  has started delivery around the world, including to some of the lowest-income countries.

Yet I am deeply concerned that many low-income countries have not yet received a single dose, while wealthier countries are on track to vaccinating their entire population. We see many examples of vaccine nationalism and vaccine hoarding in wealthier countries — as well as continued side deals with manufacturers that undermine access for all.

The global vaccination campaign represents the greatest moral test of our times.

It is also essential to restart the global economy — and help the world move from locking down societies to locking down the virus.

COVID-19 vaccines must be seen as a global public good. The world needs to unite to produce and distribute sufficient vaccines for all, which means at least doubling manufacturing capacity around the world.

That effort must start now. 

Only together can we end this pandemic and recover.

Only together can we revive our economies.

And then, together, we can all get back to the things we love.

S7-Episode 2: Bringing Health to the World

“You see, we're not doing this work to make ourselves feel better. That sort of conventional notion of what a do-gooder is. We're doing this work because we are totally convinced that it's not necessary in today's wealthy world for so many people to be experiencing discomfort, for so many people to be experiencing hardship, for so many people to have their lives and their livelihoods imperiled.”

Dr. David Nabarro has dedicated his life to global health. After a long career that’s taken him from the horrors of war torn Iraq, to the devastating aftermath of the Indian Ocean tsunami, he is still spurred to action by the tremendous inequalities in global access to medical care.

“The thing that keeps me awake most at night is the rampant inequities in our world…We see an awful lot of needless suffering.”

:: David Nabarro interviewed by Melissa Fleming

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Ballet Manguinhos, named for its favela in Rio de Janeiro, returns to the stage after a long absence during the COVID-19 pandemic. It counts 250 children and teenagers from the favela as its performers. The ballet group provides social support in a community where poverty, hunger and teen pregnancy are constant issues.

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The pandemic has put many people to the test, and journalists are no exception. Coronavirus has waged war not only against people's lives and well-being but has also spawned countless hoaxes and scientific falsehoods.

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Covid 19 Essay in English

Essay on Covid -19: In a very short amount of time, coronavirus has spread globally. It has had an enormous impact on people's lives, economy, and societies all around the world, affecting every country. Governments have had to take severe measures to try and contain the pandemic. The virus has altered our way of life in many ways, including its effects on our health and our economy. Here are a few sample essays on ‘CoronaVirus’.

100 Words Essay on Covid 19

200 words essay on covid 19, 500 words essay on covid 19.

COVID-19 or Corona Virus is a novel coronavirus that was first identified in 2019. It is similar to other coronaviruses, such as SARS-CoV and MERS-CoV, but it is more contagious and has caused more severe respiratory illness in people who have been infected. The novel coronavirus became a global pandemic in a very short period of time. It has affected lives, economies and societies across the world, leaving no country untouched. The virus has caused governments to take drastic measures to try and contain it. From health implications to economic and social ramifications, COVID-19 impacted every part of our lives. It has been more than 2 years since the pandemic hit and the world is still recovering from its effects.

Since the outbreak of COVID-19, the world has been impacted in a number of ways. For one, the global economy has taken a hit as businesses have been forced to close their doors. This has led to widespread job losses and an increase in poverty levels around the world. Additionally, countries have had to impose strict travel restrictions in an attempt to contain the virus, which has resulted in a decrease in tourism and international trade. Furthermore, the pandemic has put immense pressure on healthcare systems globally, as hospitals have been overwhelmed with patients suffering from the virus. Lastly, the outbreak has led to a general feeling of anxiety and uncertainty, as people are fearful of contracting the disease.

My Experience of COVID-19

I still remember how abruptly colleges and schools shut down in March 2020. I was a college student at that time and I was under the impression that everything would go back to normal in a few weeks. I could not have been more wrong. The situation only got worse every week and the government had to impose a lockdown. There were so many restrictions in place. For example, we had to wear face masks whenever we left the house, and we could only go out for essential errands. Restaurants and shops were only allowed to operate at take-out capacity, and many businesses were shut down.

In the current scenario, coronavirus is dominating all aspects of our lives. The coronavirus pandemic has wreaked havoc upon people’s lives, altering the way we live and work in a very short amount of time. It has revolutionised how we think about health care, education, and even social interaction. This virus has had long-term implications on our society, including its impact on mental health, economic stability, and global politics. But we as individuals can help to mitigate these effects by taking personal responsibility to protect themselves and those around them from infection.

Effects of CoronaVirus on Education

The outbreak of coronavirus has had a significant impact on education systems around the world. In China, where the virus originated, all schools and universities were closed for several weeks in an effort to contain the spread of the disease. Many other countries have followed suit, either closing schools altogether or suspending classes for a period of time.

This has resulted in a major disruption to the education of millions of students. Some have been able to continue their studies online, but many have not had access to the internet or have not been able to afford the costs associated with it. This has led to a widening of the digital divide between those who can afford to continue their education online and those who cannot.

The closure of schools has also had a negative impact on the mental health of many students. With no face-to-face contact with friends and teachers, some students have felt isolated and anxious. This has been compounded by the worry and uncertainty surrounding the virus itself.

The situation with coronavirus has improved and schools have been reopened but students are still catching up with the gap of 2 years that the pandemic created. In the meantime, governments and educational institutions are working together to find ways to support students and ensure that they are able to continue their education despite these difficult circumstances.

Effects of CoronaVirus on Economy

The outbreak of the coronavirus has had a significant impact on the global economy. The virus, which originated in China, has spread to over two hundred countries, resulting in widespread panic and a decrease in global trade. As a result of the outbreak, many businesses have been forced to close their doors, leading to a rise in unemployment. In addition, the stock market has taken a severe hit.

Effects of CoronaVirus on Health

The effects that coronavirus has on one's health are still being studied and researched as the virus continues to spread throughout the world. However, some of the potential effects on health that have been observed thus far include respiratory problems, fever, and coughing. In severe cases, pneumonia, kidney failure, and death can occur. It is important for people who think they may have been exposed to the virus to seek medical attention immediately so that they can be treated properly and avoid any serious complications. There is no specific cure or treatment for coronavirus at this time, but there are ways to help ease symptoms and prevent the virus from spreading.

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7 Personal Statement Examples That Survive COVID-19

Sam Benezra

As summer approaches, rising seniors across the United States have college applications on their mind. This time around, however, things are a little different. The outbreak of COVID-19 has disrupted daily life around the world, and many students are concerned about how it will affect their chances of getting accepted to the school of their choice.

Don’t fret too much about cancelled internships and extracurricular activities or postponed SAT dates. A number of colleges, including Yale , Harvard , and Emory University have released statements assuring applicants that their admissions will not be affected by any disruptions caused by COVID-19. Universities know what students are going through right now, and are understanding of the constraints.

Nevertheless, the coronavirus will surely alter what college applications look like over the next couple of years. Without the opportunity to make their extracurricular activities stand out, students will have to lean on other parts of their application, including the personal statement or essay.

The personal statement or essay is the soul of a college application. It is your opportunity to talk directly to colleges in your own voice. It is a space to tell admissions officers who you are, what you’re interested in, and maybe even to charm them a little bit. When admissions officers read your essay, they want to get a sense of your personality, your passions, and the way you see the world. 

Under the current circumstances, the role of the personal statement is even more important than in an average year.

“The reality is, the way that college admissions is going to go in the fall is not going to be based on numbers and scores the way it might have been in the past,” Nicole Hurd, founder and CEO of College Advising Corps, told TUN . “Everybody is going to have to be able to tell a story that is going to be much more based on experiences and aspirations and narrative than just on numbers.”

With that in mind, here is a guide to writing your personal statement during and after the coronavirus outbreak.

What do colleges want to see in personal statements or essays?

First and foremost, when admissions officers read your personal statement, they want to get a sense of who you are, not only as a student, but as a person. They want to know about the things that matter to you, the way you think, and how you respond to challenges.

“You may be surprised to hear this, but one of the reasons we enjoy reading your essays and stories every year is because we get to understand what a generation is thinking about,” Emory University Director of Recruitment and Talent Giselle F. Martin said in an open letter to juniors and sophomores in April. “We encourage you to take this time to think about what matters most to you. After all, there is no greater gift than time.”

Colleges are still looking for the same qualities in applicants that they always have — intelligence, leadership, creativity, passion, curiosity, and maturity.

