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Read these 12 moving essays about life during coronavirus

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

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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.

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?

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.

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.

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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• v.10(2); 2020 Dec

Regularizing daily routines for mental health during and after the COVID-19 pandemic

Wai kai hou.

1 Department of Psychology, Centre for Psychosocial Health, The Education University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

Francisco TT Lai

2 Jockey Club School of Public Health and Primary Care, The Chinese University of Hong Kong, Hong Kong SAR, China

Menachem Ben-Ezra

3 School of Social Work, Ariel University, Ariel, Israel

Robin Goodwin

4 Department of Psychology, University of Warwick, Coventry, UK

The SARS-Cov-2 (COVID-19) pandemic, though far from concluded, has already had an enormous psychological [ 1 ] and economic [ 2 ] impact on over half of the world’s countries and regions. Everyday life can actually be seen as the fundamental context for resilience during trauma and chronic stress [ 3 ]. In response to the pandemic, different forms of lockdown, quarantine, and social/physical distancing have restricted interactions both within and across regions and countries. This has threatened basic livelihoods and mobility, reduced interpersonal interactions, and led to new workforce patterns and the suspension of schools and higher education. These changes in major life domains resemble the functional impairment consequential to mental disorders such as depression and place a large number of people at greater risk of poor mental health. In the latest published guidelines on mental health and psychological aspects of COVID-19, the World Health Organization (WHO) [ 4 ] suggests regular activities for children confined at home and new routines for vulnerable adults, including those who are older and /or with chronic health conditions. This advice is reflected in advice by Governments in the UK (PHE), the US (CDC), and elsewhere.

Regularized routines, such as those offered above, can buffer the adverse impact of stress exposure on mental health [ 5 , 6 ], but it is unclear how this message can best be conveyed. Below we suggest a number of options and important caveats to maximize the efficacy of this advice, and its positive impact on mental health. The guidelines will be useful for enhancing population mental health during and after this pandemic and, arguably, other epidemics in the future.

First, it is important to recognize that daily routines are likely to differ in their impact on mental health. Daily routines can be parsed into two types [ 7 ]. Primary routines are behaviors necessary for maintaining livelihood and biological needs, such as hygiene, sleep, and eating. Secondary routines reflect individual circumstances, motivations and preferences, and include exercising, leisure/social activities, and practices associated with work or study, including keeping oneself on time and meeting goals and targets. During a pandemic, some routines are disrupted as a result of stress (eg, sleep) while other disruptions result from economic factors (eg, work activities). Routines are often terminated due to other contextual restrictions, for example, face-to-face interactions with relatives, friends, or coworkers. With our multitude of daily activities, disruption and termination can often co-occur. Because primary routines regularize the overall structure of daily living, disruption and termination of primary routines have a more pivotal role in mental health during acute stress [ 3 , 5 , 6 ].

Second, primary and secondary daily routines can be usefully consolidated and replaced, while new routines can be added [ 8 ]. Consolidation of existing routines may mean, for example, that time at home is used for household tasks or indoor leisure activities. Replacement could include using telephone/video calls or social media instead of face-to-face interaction. Adaptive new routines can be added to complete the everyday life structure, for example, by spending more time exercising or ensuring personal and household hygiene. During a pandemic, new routines might include lengthier handwashing (perhaps to a song) or other preventive measures such as wearing a mask and washing hands more often. These behaviors restore a sense of normalcy, controllability, and predictability. It is important to note that some of them, for example the regular use of mask for infection prevention, will vary across sociocultural contexts.

Two principles guide the sustainment of daily routines. Primary routines (eg, regular healthy diet, sleep, and personal hygiene) should be prioritized over secondary routines including leisure and social activities, exercising, and work/study in order to maintain an overall regular daily living that directly enables positive mental health. Consolidation should be prioritized prior to replacement and addition, because fewer resources are needed for consolidating disrupted routines relative to replacing or adding new ones. During times of high stress, consolidation of existing social ties with family and friends is preferred over the addition of new social partners [ 9 ].

Prompt dissemination of these guidelines could be implemented through traditional broadcast media (print, radio, and television) and digital media including websites and social media platforms. These guidelines can further be strengthened face-to-face by a national team of trained community health workers who are young, less susceptible to the COVID-19, and in need of employment opportunities due to the economic downturn [ 10 ]. Alternatively, nationwide voluntary schemes such as the UK’s GoodSam scheme provide useful personnel. These guidelines could also be strengthened as part of a health promotion strategy for disadvantaged groups such as older adults living alone and low-wage essential workers (eg, cleaners, couriers, grocery workers) who, through their continuous interactions with a range of others, are more vulnerable to infection.

Photo: From unsplash.com.

Unprecedented by any previous public health crises, the COVID-19 pandemic puts a pause on people’s hectic daily living. Interventions are needed to direct focus towards the role of daily living in order to promote psychological resilience. Mass education and non-specialist care can be fruitfully recalibrated to emphasize the sustainment of regular daily routines to ensure positive mental health during and after a pandemic.

Acknowledgement

The authors would like to thank Tsz-Wai Li, Li Liang, and Huinan Liu for their support on preparation of the manuscript.

Funding: Public Policy Research Fund (SR2020.A5.019).

Authorship contributions: WKH led conceptualization, write-up of the original draft, review, and editing. FTTL supported conceptualization and write-up of the original draft. MB supported review and editing. RG supported conceptualization and write-up of the original draft and led review and editing.

Competing interests: The author completed the ICMJE Unified Competing Interest form (available upon request from the corresponding author), and declare no conflicts of interest.