Today, Explained - The loneliness pandemic

Episode Date: April 10, 2020

Coronavirus has led to another pandemic: social isolation. Vox’s Ezra Klein says this sickness has a cure. (Transcript here.) Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It's Friday, April 10th, 2020, and it's colder and windier in D.C. today than it was yesterday. I'm Sean Robbins-Firm, and this is The Weather in D.C., along with your coronavirus update from Today Explained. We hit a bleak benchmark today. More than 100,000 people around the world have died as a result of this coronavirus, and that's likely an undercount. Lockdowns are being extended around the world. Ireland, Italy, South Africa, Malaysia are all looking to late April, early May at the soonest. Meanwhile, President Trump has been pushing to reopen the country next month. It's worth noting that President Trump doesn't really have the authority to just open the country back up. The CDC has recommended people shelter in place through the end of April, but that's for states to decide, which is why a few states still haven't really even shut down yet.

Nebraska. They say antibody tests will be key to getting back to normalcy around the world. Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation's leading infectious disease expert, says a large number of antibody tests should be available in the United States soon. There have been problems with the accuracy of these tests, so I guess we'll have to wait and see. Another big part of getting back to normal is contact tracing. Google and Apple are saying they're going to collaborate to use Bluetooth technology in their billions of devices around the world to tell us if we've come into contact with someone who has had this coronavirus.

They say users' privacy will be protected. The feature is still a few months away. Professional basketball might also still be a few months away, but some of your favorite players from the NBA, WNBA, past and present will be getting together to play horse from their houses and neighborhood courts. The first round is coming this Sunday. Check local listings. Not sure who will win, but shout- to my world champion Toronto Raptors. Share your pandemic

stories with Today Explained. What's on your mind? What's bumming you out? What's giving you hope? What's your greatest concern? Who's your favorite Toronto Raptor? Email todayexplained at vox.com, tweet at today underscore explained or at ramasverm or give us a call and leave a message at 202-688-5944. Bet MGM, authorized gaming partner of the NBA, has your back all season long. From tip-off to the final buzzer, you're always taken care of with a sportsbook born in Vegas. That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM.

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Please play responsibly. If you have any questions or concerns about your gambling or someone close to you, please contact Connex Ontario at 1-866-531-2600 to speak to an advisor free of charge. BetMGM operates pursuant to an operating agreement with iGaming Ontario. Hi, my name is Sean. I'm calling from New York City.

I am a relatively healthy 27-year-old, and I'm maybe the most anxious I've ever been in my entire life. And I just, I don't, I don't know what to do about that. And I get that the response needs to be mitigating actual real health impacts for the most vulnerable sections of the population. I get that. I really do. But what can the rest of us do to just feel okay? I don't know. Has anyone thought about the kind of psychological impact that this crisis is having on the population. Thanks so much. Thanks for calling, Sean. The answer to your question is yes.

Your boy, Ezra Klein, has been thinking about the psychological impact of this crisis. He wrote a whole dang piece about it for Vox.com. I think in politics, we're very used to looking at the economic impacts of things. What is it going to do to GDP? What is it going to do to the unemployment rate? But what coronavirus is doing is disrupting something more foundational and fundamental even than that. It is disrupting whether or not we are able to see each other, to give each other a hug, to go visit a parent. And there's been a revolution in recent years in the medical science around social isolation and loneliness, which are different things, notably. Social isolation is objective, measurable. How many people do you see in a week? Loneliness is subjective. It is whether or not you feel lonely. But both of them have mental effects on people, and they really do physical harm. They are a genuine health risk. So understanding that and then trying to abate it, recognizing that we have to do more than just physically distance,

we also need to socially connect, particularly for the most vulnerable. I wanted to write this piece because I think it's unbelievably important. Are there numbers on social isolation? Are they as bad as these jobs numbers we're seeing? We don't do it in a national way, moment to moment, the way we do for the economy. It isn't that there are daily unemployment filings for loneliness. But we do have surveys, and we do have a lot of data on this. By coincidence, just a couple months ago, the National Academies of Science released a huge report on the health consequences of social isolation and loneliness in older adults. As you might expect, older adults are among the most vulnerable to this. So 43% said they felt lonely and about a quarter fit the definition of socially isolated.