In your personal statement, be true to yourself and your experiences. Tell a story from the heart, not one cut out from a college applications handbook.

What are the qualities that define a strong personal statement or essay?

Personal statements should be personal — It’s called a personal statement for a reason. Your personal statement should first and foremost be a story about you. Find inspiration in the big moments in your life, but also in the small moments — dinners with family, laughs with friends, etc.

Personal statements should be meaningful — You don’t have to write your college essay about a profound, life-changing moment. However, whatever topic you do choose should carry some meaning to you or else your readers will be asking themselves, “so what?”

Personal statements should be tight — Your personal statement should be tightly edited and have a strong narrative flow. Common App essays are restrained to a meager 650 words. It can be difficult to pack a whole lot of meaning into such a small space, so make sure every word counts and have a teacher or parent proofread.

Personal statements should be engaging — Hook your reader in and don’t let go. The goal of a personal statement is to make a lasting impression on whoever reads it. Boring essays simply won’t cut it!

What are the personal statement topics and questions?

The Common App allows students to respond to one of seven different personal essay prompts, including an open prompt that allows students to choose their own topic, or even write in their own prompt. 

• Identity and passions : “Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, please share your story.”
• Overcoming challenges, setbacks, and failures: “The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?”
• Thinking critically: “Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome?”
• Solving problems: “Describe a problem you’ve solved or a problem you’d like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma — anything of personal importance no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.”
• Personal growth: “Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others.”
• Inspiration and curiosity: “Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more?”
• Anything at all: “Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design.”

You can access Common App essay prompts for the 2020-2021 application period here .

When brainstorming, try to come up with at least one idea for each prompt.

Are there tips for brainstorming personal statement topics?

The most challenging part of writing your personal statement is settling on a topic to write about or a story to tell. But while brainstorming can be difficult, it can also be a fun process. Here are a few tips to help you generate ideas:

Ask yourself questions — To start generating ideas, it can be helpful to start looking inward and asking some introspective questions, such as:

• What are you passionate about?
• What do you want colleges to know about you?
• What are some impactful moments in your life?
• Who are some meaningful people in your life?
• What’s a story you will never forget? Why will you never forget it?
• How do you spend your free time? Why?
• What are you looking forward to?
• What do you want to get out of your college experience?

Don’t feel the need to impress — Crazy stories do not necessarily make better stories. Don’t get caught up in the idea that you need to tell an overly exciting or dramatic story. Likewise, don’t use your personal statement to list off achievements and awards. The point of the essay is to shine a light on who you are, not what you’ve done.

Think about the small things — Oftentimes, the most personal essays are those that focus on the details of life. Think about your favorite movies, books, and music. Reminisce on conversations and disagreements, sports events and camping trips, road trips, and walks around your neighborhood.

Avoid clichés — College admissions officers read thousands of personal statements every year and, as a result, are experts in picking out clichéd essays. While any topic can make a great essay, it is harder for yours to stand out when it sounds similar to many others. Topics like sports championships and eye-opening travel experiences can make great essays, but they are also a little overplayed, so it might be harder for them to stand out.

Should you write about the coronavirus?

Probably not. While the COVID-19 pandemic has surely been an impactful moment in many of our lives, writing your personal statement about the pandemic may not be the best choice, simply because so many others will likely also be writing about it.

Virtually everyone in the world has been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic in some capacity and has a unique story about the event. Unfortunately, admissions officers who have to read through thousands of college essays each year will likely have a difficult time differentiating between yours and two hundred others on the same topic.

The best college essays are memorable and unique. They have the ability to stand out amongst a crowd and leave a lasting impression. As a result, the most out-of-the box essays are often the most compelling. Writing on a common topic can make it more difficult to catch your reader’s attention. 

Furthermore, when you are writing about mass events like the coronavirus, it can be easy to write more about the event and about others than about yourself, which is what admissions officers really want to know about.

That doesn’t mean that the coronavirus is completely off-limits as a topic. If you think you have a powerful story to tell, by all means, tell it. However, you should keep in mind that any essay on the coronavirus will have to be outstanding to catch the eye of an admissions officer. 

A better alternative would be to use the Common App’s added question for fall 2020 admissions on how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected you personally. 

“That’s definitely an opportunity for (applicants) to talk about what they were planning on doing and how that was taken away,” said Joe Korfmacher , a college counselor at Collegewise. “But it also gives them an opportunity to talk about what they did instead.”

Are there personal statement examples?

These personal statement examples illustrate what works for the students who wrote them.

• Prompt #1: Identity and Passions — Rocio’s “Facing the Hot Griddle”

In this essay, Rocio makes a tortilla, and in doing so, finds herself reflecting on her Guatemalan heritage and current life in the United States. She recounts some of the obstacles that she has faced as an immigrant and how, like masa harina being made into a tortilla, has been molded by her experiences and challenges.

• Prompt #2: Overcoming a Challenge — Heqing “Amy” Zhang’s “On the day my first novel was rejected, I was baking pies.”

In this essay, Amy Zhang recounts the experience of having her first novel rejected by a publishing house on the day of her church’s annual bake sale. With a unique narrative voice that highlights her storytelling skills, Zhang relates her feelings of disappointment and grief, and how these emotions helped her spin her next novel, which she would end up selling within three days.

• Prompt #3: Thinking Critically — Callie’s “Bridging Polarity”

In this essay, Callie reckons with the difference in beliefs between her friends that she grew up with in Texas and those in her new home of San Francisco. She recounts how a visit from a childhood friend led her to value different perspectives and to listen to those with opposing views.

• Prompt #4: Solving Problems — Seena’s “Growing Strawberries in a High School Locker”

Seena assigns himself a unique challenge: to grow strawberries inside an empty high school locker. What seemed initially like a simple task quickly grew into a complex project involving a solar-powered blue LED light, an automated plant watering system, and a 3-D printed, modified lock system that increased airflow into the locker. As Seena recounts this experiment, his innate curiosity, problem-solving, and disposition toward mechanical engineering are on full display.

• Prompt #5: Personal Growth — Anna’s “Returning to Peru”

Anna remembers how a trip to her father’s homeland in Peru helped instill in her a passion for protecting the environment. She recounts witnessing pollution, lack of clean water, and environmental degradation in impoverished areas of Lima and how it motivated her interest in environmental science and conservation.

• Prompt #6: Inspiration and Curiosity — Jillian Impastato’s quest to find women with tatt oos

Jillian Impastato dives into her fascination with the art of tattoos and the lives of women who have them. Intrigued by the symbology and the meaning attached to them, Impastato has embarked on something of an informal anthropology project in which she asks women she sees with tattoos questions. She hears their stories and learns about the relationships they have with the art on their bodies. All at once, this essay displays Impastato’s natural curiosity, her interest in art, her outgoing personality, and her willingness to pursue answers.

• Prompt #7: Anything At All — Madison’s “On Potatoes”

Madison presents herself with a not-so-simple question: “If you had to choose one food to eat for the rest of your life, what would it be?” After weighing the options, she settles on the nutritious and versatile potato. She uses this as a jumping-off point to discuss her own disposition to variance and diversity. The potato becomes a clever metaphor for her innate curiosity and openness to new ideas.

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Essay On Covid-19: 100, 200 and 300 Words

• Updated on  
• Apr 30, 2024

COVID-19, also known as the Coronavirus, is a global pandemic that has affected people all around the world. It first emerged in a lab in Wuhan, China, in late 2019 and quickly spread to countries around the world. This virus was reportedly caused by SARS-CoV-2. Since then, it has spread rapidly to many countries, causing widespread illness and impacting our lives in numerous ways. This blog talks about the details of this virus and also drafts an essay on COVID-19 in 100, 200 and 300 words for students and professionals. 

Table of Contents

• 1 Essay On COVID-19 in English 100 Words
• 2 Essay On COVID-19 in 200 Words
• 3 Essay On COVID-19 in 300 Words
• 4 Short Essay on Covid-19

Essay On COVID-19 in English 100 Words

COVID-19, also known as the coronavirus, is a global pandemic. It started in late 2019 and has affected people all around the world. The virus spreads very quickly through someone’s sneeze and respiratory issues.

COVID-19 has had a significant impact on our lives, with lockdowns, travel restrictions, and changes in daily routines. To prevent the spread of COVID-19, we should wear masks, practice social distancing, and wash our hands frequently. 

