Joyce Fegan: Is it now we count the cost of Covid on our lives?

Public travelling on the Luas a day after mandatory wearing of facemasks was introduced Picture: Niall Carson/PA Wire

Two years of mask-wearing, hand sanitising, and social distancing later, I’m writing this with Covid-19.

It’s ironic to be beginning a period of isolation the same week Nphet recommended the ending of compulsory mask-wearing — a move that has been seen by some as the most definitive sign that we are returning to normal after two years of a pandemic.

Some are embracing the advice, others are hesitant — the polarity being a familiar hallmark of these last two years.

Over the last 24 months, we have vacillated between unity and division. There were those who followed State-mandated rules to the letter of the law. And there were those who took to the streets in protest.

And over the last two years, the public conflict has seeped into the personal too. In our circles of family and friends there were those who felt anxious and behaved accordingly, and there were those who threw caution to the wind. There are those who heralded the vaccine, and those who did not. There are those who have yet to go out for dinner and there are those who holidayed abroad on the first available flight. The ideal situation being that both parties would respect one another, but from conversations with friends, this rarely seems to be the case.

While lockdowns and restrictions provided many with State-backed boundaries, we later ended up in a place where we were having to assert our own personal boundaries with friends and family. There might have been some confusion or disappointment at best, and offence taken or abuse given at worst.

If the end of mandatory mask-wearing is a sign of our return to normal living, is this the point where we start counting the cost of Covid?

We are used to counting in case numbers, intensive care unit admissions, and death tolls, but is it now we start looking at the impact of Covid on our relationships, lives, and wellbeing?

Public recalibration

This week, experts, both here and abroad, have said that personal and public recalibration is going to take time.

Dr Paul D’Alton, head of the psychology department at St Vincent’s University Hospital, said it could take some people between “six and eight months to find their feet again”.

President of the American Medical Association Gerald Harmon said: “The impact on society is just beginning to be felt now.”

In Britain, recent figures from the NHS predict there will be 230,000 new cases of post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in England as a result of the pandemic.

The forecast is based on the effects of the pandemic on domestic abuse victims, children, and young people, relatives of Covid survivors, health and care workers, and those who have lost friends and family to the disease.

The NHS is already facing the biggest backlog of those waiting for mental health help in its history.

Numerous studies have investigated the prevalence of PTSD after pandemics.

One of these looked at the mental health impact of the 2014-2016 ebola epidemics on the general population in affected countries. It found that 76.4% of the general public showed at least one symptom of PTSD, 27% met the level of clinical concern for the disorder, and 16% met the level of a probable diagnosis of PTSD.

A recent survey on post-traumatic stress symptoms among residents in the hardest-hit areas in China during the Covid pandemic indicated a prevalence of 7%.

The results vary, but the reality remains the same — when the dust settles there’s going to be some kind of fallout, both in our personal and public lives.

There have been public conversations around remote working, re-entry anxiety and the “great resignation”, either by people choosing different lifestyles or by untenable conditions pushing mothers, in particular, out of the workforce.

But what about the more subtle unravellings, such as in our relationships?

Last week The Atlantic published an article titled ‘It’s Your Friends Who Break Your Heart’. It’s about how many friendships are lost to things such as parenthood, emigration, political division, and now a pandemic.

While the pandemic might have shown us how interdependent we are on one another, it also exposed fault lines in friendships and relationships. Shared, or unshared values, as the case may be, shot to the surface as we navigated an unexpected once-in-a-lifetime situation.

Who respected your concerns for safety and who didn’t? Who checked in on you when the chips were down? Was your care for others reciprocated? They are things that people usually remember when any times of hardship pass.

Among the many fallouts, the pandemic has triggered a sort of relationship reckoning too.

When romantic relationships end, there is a definite split either because you stop meeting up, cease living together, or you sign off on a divorce and assets get split. The only other relationship ending we are accustomed to is death. There is no ambiguity.

But what about the ambiguous loss — when there is a change or an ending of a relationship with someone who is still alive?

That is just one of the many questions we’ll be reckoning with as our full return to unrestricted life beds in.

On the extreme end of the scale, there are those who are counting the cost of living with an abuser, those who did not get to hold their loved one’s hand as they died, and those women who laboured alone while their partners looked up at hospital windows from the street below.

No one person is ever going to have the solution or the salve for all of those experiences.

It was nine years ago this year that we had the tourism-led initiative of ‘The Gathering’, to mobilise the return of our diaspora. There were big national events and small community spin-offs.

So what if now, we all found a way to process these last two years, to count the cost, to ascertain the impact in order to find a way to move forward where we learn the lessons and let go of the losses?

This work, as per usual, will probably be left to the artists and the activists among us.