And this is pre-coronavirus? This is pre-coronavirus. And remember, you may be a millennial or a Gen Zer or whatever who's socially distancing right now, but if you're over 70, you're doing something in most parts of the country, if you're paying attention, that is much more severe. You're quarantining. You are terrified of catching this, not because you might give it to somebody else, which is bad enough, but because you may not survive it. So a lot of people who are already quite lonely, quite isolated, have moved into a period of self-imposed quarantine that does not have a clear endpoint. And the more that young people go out, the more that their children or their friends

are out in the world and potentially able to catch this virus, the more they have to segregate away from them. So it's really, really difficult. And loneliness and isolation, particularly among the elderly, is a tremendous health risk. It seems to be physical in some deep way. And the particular way in which it's physical, the former Surgeon General Vivek Murthy has done a lot of work on this, he's got a book coming out on it, is that it sets off a tremendous stress response in the body. Human beings know on a deep level, deeper than our conscious thought, to feel safe in a group. If we are not in a group, we wake up more often during the night, we are more afraid,

we are what's called hypervigilant, we're constantly scanning for threats, we don't relax. And this seems to then set off a chain reaction of very dangerous actual physical reactions in the body. So in this National Academy of Sciences report, what they find is social isolation, and I'm quoting here, has been associated with a significantly increased risk of premature mortality from all causes. And those causes include a 50% increased risk of developing dementia, a 29% increased risk of incidence of coronary heart disease, a 25% increased risk of cancer mortality, a 59% increased risk of functional decline, and a 32% increased risk of stroke. Now that is over time.

It's not necessarily over two or three weeks of being lonely, but if this goes on for a long time, it is worth being clear. Being lonely and being isolated is a health risk, a direct physical risk to your life. I'm sure there are some people

who are fine being alone. I know a few people who seem happier in quarantine than they were going to work every day, but what about people who already suffer from serious anxiety or depression, people who are already desperately lonely? This is a huge issue, I think. So the way I would think about this is that the people who are already at the highest risk for social isolation and loneliness are even more vulnerable in this era. So we've been talking about the elderly, but the disabled are another group here. A lot of people who it's already hard for them to go out, already hard for them to go take a walk, already hard for them to see people for one reason or another. And then people with serious mental health issues who are socially anxious, who are depressed, this is going to make it much harder both for them to go out, but also harder for people to reach out to them. They may have an extreme reaction where they have trouble even taking incoming help, even if people are trying to be safe about it. And I want to be so clear, we need to do the

social distancing. We absolutely need to. But we also have to remember that the cost of social distancing will fall disproportionately on those who are already most vulnerable and already were the most lonely and isolated. And that will have not just psychological, but also health effects for them. I'm doing okay so far. My hair is a wreck because I figured I'm not going anywhere, so I didn't bother curling it or anything. My name is Dorothy Kelly. I'm 84 years old. I live alone, and I'm pretty much in isolation.

It's really hard to just be stuck in the house all the time. I like to be with people, so I miss that. And I see my daughter on Saturdays from a distance. She brings me groceries and leaves them in the garage and tells me not to come past the kitchen door. And the same with my daughter-in-law. She leaves stuff on her front porch. I'm doing Duolingo on my iPad in Italian, mostly to keep my brain active, and then reading a mystery book.

And then I keep cleaning out some drawers, because I am 84, and I've got so much stuff accumulated, you can't imagine. That's basically it, and watching movies that I've recorded in the evening or TV shows. I like Jeopardy and Wheel of Fortune, so I record them. I didn't even know what FaceTime was until last week when the phone started making noises and I answered it. It was my son doing FaceTime. So I said, how do you do that? So he explained it to me. So luckily for cell phones and text messages and stuff like that and FaceTime with my family, so that's good. But I'm looking out my window right now and the trees are starting to bloom all over the place. And the birds in the morning, I guess they don't know there's such a thing as a coronavirus.

And they're all singing and building their nests and the trees are in my house. It's so funny to hear them singing and being happy. I miss being able to hug my grandson, who's nine years old. I have five grandchildren, but he's the youngest. And I just miss the closeness, you know, being able to hug somebody and have somebody hug me, which I always did with my family. We're huggers, so I miss that. My advice to other people that are in my position is to keep busy with your mind, do something, watch something pleasant, read a book that's

interesting, and try to stay positive is the main thing. And I think, you know, someone in my position has to think like that, has to be positive. Otherwise, they may as well just, you know, curl up and die because people have died from depression, just being sad. So you've just got to keep thinking positively that this will end, hopefully. I just hope it all does end. Yep. Support for Today Explained comes from Ramp.