People should follow social distancing and other safety guidelines and also learn the tricks to be safe stay healthy and work the whole challenging time. 

Also Read: National Safe Motherhood Day 2023

Essay On COVID-19 in 200 Words

COVID-19 also known as coronavirus, became a global health crisis in early 2020 and impacted mankind around the world. This virus is said to have originated in Wuhan, China in late 2019. It belongs to the coronavirus family and causes flu-like symptoms. It impacted the healthcare systems, economies and the daily lives of people all over the world. 

The most crucial aspect of COVID-19 is its highly spreadable nature. It is a communicable disease that spreads through various means such as coughs from infected persons, sneezes and communication. Due to its easy transmission leading to its outbreaks, there were many measures taken by the government from all over the world such as Lockdowns, Social Distancing, and wearing masks. 

There are many changes throughout the economic systems, and also in daily routines. Other measures such as schools opting for Online schooling, Remote work options available and restrictions on travel throughout the country and internationally. Subsequently, to cure and top its outbreak, the government started its vaccine campaigns, and other preventive measures. 

In conclusion, COVID-19 tested the patience and resilience of the mankind. This pandemic has taught people the importance of patience, effort and humbleness. 

Also Read : Essay on My Best Friend

Essay On COVID-19 in 300 Words

COVID-19, also known as the coronavirus, is a serious and contagious disease that has affected people worldwide. It was first discovered in late 2019 in Cina and then got spread in the whole world. It had a major impact on people’s life, their school, work and daily lives. 

COVID-19 is primarily transmitted from person to person through respiratory droplets produced and through sneezes, and coughs of an infected person. It can spread to thousands of people because of its highly contagious nature. To cure the widespread of this virus, there are thousands of steps taken by the people and the government. 

Wearing masks is one of the essential precautions to prevent the virus from spreading. Social distancing is another vital practice, which involves maintaining a safe distance from others to minimize close contact.

Very frequent handwashing is also very important to stop the spread of this virus. Proper hand hygiene can help remove any potential virus particles from our hands, reducing the risk of infection. 

In conclusion, the Coronavirus has changed people’s perspective on living. It has also changed people’s way of interacting and how to live. To deal with this virus, it is very important to follow the important guidelines such as masks, social distancing and techniques to wash your hands. Getting vaccinated is also very important to go back to normal life and cure this virus completely.

Also Read: Essay on Abortion in English in 650 Words

Short Essay on Covid-19

Please find below a sample of a short essay on Covid-19 for school students:

Also Read: Essay on Women’s Day in 200 and 500 words

to write an essay on COVID-19, understand your word limit and make sure to cover all the stages and symptoms of this disease. You need to highlight all the challenges and impacts of COVID-19. Do not forget to conclude your essay with positive precautionary measures.

Writing an essay on COVID-19 in 200 words requires you to cover all the challenges, impacts and precautions of this disease. You don’t need to describe all of these factors in brief, but make sure to add as many options as your word limit allows.

The full form for COVID-19 is Corona Virus Disease of 2019.

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• Open access
• Published: 17 July 2024

‘ Life became harder with COVID-19 ’: exploring the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic among youth living in eThekwini district, South Africa

• Kalysha Closson 1 , 2 ,
• Erica Dong 1 ,
• Bongiwe Zulu 3 ,
• Janan J. Dietrich 5 , 6 , 7 ,
• Campion Zharima 5 , 8 ,
• Julie Jesson 4 ,
• Tatiana Pakhomova 1 ,
• Mags Beksinska 3 &
• Angela Kaida 1  

BMC Public Health volume  24 , Article number:  1922 ( 2024 ) Cite this article

122 Accesses

Metrics details

In South Africa, pervasive age and gender inequities have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and public health response. We aimed to explore experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic among youth in eThekwini district, South Africa.

Between December 2021-May 2022 we explored experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth aged 16–24 residing in eThekwini, South Africa. We collated responses to the open-ended question “Has the COVID-19 pandemic affected you in any other way you want to tell us about?” in an online survey focused on understanding the pandemic’s multi-levelled health and social effects. We used a thematic analysis to summarise the responses.

Of 2,068 respondents, 256 (12.4%, median age = 22, 60.9% women) completed the open-ended survey question (11% in isiZulu). Results were organized into three main themes encompassing (1) COVID-19-related loss, fear, grief, and exacerbated mental and physical health concerns; (2) COVID-19-related intensified hardships, which contributed to financial, employment, food, education, and relationship insecurities for individuals and households; and (3) positive effects of the pandemic response, including the benefits of government policies and silver linings to government restrictions.

Conclusions

We found that South African youth experienced significant grief and multiple losses (e.g., death, income, job, and educational) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trauma-aware interventions that provide economic and educational opportunities must be included in post-COVID recovery efforts.

Peer Review reports

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has devastated people’s health, education, and economic security and has exacerbated existing inequalities and vulnerabilities [ 1 , 2 , 3 ]. Adolescents are at a critical stage of development and may face long-term consequences due to disruptions in education and social support [ 4 , 5 , 6 ].

Pandemic responses initially overlooked the effect on youth, not considering them high-risk compared to older or medically vulnerable groups [ 7 ]. However, the indirect, multidimensional effects of the pandemic on youth are profound, including immediate and long-term socioeconomic impacts [ 3 , 7 ]. These effects include increased child poverty, worsened learning conditions, threats to child health from economic hardship, safety concerns, and worsening mental well-being [ 2 , 8 ]. The pandemic’s disruption to youth’s access to education and employment opportunities is likely to place them on a volatile trajectory in finding and maintaining quality jobs and income [ 9 ]. Pre-pandemic, young people faced challenges to a successful future with a limited labour market, lack of affordable housing, and difficulty accessing their rights [ 7 , 10 ]. The far-reaching effects on youth may have enduring consequences for society [ 8 ], with youth and future generations bearing significant long-term economic and social burdens worldwide [ 1 , 9 , 11 ].

In South Africa, where the majority of the population (62.6%) was living below the poverty line pre-pandemic [ 12 ], research has shown that food insecurity and hunger worsened among young people [ 13 ]. This has particularly severe implications for youth, who may face multiple losses and challenges during this critical period of physical, cognitive, and social development [ 5 , 6 ]. There have been reports of mental health concerns among South African youth [ 13 ]. Moreover, the unemployment rate among young people aged 15–34 was 46.3% in 2021, with youth disproportionately accounting for 59.5% of total unemployed persons [ 14 ]. Prolonged periods of unemployment in youth have long-lasting effects on income and mental health, occurring beyond the period of economic recession, as well as risks of concurrent and future insecure employment [ 7 , 9 ].

Despite the broad scope of literature on the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic, there is a gap in knowledge on the experiences and impact of the pandemic on youth in sub-Saharan Africa. To address this gap, our team launched the AYAZAZI RIGHTS ( R apid I nvestigation of G endered H ealth outcomes in the T ime of S ARS-CoV-2) survey in 2021 to explore the multileveled effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth overall and by gender. As part of the survey, we included an open-ended question to gather qualitative data on the experiences of youth in eThekwini, South Africa during the COVID-19 pandemic.

By providing an open-ended comment box, we sought to create a space where youth could openly express their thoughts, feelings, and concerns in their own words without being constrained by pre-determined response options [ 15 , 16 ]. By recognising and valuing youth living experience, we aim to provide a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of the pandemic on youth. This may inform the development of effective and equitable interventions and policies. By shedding light on youth’s unique needs and vulnerabilities, this study seeks to inform interventions to support the resilience and recovery of young people in South Africa.

Study setting

As of August 2nd, 2023, South Africa had the highest recorded number of COVID-19 cases in the African region, accounting for 43% of all cases [ 17 ]. KwaZulu-Natal is the second most populous province in South Africa, with the second highest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases at 728,708 in February 2023 [ 18 , 19 , 20 ]. eThekwini, being the most populous district in KwaZulu-Natal, is home to some 3.5 million people [ 21 ], with youth aged 15–24 years-old comprising 16.1% of the population (731,267) [ 22 ]. eThekwini district had recorded the highest number of cases in the province, accounting for 49% of all cases and 35% of deaths in the province in May 2022 [ 19 ] and recording 358,222 cases and 5,707 deaths by February 2023 [ 20 ].

South Africa underwent a national lockdown beginning March 27th, 2020, considered the most restrictive lockdown in Sub-Saharan Africa [ 23 ]. Restrictions included a stay-at-home order, limited gatherings, alcohol and tobacco sale bans, and travel restrictions [ 24 ]. Varying lockdown restrictions followed this in response to multiple waves of COVID-19 infection levels from May 2020 to April 2022, when the National State of Disaster was terminated.

From December 21st, 2021 to May 31st, 2022, data from online surveys were collected to explore the multi-levelled effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth aged 16–24 in the eThekwini district of KwaZulu-Natal, South Africa.

Study design

Youth aged 16–24 years, living in the eThekwini district, Durban, South Africa, who could read in English and/or isiZulu and had access to a mobile phone, tablet, or computer that could access the internet were eligible for participation. The survey included questions on socio-demographics, COVID-19 experiences (e.g., illness, deaths, vaccination) and impact (e.g., job, income, food access), as well as other sexual, reproductive, mental health, and substance use experiences and effects from the start of the COVID-19 pandemic to the time of the interview. The final survey question allowed participants to choose to enter free text to the question: “Has the COVID-19 pandemic affected you in any other way you want to tell us about?”

The overall AYAZAZI RIGHTS study was a mixed method design, capturing quantitative and qualitative data through an online survey. This analysis used qualitative methods to analyse responses to an open-ended text comment box. Our analysis was informed by a youth-centered and participatory approach, which sought to prioritise youth voices and perspectives and value their lived experiences. Online qualitative surveys hold the advantages of being able to capture diverse perspectives, experiences, and sense-making from a wide population [ 25 ]. The feeling of anonymity encourages disclosure and participation for sensitive topics [ 26 ].

Analysing open-ended data offered valuable insights [ 16 ]. Unlike closed survey responses, open-ended questions elicit more comprehensive information, allowing participants to provide perspectives beyond researchers’ potential biases [ 16 ]. Open-ended data can uncover overlooked issues, enhancing the study’s overall understanding. Additionally, sharing participants’ own words on the topic is beneficial for informing decision-makers and shaping effective, equitable interventions and policies [ 16 ]. In the case of our study, the thematic analysis of the open-ended responses provided a deeper understanding of the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth in eThekwini district, South Africa, than the quantitative survey responses alone. As such, our analysis was able to delve further into reasons why young people’s mental health was so affected by the pandemic.

Data collection- recruitment

We recruited participants for our study through diverse methods, including community organisations, advisory boards, social media, and flyers placed in youth frequented areas like retail spaces and transit hubs. We also engaged previous eligible participants from other studies at the Maternal Adolescent and Child Health Research Unit (MRU). To enhance participation, those who completed the full mobile survey could enter a cash prize draw of R100 (CAD$ 8.50), with winning odds varying from one in five to one in twenty during the enrollment period. Participants accessed the survey via a cost-free web link provided through the #datafree Moya Messenger App.

Data analysis

This study qualitatively analyzed open-ended responses on the effects of COVID-19 in English or isiZulu. Responses like “not applicable” or with limited detail, such as a simple “no,” were excluded. We translated isiZulu comments to English and merged them into a single dataset for analysis in NVivo 12. In NVivo, we used thematic analysis to explore the experiences of youth in eThekwini district, South Africa, during the first 26 months of the COVID-19 pandemic. This approach, chosen due to global limited and rapidly evolving pandemic evidence, provided flexibility to highlight youth voices and their experiences while placing them within the broader literature and context [ 27 ].

Both KC and ED initially reviewed all comments to familiarize themselves with the data. Insights from this process were then shared with the team. KC initiated the coding process by reviewing each comment and grouping into initial ‘codes’. Together KC and ED defined initial codes and ED reviewed for accuracy and alignment with code definitions. Initial codes were shared with the remaining team and through iterative discussions, codes evolved into broader categories, which were eventually distilled down to three overarching themes. This iterative theme refinement process allowed team members to gain insight from the data and provided opportunity for multiple members of the team’s perspective to be considered throughout the analysis [ 28 ]. After multiple group discussions. We selected exemplary quotes to highlight the identified themes and ensure representation across age and gender. Only a small number of non-binary participants responded to the open-ended question (< 5). Thus, to protect their identity, we have excluded non-binary participants socio-demographic information from the results below. The term non-binary refers to people whose gender identities and expressions do not conform to binary understanding of gender [ 29 ].

Ethical approval was provided by the Simon Fraser University Research Ethics Board and the University of British Columbia Behavioural Research Ethics Board (REB number: H21-02027), and by the University of the Witwatersrand Human Research Ethics Committee (Wits HREC-Medical) in South Africa (REB number: M210863). Participants were provided with an electronic consent letter, detailing the purpose of the survey, benefits and risks for participation, and key contacts for further question before accessing the questionnaire. A list of resources including online and in-person local support services such as mental health and sexual and reproductive health care was provided at the end of the questionnaire. All participants names are pseudonyms to protect confidentiality.

Of 2,068 participants with non-duplicate responses and complete gender data, 353 (17.1%) included comments in a survey comment box. 97 of these comments were removed as they reported “no” or “NA” without further explanation. Thus, 256 youth (12.4% of the enrolled sample, median age = 22, 60.9% women) submitted a comment (11% in isiZulu). Differences between those who did and did not answer the comment box can be found in Supplementary Material . Additional gender-stratified demographics of youth who submitted a can be found in Table  1 . Our results were organised into three themes based on an iterative theme refinement process, emergent from the coding process. Together, these three themes help reflect the diversity of experiences affecting eThekwini youth during the pandemic. They include: (1) Loss, fear, grief, and exacerbated mental and physical health concerns; (2) Heightened financial, educational, or other insecurities; and (3) Positive effects and silver linings of the pandemic response.

Theme 1: COVID-19-related loss, fear, grief, and exacerbated mental and physical health concerns

Theme one was most common theme discussed in the comments and consists of two sub-themes: ‘loss’ and ‘fear, grief, and exacerbated mental health concerns’.

Much of our data illustrated how common an experience it was for a youth in eThekwini district to have known someone, whether a relative or community member, who died of COVID-19. Loss was highlighted through general comments that ‘COVID-19 was a death sentence’ (Themba, age 21, woman) to much more detailed descriptions of grief and loss that were experienced equally across age and gender. Many young people spoke not just about acquaintances or neighbours, but of members of their immediate families dying from COVID-19. For example:

It [COVID-19] affected me deeply because I lost my father to COVID. -Nia; age 19; woman

Fear, grief, and exacerbated mental health concerns

While many of the comments simply described the experience of losing someone to COVID-19, others were more detailed in describing the grief experienced from losing a loved one to COVID-19. For example, Nkosi highlighted the fear and grief he experienced in losing a relative while many others were dying:

[I] Felt very scared during the first [wave of] COVID-19. […] many people dying from it [COVID-19], hospitals were fully packed, and doctors and nurses were overworked. Many people dying. Lost a relative to COVID, it was very sad and traumatising. - Nkosi; age 20; man

The trauma of losing a loved one was also amplified by the loss that everyone in youths’ communities were also experiencing. Beyond these experiences of having a close family member die of COVID-19, youth also spoke of the trauma of getting very sick from the virus. Getting COVID-19 in the context of high mortality was scary for many participants, as they feared that they might pass COVID-19 to a family member. One participant stated:

I had to stay at home because I was very ill. It was very traumatic for me being sick and many people dying of COVID. - Sbusiso; age 22; man

The onset of COVID-19 illness added an additional layer of complexity to the capacity of numerous young people to work, provide for their families, and heightened concerns about spreading the infection to others.

Finally, mental health concerns were heightened due to public health restrictions that further prevented youth from working, as exemplified by Amahle:

During the COVID-19 pandemic I lost my job due to the pandemic. […] This led me to depression because I couldn’t help my family with groceries and the thing we need. Worse part I had to explain myself to my 7 years old son why I hardly have money for […] his lunch box […]. I got depressed and started to do drugs (weed) […]. Lucky I still have my mom who helped me with most of the things.” - Amahle; age 23, woman

The above quote highlights how the financial strain imposed by pandemic regulations and restrictions was a source of emotional distress, leading to depression. This distress was compounded by the necessity of conveying their financial difficulties to their child. Additionally, the quote mentions the use of substances as a coping mechanism to address the distress and underscores the significance of the family as a support system. In its entirety, the quote serves as a poignant narrative that highlights the interwoven themes of fear, grief and exacerbated mental health concerns within the context of an unprecedented global health crisis.

Theme 2: COVID-19 intensified hardships contributed to financial, employment, food, educational, and relationship insecurities

This theme describes the enhanced socioeconomic hardships experienced during the pandemic and consists of three sub-themes: ‘harder life’, ‘worry about the future’, and ‘the effect of hardships on relationships’.

Harder life

Youth shared the overlapping hardships that they experienced during the pandemic. Many comments left by participants were brief, stating how life was hard or how the pandemic changed everything, such as broad comments like ‘ life became harder with COVID-19’ (Ndlovu; age 20; man). Some individuals provided more detailed insights, delving into how the pandemic worsened economic uncertainties at individual and household levels. For example, comments spoke of specific hardships including youth losing their jobs, their family members losing work, or the household struggling to meet ends meet. Young men were more likely to discuss their own individual struggles with losing work or challenges in securing employment. For example:

I couldn’t find a job because most companies were not performing well. I tried to invent a small business, but I did not have enough capital to implement my ideas. – Tebello; age 23; man

While young women also discussed their own challenges with employment, they were more likely to mention additional hardships facing household members. For example, Amara stated:

Yes, it (COVID-19) has (affected me) because now I’m not working and even my sister too, so no one is working at home now. -Amara; age 24; woman.

Although access to employment was limited and many individuals were facing a reduced income, participants also highlighted that food was hard to come by and the food that was available was more expensive than before the pandemic. For example, Makena stated:

Yes, it (COVID-19) affected us, we could not go to the shops. We were limited things we buy in store and couldn’t go to school every day. Our parents were retrenched. Things were not the same in the house as food went up. – Makena; age 22; woman

Worry about the future

The comments also echoed concerns regarding the future, highlighting how the pandemic intensified pre-existing gaps in career opportunities and disrupted crucial stages of young people’s education. For example, Ndlovu stated:

Going to campus stopped and everything was online. I couldn’t find any part time work while I was studying, and I can’t find work now no matter how much I try. I can’t find work outside the country because I can’t afford to travel. I am seriously worried about the damage the pandemic has done to the economy and my future as well as the future of my friends who share the same challenges. – Ndlovu; age 23; man

Youth, especially adolescent girls and non-binary participants highlighted the insecurities to education that the pandemic brought. Accessing online education without adequate internet connections or proper technology led many young people to miss many educational experiences. For example:

School attendance has been a problem since we’re not attending every day and my grades have dropped. -Omphile; non-binary

Hardships effects on relationships

Both young men and women talked about how the loss of job or income because of the pandemic affected their relationships. For example, Zola stated:

My partner lost his job and couldn’t support me anymore, that made us fight a lot. - Zola; age 18; man

Another participant ‘Ada’ similarly stated:

My partner lost his job, and I am selling food and fruits in the streets, so my partner when he is angry, he hit me, but now [it is] better. - Ada; age 22; woman

Economic insecurities and lack of employment opportunities for young men was commonly discussed by young men and their partners.

Positive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic

Finally, while government restrictions were mostly discussed negatively, some youth, particularly young women, spoke of the positive effects that they experienced, considering the challenges raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. These positive effects included the benefits of government policies and silver linings to government restrictions. For example, one participant, Lindiwe, discussed how increases in social grant support during COVID were helpful:

It was a bit hard at home, but at least the grant money was raised so it also helped. -Lindiwe, age 20, woman

Similarly, another young woman, Zuri, highlighted how beneficial the COVID relief grant was for them:

Yes. I would say it [the pandemic] has affected me positively as I am unemployed but managed to have an income of R350 from the government. This R350 is making a huge impact as I am able to buy cosmetics and assist where I can at home as there is no one who is working currently. –Zuri, age 22, woman

Another participant, Busi, discussed the positive effect that online learning had on them:

In a good way sometimes in terms of school studying online has helped because I watch the video multiple times for me to understand rather than being in a lecture hall it’s hard for me having to listen/study there, COVID has [taught us] to appreciate life and has taught the importance of listening to instructions to keep yourself and those around you safe. -Busi, age 21, woman

These quotes highlight the resilience of youth in the face of adversity. They may also highlight other ways that the pandemic disproportionately affected or privileged different groups of youth based on income and other sources of support.

The three themes identified in our study reflect the diverse and complex ways the COVID-19 pandemic has affected the lives of young people in eThekwini. The experiences mentioned by participants in our study are congruent with many of the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic highlighted in the available literature on South African youth [ 13 , 30 , 31 , 32 ] and low-and-middle-income (LMICs) youth experiences [ 7 , 33 , 34 ] where the effects on mental health, education, and socio-economics have been key findings [ 35 ].

Our results provide insights into the mental health effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on South African youth, aligning with existing research on the subject [ 36 , 37 ]. Furthermore, results highlight how these mental health declines are likely influenced by the amount of loss experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic. These negative mental health outcomes include not only the grief and trauma associated with COVID-19 related deaths, but also the secondary effects on economic, job, and educational insecurities due to the restrictions imposed by the pandemic. Disenfranchised grief, relating to unacknowledged loss [ 38 , 39 ], adds a unique dimension, particularly in LMICs like South Africa, where traditional mourning practices that hold significant cultural and social significance were disrupted due to pandemic restrictions [ 38 , 39 ].

Many youth in our study lost caregivers, potentially disrupting their support systems and exacerbating mental health challenges [ 40 ]. Additionally, the pandemic heightened socio-economic instability, most notably food insecurity, particularly affecting urban youth [ 32 ]. Addressing these issues, including limited job opportunities and food insecurities, is crucial for mitigating the pandemics’ negative effects on youth mental health.

Our findings underscore the significant emotional toll that the pandemic has taken on young people, with many reporting increased levels of fear, stress, anxiety, and depression. The mental health issues raised by youth in our study align with concerns raised by South African healthcare workers and underscore the need for improved mental health support for youth. Mental health vulnerabilities among youth in our study are especially concerning as mental health issues and linked sexual and reproductive health concerns among youth in South Africa were already high pre-pandemic [ 41 , 42 , 43 ].

Despite the hardships, some youth reported positive experiences, such as thriving in online learning environments and a newfound appreciation for life during lockdown. These instances highlight the resilience of South African youth and point to areas of post-traumatic growth that have been seen in the context of the pandemic among young people across the globe [ 44 , 45 ]. However, results should be interpreted with caution as it is likely that the positive effects to online learning were only available to more well-off youth who had access to stable and consistent internet.

Implications and recommendations

These findings underscore the profound and extensive effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on South African youth, offering valuable insights to guide efforts in supporting and safeguarding this vulnerable demographic. Moreover, these insights have significant implications for public health, particularly in understanding the pandemic’s effect on youth health and wellbeing in eThekwini. The pandemic worsened pre-existing mental health conditions and gave rise to more, underscoring the importance of ensuring that young people can access the necessary support and resources. This could include therapy, counselling, support groups, education and awareness campaigns that promote mental health and wellness [ 46 , 47 ]. Additionally, recognising that trauma and grief significantly contribute to mental health issues among youth, tailored trauma-aware Footnote 1 approaches are crucial [ 48 ]. Furthermore, as a substantial portion of these mental health repercussions stem from heightened socioeconomic instability, public health policies and interventions should prioritise economic revitalisation for youth in the region. These policies and interventions include financial support for youth and their families, education and career development programs, and initiatives promoting health and wellness, including access to nutritious food [ 49 ], physical activity [ 50 ], and comprehensive support [ 51 , 52 ]. Twenty-eight million South Africans, nearly half of the population (47%), receive social grants, with 10 million South Africans age > 18 years old receiving the COVID-19 special relief grant of R350 monthly [ 53 ]. Available financial support to South African youth is crucial to South Africa’s development with young people aged 18–34 constituting almost a third of the population [ 54 ]; being the next working generation, their health and wellbeing is vital.

Strengths and limitations

Several strengths and limitations of our study should be noted. A strength is that even though the open-ended study question was presented at the end of a relatively lengthy survey, many youth still wrote detailed responses. This analysis of open-ended text responses allowed our team to capture detailed and nuanced experiences of youth, highlighting the importance of analysing such data.

There are several limitations to our study methodology. While analysing and presenting participants’ words shared in questionnaire data is an essential element of community-based research practices, the analysis of the free-form text is limited in that it does not allow for the use of specific measures typically used by qualitative researchers to enhance rigour. For example, we could not explore youth perceptions using live prompts, which is a common practice in collecting qualitative interview data [ 55 ]. Use of live prompts help to enhance the fidelity of researchers’ interpretations of the data to meanings originally intended by participants. Additional research would benefit from longitudinal follow-up studies that could help expand on comments and experiences raised by respondents in our study using focus-groups or interviews to substantiate and broaden the insights presented in this paper. Furthermore, efforts are needed to explore the long-term effects of grief experienced by youth during the pandemic. Additional research on ensuring access to health and social protection during pandemics is vital.

Our findings shed light on the profound grief and hardships experienced by youth in eThekwini due to the COVID-19 pandemic, encompassing both direct losses from family members’ COVID-19 deaths and the subsequent mental health effects resulting from pandemic-induced socioeconomic consequences. These insights contribute to the existing literature on COVID-19’s mental health effects on South African youth. Results emphasise the need for comprehensive, youth-centred approaches to addressing economic and mental health challenges within their unique socioeconomic, cultural, and historical contexts. By considering these findings, public health professionals and policymakers can develop programs and policies that support and protect the health and well-being of this vulnerable population.

Data availability

The de-identified data cannot be publicly shared as we do not have approval from the community or research ethics board. Researchers or trainees who wish to access the data should contact Dr. Angela Kaida ([email protected]) to request access.

Here we use the terminology of “trauma aware” rather than the perhaps more commonly known phrasing of “trauma-informed”. As others have noted, the language of “Trauma aware” reflects humility and understanding that even those who are not experts in addressing trauma can still practice in sensitive ways that demonstrate an awareness of the pervasiveness of trauma experiences among key populations and pursue strategies that centre physical, psychological, emotional safety.

Abbreviations

Low and middle-income country

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Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank all the youth who shared their stories with us. Also, thank you to all the staff and community advisory members who supported this research. The views expressed in this manuscript are the authors’ own.

This work was supported by the Centre for International Child Health (CICH) through the generous support of the British Columbia Children’s Hospital Foundation, Canada. JJD is funding by the South African Medical Research Council through its Division of Research Capacity Development under the Early Investigators Programme from funding received from the South African National Treasury as well as the CIPHER GROWING THE LEADERS OF TOMORROW grant from the International AIDS Society. The content hereof is the sole responsibility of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of the SAMRC. KC is supported by a Canadian Institute for Health Research Banting Postdoctoral Fellowship.

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Kalysha Closson, Erica Dong, Tatiana Pakhomova & Angela Kaida

Center of Gender Equity and Health, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States

Kalysha Closson

Wits MRU (MatCH Research Unit), Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Durban, South Africa

Bongiwe Zulu & Mags Beksinska

Center for Epidemiology and Research in POPulation Health (CERPOP), Inserm, Université de Toulouse, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France

Julie Jesson

Perinatal HIV Research Unit (PHRU), Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa

Janan J. Dietrich & Campion Zharima

Health Systems Research Unit, South African Medical Research Council, Bellville, South Africa

Janan J. Dietrich

African Social Sciences Unit of Research and Evaluation (ASSURE), Wits Health Consortium, Johannesburg, South Africa

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Conceptualisation: KC; Data Curation: KC, BZ, JJ; Formal Analysis: KC, ED; Analysis Support: CZ, TP, BZ, AK, JJ; Funding Acquisition: AK, JJD, MB, KC, JJ; Project administration: BZ; Writing- original draft: KC, ED; Writing- review and editing: KC, ED, CZ, TP, BZ, JJ, JJD, MB, AK.

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Participants were provided with an electronic consent letter, detailing the purpose of the survey, benefits and risk for participation, and key contacts for further questions before accessing the questionnaire. Informed consent was obtained from all participants. A list of resources including online and in-person local mental health and sexual and reproductive health care support services, were provided at the end of the questionnaire. Ethical approval was provided by the Simon Fraser University Research Ethics Board and the University of British Columbia Behavioural Research Ethics Board (REB number: H21-02027), and by the University of the Witwatersrand Human Research Ethics Committee (Wits HREC-Medical) in South Africa (REB number: M210863). All study methods were performed in accordance with relevant guidelines and regulations.

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Closson, K., Dong, E., Zulu, B. et al. ‘ Life became harder with COVID-19 ’: exploring the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic among youth living in eThekwini district, South Africa. BMC Public Health 24 , 1922 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1186/s12889-024-19238-7

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Understanding the global impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on well-being

Benoît decerf, jed friedman, arthur mendes, steven pennings, nishant yonzan.

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound impact on global well-being, affecting multiple dimensions including mortality, poverty, and education. Understanding these impacts is crucial for informing policy decisions and improving the response to future pandemics. In our recent paper , we provide a comprehensive analysis of the pandemic's impact across these central dimensions using a common metric. This metric is years of human life , either the years of life lost due to premature mortality, or years of life spent in poverty (or will be spent in poverty) because of income decline or learning loss. Measures of aggregate loss that combine losses in these three dimensions of “lives, livelihoods, and learning” depend on how we value a year of life lost vis-à-vis a year spent in poverty that otherwise would not have been (if not for the pandemic). This valuation is obviously a normative decision and will vary across people and countries.

Mortality, poverty, and school closures have all contributed to the well-being losses experienced during the pandemic. We estimate these losses for 122 countries, covering approximately 95% of the global population, through the following measures:

• Years of Life Lost ( YLL ): defined as the difference between age at death for pandemic related “excess mortalities” in 2020-2021, and the conditional life expectancy for the excess deaths. It is calculated using WHO data on excess deaths and country-specific conditional life expectancies.
• Current Poverty Years ( CPY ): defined as the number of people pushed into poverty during the economic downturn of 2020-2021, using national poverty thresholds. (see Mahler et al. (2022) for details).
• Future Poverty Years ( FPY ): the long-term increase in poverty due to reduced economic growth from human capital losses due to school closures in 2020-2021, using the World Bank's Long Term Growth Model (LTGM) (see our paper appendix for details).

Losses around the world, by dimension

The world has seen significant losses in each dimension. Had these losses been distributed equally around the world, every person would have spent about two weeks in poverty in 2020–2021 (the CPY estimate), lost eight days of life ( YLL , discounted to the present), and would expect to spend an additional month in poverty ( FPY , again discounted to the present) after 2021 due to the pandemic. However, these losses were not distributed equally. Instead, lower- and middle-income countries bore a disproportionate burden. The results, summarized in Figure 1 below, indicate:

• The years of life lost ( YLL ) rise with national income until upper-middle levels, then fall, due to younger populations in poorer nations and better healthcare and vaccines in richer ones.
• Contemporaneous poverty years ( CPY ) is high in poorer countries, decreases with national income, and can be near zero for the richest nations, reflecting the effectiveness of their social policies during the pandemic.
• Future poverty years ( FPY ) decreases with income as lower-income countries experienced sustained school closures with younger populations, meaning a larger future workforce impact. Well-being loss from school closures dominates the loss from CPY at any level of national income— FPY is at least twice as large as CPY and sometimes three times as large.

Figure 1. Welfare costs of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 and 2021, by national per capita income 

Note:  The curves for Years of Life Lost ( YLL ), Future Poverty Years ( FPY ), and Current Poverty Years ( CPY ) (in years per 100 people) are smoothed based on fitted values from separate locally weighted polynomial regressions. In each regression, the natural logarithm of GNI PC (2020 US$, Atlas Method) is the independent variable, while YLL , FPY , or CPY is the dependent variable. A bandwidth of 0.75 is used in all regressions.

Total well-being loss

When aggregating the total well-being costs from the pandemic, we need to consider the value of a year of life lost relative to an additional year of life spent in poverty, which we call α. We don’t choose a specific value for α as reasonable views on this valuation differ. Instead, we present results for a range of plausible valuations of α=1, 4, and 10 as well as country-specific values that were calibrated from a specified utility function.

Regardless of the specific valuation chosen in our range, the analysis consistently shows that high-income countries experienced the smallest total well-being losses, while low- and middle-income countries collectively experienced much higher losses (Table 1). Regarding regional differences, countries in the Latin America and the Caribbean region experienced the greatest losses, as they suffered both large learning losses and significant mortality shocks (see paper for details).

Note: Total well-being loss is measured as YLL+(CPY+FPY)/α, where the normative parameter α captures the number of years lived in poverty deemed to yield the same well-being loss as one year of life lost.

Our loss estimates naturally come with caveats, including the exclusion of income losses for those above the poverty line and uncertainty surrounding the impact of learning loss on future poverty (as well as the effectiveness of any remedial learning). Nevertheless, our findings provide insights for policymakers and prompt speculation about whether different policy paths would have been chosen if this analysis had been available at the start of the pandemic.

This work was supported by the “Covid-19, lives, livelihoods and learning” RSB grant from the World Bank. Nishant Yonzan gratefully acknowledges financial support from the UK Government through the Data and Evidence for Tackling Extreme Poverty (DEEP) Research Program .

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How have businesses been able to survive during COVID-19 pandemic?

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When the border between the U.S. and Canada closed earlier this year to contain COVID-19, the owners of a small boutique hotel in northern Vermont saw their clientele dwindle virtually overnight. 

They took out a loan, and wondered if they should take out another. As the pandemic dragged on—with a steep drop in foot traffic—the husband and wife team found it harder to ignore a nagging question: Was the hotel worth keeping?

As nations across the world have come up with individual approaches to combat the spread of the coronavirus, the repercussions for international businesses have been intense. The Global Resilience Institute at Northeastern published two papers in October that address the challenges faced by domestic companies and multinational corporations and offer solutions in preparation for the next global disruption.

The project, funded through a grant from the Federal Emergency Management Agency , was undertaken by Luis Dau , associate professor of international business and strategy at Northeastern, in collaboration with his colleague Elizabeth Moore , assistant teaching professor of international business and strategy.

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The researchers found that the ability to adapt and pivot quickly, along with a willingness to pool knowledge and resources, contributed to the survival of businesses in sectors hit hardest by the pandemic, including the restaurant, hospitality, and events industries.

Some businesses found it easier to pivot. When demand for hand sanitizer surged in the spring at the outset of the pandemic, a whiskey distillery and kombucha brewery offered their excess alcohol to the sanitizer-making effort.

“There is so much we can learn from these companies,” says Dau. “Not putting all their eggs in one basket can be really beneficial, allowing them to rely simultaneously on their different businesses during the recovery.”

Some fisheries opted to bypass complicated supply chains by selling directly to customers.

“A lot of fishers, instead of trying to sell to restaurants, realized they couldn’t, and actually went out and sold the fish by themselves, literally on Facebook Marketplace,” says Moore. “We saw a rapid transition to other modes of selling that was really unique.”

Some businesses overcame challenges by creating strategic alliances with other businesses, she says. In Vermont, a restaurant was forced to close its doors because it lacked an outdoor patio. The bookstore next door had the outdoor space, but no foot traffic. So the owners of the two businesses partnered up to share their spaces with the caveat that the bookstore would put its books on display outside.

Moore found that established relationships can lead to new opportunities. To support coastal communities, banks teamed up with consultants to offer training programs that helped small businesses make sense of existing trading relationships and branch into new markets. For example, there’s a strong relationship between some of the Nordic countries and Maine, giving businesses access to beneficial shipping routes and ports. Businesses throughout the Northeast could potentially seek other potential relationships overseas, Moore says.

But alongside the innovative solutions, the studies found fears and uncertainty among business owners. As key real estate in small tourist cities and towns has gotten bought out by large buyers, one of the biggest concerns shared by owners of restaurants and shops was that international buyers would snatch up valuable commercial properties.

The business owners also told Moore they’d encountered challenges navigating the policies and rules implemented by different countries. Developing a standard set of solutions ahead of the next pandemic or global crisis will be crucial for the viability of international companies, she says.

Companies should avoid depending on the same suppliers or buyers, but instead cultivate an alternate distribution network, says Dau. That way, if there’s a problem with one supplier or a political issue with the country in which the supplier is based, companies can avoid disruptions to their supply chain and access to necessary resources.

“This may seem evident, but if a firm does not preemptively develop this network of suppliers and buyers, it will be much more challenging to do so once a serious disruption occurs,” Dau says.

Building and strengthening those relationships ahead of time has other benefits. At the height of the pandemic, many businesses struggled to keep up with the ever-evolving regulatory requirements. To address that problem, some domestic and multinational corporations set up learning groups in which they took turns keeping an eye on regulatory changes within their sectors.

“In this project, we saw it mostly in domestic communities, but that’s something that could be certainly expanded globally,” Moore says.

Multinational corporations, which commonly impart guidelines to their subsidiaries, would benefit from learning from their subsidiaries, too.

“This knowledge-sharing can make companies more resilient, more prepared for any kind of disruption,” says Dau. “There are different types of valuable knowledge they can share across their network of affiliated firms, including institutional knowledge, competitive knowledge, and internationalization knowledge,” Dau says.

Because multinational corporations and international organizations are global actors, they can assist government response efforts by developing frameworks for sharing resources and knowledge during a crisis. And governments can make it easier for businesses to stay afloat—and help the economy to rebound—by relaxing restrictions on loans and providing more flexible funding, says Dau.

“We’re making a case for the benefits of connectedness for companies and for governments in an era when we’re seeing increased nationalism and isolationism across the globe,” he says. “My hope is that a silver lining of the coronavirus pandemic is in helping people and governments see the dangers of isolationism.”

Above all, preparedness will go a long way in surviving the next global disruption, the researchers say. While businesses won’t be able to completely avoid fallout from a crisis, they’ll be better equipped to respond. 

“One takeaway that I would tell all businesses, regardless of size, regardless of where they are, regardless of whether they’re multinational or not, is try your best to be as knowledgeable as possible,” Moore says.

All businesses could be in a stronger position next time there’s a crisis by building and using their knowledge about financing options and what it means for a business to take on debt in their decision-making.

“We will likely experience other serious pandemics and global disruptions within our lifetimes,” says Dau. “So if companies develop relevant contingency plans and personnel training, they will be much more prepared and resilient as a result.”

For media inquiries , please contact [email protected].

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'Life became harder with COVID-19': exploring the experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic among youth living in eThekwini district, South Africa

Affiliations.

• 1 Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada. [email protected].
• 2 Center of Gender Equity and Health, University of California San Diego, La Jolla, CA, United States. [email protected].
• 3 Faculty of Health Sciences, Simon Fraser University, Burnaby, BC, Canada.
• 4 Wits MRU (MatCH Research Unit), Department of Obstetrics and Gynaecology, Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Durban, South Africa.
• 5 Perinatal HIV Research Unit (PHRU), Faculty of Health Sciences, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
• 6 Health Systems Research Unit, South African Medical Research Council, Bellville, South Africa.
• 7 African Social Sciences Unit of Research and Evaluation (ASSURE), Wits Health Consortium, Johannesburg, South Africa.
• 8 Centre for Health Policy, School of Public Health, University of the Witwatersrand, Johannesburg, South Africa.
• 9 Center for Epidemiology and Research in POPulation Health (CERPOP), Inserm, Université de Toulouse, Université Paul Sabatier, Toulouse, France.
• PMID: 39020372
• PMCID: PMC11256542
• DOI: 10.1186/s12889-024-19238-7

Background: In South Africa, pervasive age and gender inequities have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic and public health response. We aimed to explore experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic among youth in eThekwini district, South Africa.

Methods: Between December 2021-May 2022 we explored experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic on youth aged 16-24 residing in eThekwini, South Africa. We collated responses to the open-ended question "Has the COVID-19 pandemic affected you in any other way you want to tell us about?" in an online survey focused on understanding the pandemic's multi-levelled health and social effects. We used a thematic analysis to summarise the responses.

Results: Of 2,068 respondents, 256 (12.4%, median age = 22, 60.9% women) completed the open-ended survey question (11% in isiZulu). Results were organized into three main themes encompassing (1) COVID-19-related loss, fear, grief, and exacerbated mental and physical health concerns; (2) COVID-19-related intensified hardships, which contributed to financial, employment, food, education, and relationship insecurities for individuals and households; and (3) positive effects of the pandemic response, including the benefits of government policies and silver linings to government restrictions.

Conclusions: We found that South African youth experienced significant grief and multiple losses (e.g., death, income, job, and educational) during the COVID-19 pandemic. Trauma-aware interventions that provide economic and educational opportunities must be included in post-COVID recovery efforts.

Keywords: Adolescents; COVID-19; Health equity; South Africa; Youth.

© 2024. The Author(s).

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Conflict of interest statement

The authors declare no competing interests.

• Lambert H, Gupte J, Fletcher H, Hammond L, Lowe N, Pelling M, et al. COVID-19 as a global challenge: towards an inclusive and sustainable future. Lancet Planet Health. 2020;4(8):e312–4. doi: 10.1016/S2542-5196(20)30168-6. - DOI - PubMed
• UNESCO. UNSDG _ policy Brief_ Education during COVID-19 and beyond. UNITED NATIONS; 2020.
• United, Nations. Highlights 2021–2022: towards Sustainable Development for all New York. New York department of economic and social Afairs Afairs DoEaS; 2022.
• Desmond C, Sherr L, Cluver L. Covid-19: accelerating recovery. 10.1080/1745012820201766731. 2020;16(1):1–6.
• Patton GC, Sawyer SM, Santelli JS, Ross DA, Afifi R, Allen NB, et al. Our future: a Lancet commission on adolescent health and wellbeing. Lancet. 2016;387(10036):2423–78. doi: 10.1016/S0140-6736(16)00579-1. - DOI - PMC - PubMed
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OB-GYN board certification shouldn’t require traveling to Texas, a state hostile to abortion and abortion providers

By Madeline Cohen , Sarah O'Connor , and Nicole Huberfeld July 17, 2024

T aking the oral examination is the final step in becoming a board-certified obstetrician and gynecologist (OB-GYN). It is a challenge in the best of circumstances.

But instead of worrying about how to respond to questions about the management of uterine cancers or peripartum hemorrhage, test candidates are worried about the legal risks of taking this exam, which must be done in Dallas, home of the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology (ABOG). Texas is the state that proudly passed Senate Bill 8 , a strict anti-abortion law that demonstrates increasingly hostile laws against medical providers in that state.

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With one change — returning to virtual testing — the board could quell the worries of about 15,000 board-certification hopefuls.

Passing one’s boards demonstrates that a physician has the knowledge and skillset to provide care in a specific specialty. It is separate from licensure, which individual states require and manage. ABOG is the governing body that certifies physicians in obstetrics and gynecology. Although the exam is described as voluntary, almost all hospitals require board certification for their physicians to be hired as employees. This exam is the only way for OB-GYNs to achieve board certification.

But the only way to take it is to travel to ABOG’s testing facility in Dallas sometime between mid-October and mid-November.

Related: Trump’s 2024 platform abandons calls to cut Medicare, broadly restrict abortion

During the Covid-19 pandemic, ABOG transitioned to a virtual format to protect the health of examinees. As recently as July 2022, it used a virtual format to protect candidates from ongoing Covid-19 infection, as well as “ concerns regarding the U.S. Supreme Court opinion on Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization .” When ABOG reviewed the process of remote certifying examinations, the results were positive, with unchanged pass rates, similar rates of candidate anxiety, mitigation of environmental biases, and security hazards through the use of standardized testing centers. The organization’s findings were published in November 2022 in one of the specialty’s premiere journals, the American Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology.

But with the 2023 testing cycle, ABOG returned to requiring in-person exams for all candidates.

This is a problem for several reasons. Texas has multiple laws restricting access to abortion. Recent legal action targets anyone who is even suspected of assisting with abortions, let alone performing them.

As part of the full scope of obstetric and gynecologic care, OB-GYN trainees are required to have experience with abortion and management of early pregnancy. Many OB-GYNs outside of Texas have cared for patients seeking abortion care outside of their home states, and these procedures must be included on their certifying exam case lists. Due to the “aid and abet” provision included in Senate Bill 8, these providers could be targeted for legal or political retribution.

Although there are now states in the U.S. with shield laws, these have not yet been tested in the courts, so doctors do not know if they provide sufficient protection while traveling in Texas.

Related: Infant deaths increased after Texas banned abortion in early pregnancy

We would be remiss if we did not acknowledge the recent U.S. Court of Appeals for the Fifth Circuit ruling that emergency room physicians do not have to perform emergency abortions on pregnant people presenting at emergency departments even when abortion would be the standard of care. Doctors practicing in Texas are now faced with potential violations of the Emergency Medical Treatment and Labor Act if they do not provide necessary, emergent abortion care, or violations of Texas state law, which makes abortion a felony and imposes fines and potential loss of licensure, if they do.

We want to acknowledge that we are neither Texan patients nor Texan providers, all of whom face the full devastating impacts of these laws beyond anyone outside of the state. The concerns we raise reflect some of the many challenges that patients and providers across our entire country face as we survive in a post-Roe era.

To reassure exam takers, the American Board of Obstetrics and Gynecology published frequently asked questions on its website . They include:

Are candidates who reside in Texas or those living outside the state who perform abortion care at risk if they take the Certifying Exam, especially if they travel to Texas to sit for the exam?

Any candidate taking a Certifying Exam, whether it be virtual or physically in Texas, should not be at legal risk.

Do candidates for certification need to obtain legal guidance from a lawyer prior to traveling to Texas?

While each candidate is free to do so, it is ABOG’s opinion that candidates do not need to obtain legal advice prior to traveling to Texas to sit for the oral Certifying Exam.

Related: Abortion law emergency-exemption guidance proposed by Texas Medical Board

We find these FAQs to be thin. They likely won’t reassure OB-GYNs seeking board certification. We offer our own FAQs for those preparing to travel to Dallas and take their exams in the coming season.

Is there any chance I am at legal risk?

If a physician is not providing care in Texas, then no violation of Texas law occurs, unless the physician provided a telemedicine consultation, which would require medical licensure in Texas and could violate the law requiring physicians to consult in person to prescribe mifepristone. (This law contradicts FDA standards for prescribing mifepristone/misoprostol, but several states have such contradictory laws.) The legal risk is low, but there is no guarantee that prosecutors would choose to leave test takers alone, because some want prosecutors across Texas to enforce state laws aggressively .

What if I took care of a Texas resident who traveled out of state during their pregnancy and, due to life-threatening complications, ended their pregnancy and I was part of that care?

If the care occurred outside of Texas, then Texas prosecutors do not have jurisdiction. If there had been an element of providing care in Texas, this situation would hopefully fall within the very narrow exceptions that Texas law has for necessary abortions after six weeks of gestation. However, exceptions that allow for medical treatment, including abortion when needed for the preservation of life of the pregnant person, are so hard for doctors to understand that patients are suing Texas over these laws. And, as noted earlier, “ aiding and abetting” abortion is also a crime in Texas. This is in addition to criminalizing abortion itself and allowing private parties to enforce abortion prohibitions under Senate Bill 8. These laws are largely untested, so enforcement remains an open question.

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Requiring physicians from across the nation to travel to a state committed to hostility against pregnant people, with uncertain legal consequences for test takers, is unacceptable.

ABOG has demonstrated that virtual testing is not only feasible but successful in credentialing the next generation of doctors. Pearson testing centers exist in all 50 states and are recognized testing centers used for required tests earlier in training. In a recent phone call between one of us (Dr. O’Connor) and a Pearson employee, a Pearson representative confirmed that they would be able to provide all necessary components for remote testing. This company is just one example of options that could be explored if ABOG were committed to applicant safety.

Until then, the board’s decisions are inimical to the set of young physicians they presumably serve.

Madeline Cohen, M.D., is a third-year OB-GYN resident physician at Boston Medical Center. Sarah O’Connor, M.D., is a second-year complex family planning fellow physician at Boston Medical Center. Nicole Huberfeld, J.D., is the Edward R. Utley Professor of Health Law at Boston University School of Law and School of Public Health.

LETTER TO THE EDITOR

Have an opinion on this essay submit a letter to the editor here ., about the authors reprints, madeline cohen, sarah o'connor, nicole huberfeld.

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