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ramp.com slash explained, ramp.com slash explained, R-A-M-P.com slash explained. Cards issued by Sutton Bank, member FDIC Terms and conditions apply. Ezra, we heard from Dorothy, who's learning Italian on Duolingo and getting the hang of FaceTime, keeping her mind busy. Is this on us to figure out for ourselves, or is there something, like, I don't know, the government could do do to help or what? To be fair, it is a hard thing for the government to do anything about. This isn't one where you can easily imagine a policy that will solve it. We are right now in a tension between our public health policy of social distancing and trying to keep the economy going. One of the ways I've been trying to think about it, and I saw this going around on Twitter, is I wish we had messaged this as physical distance and social connection. We need to be more physically distant from each other, but at the same time, we need to be doing

more, not less, to reach out. We need to be calling the people in our lives who are vulnerable. We need to be setting up ways to call the people who don't have people in their lives to call them. As some doctors mentioned to me when I was working on this piece, by definition, the people who are most at risk are the people who are not going to have a social network that activates in this moment. They are the ones who don't have kids who are going to make sure to call them every day or twice a day. I've really upped the amount I'm FaceTiming my son in with his grandparents, my parents, but a lot of people don't have that. So what are we doing for them? That is something where I guess in theory, the public sector, but also civil society could activate, right? That's a good app people could work on.

And by the way, that's another thing that there's going to be a digital divide among seniors here. I was talking to some seniors who are having real loneliness and isolation issues already from coronavirus. But the seniors I'm talking to are the ones who are able to get in touch with Vox, right? And they were saying that a great thing for them is they learned in recent years or at some point in the past how to use computers, how to connect digitally, how to use Skype. But older Americans are the ones who are least likely to be heavily online. And so for a lot of folks who haven't built a comfort and a confidence or even haven't bought the hardware that lets you have these kinds of digital connections, a lot of the ways the rest of us are trying to manage

this era of social distancing are not there for them. They can't easily join a Zoom with all of their friends because they don't know how. So even just helping older people in your life set up and become comfortable with the digital solutions here that are a partial replacement for in-person connection, that can be really useful.

But beyond all the Zooms and the FaceTimes and the house party apps or whatever, at issue here, especially with the elderly, is that they may not have a social network to begin with, right? You're saying we need a totally new solution or app or something that could connect people who are free and willing to talk with those who are desperate for connection, right? Like, I don't know, maybe like a chat roulette, but without all the perviness. That's a good, I like chat roulette. Yeah, like chat roulette, but without all the perviness. That's a good, I like chat roulette without-

Yeah, like chat roulette, but for helping older people combat loneliness. Does that app exist or do we need to make that app? I think that is a good app idea if anybody's out there and wants to make it, and hopefully somebody is. But I want to say that one of the ways coronavirus is an unbelievable asshole of a disease? Is it in addition to the direct death and sickness that it is causing? It is causing tremendous economic and social disruption. It is rending the very fabric of our lives. And something that I'm trying to add to the list of just what we are thinking about is the possibility if some of the more grim cases are correct and we are social distancing in pretty significant ways, let's say through the end of the year, what are

we going to do to connect people? But you and I spoke earlier about how you've been FaceTiming more with your parents so they can see your son, their grandchild. And like, I got to say, as a pathological keeper in touch, I've been pleasantly surprised to see friends who've never called me or FaceTimed me calling and FaceTiming now. And I just used that house party app last week for the first time, and it was utter and total chaos. But I appreciated that a buddy organized it. I don't know if we have any like actual data yet. But is there a chance that this, you know,continental quarantine changes the way we communicate with our loved ones? I mean, fewer memes and links and photos and maybe

deeper conversation about how we're really doing and how we're feeling? I do think so. And I also think it's going to go in all different directions for people at all different times. So I want to know two things that are a little subtle here. I spent some time with Vivek Murthy. We did a great episode on my podcast actually about loneliness. And something that is in his book and in other work is this idea that when people are lonely, they are touchier. They experience more things as a slight, right? They weren't called. They're going to be scared. They're going to be anxious. They're going to be angry, right? They're going to need somebody to talk to. They'll be freaking out about something. And then you call and now they're ranting at you and you

just called to have a nice conversation. And then on the other hand, there are going to be people, and I've definitely felt this myself. I'm in a house with, I'm here with my wife and my wonderful but totally nuts one-year-old son and two dogs who are cooped up and not getting enough exercise. And I'm not always the best version of myself either. And so as much as I want to be out there connecting and trying to be a good Samaritan on all this, sometimes I'll call somebody

and I don't get the reaction I'm hoping for and I don't have some of the emotional bandwidth to deal with it. And so I'm finding it really important to be mindful that good intentions aren't enough. You also just have to recognize it's going to be hard for everybody, and we're going to have to be really generous with each other and try to find the times when there's space. You need to create space to do this kind of reaching out. Actually setting aside an hour a day so you can take 10 deep breaths first and then be in a good

place to talk to people is difficult. But in the same way as everything else in this crisis, if we have the bandwidth for it, it's something that we have to do in a pro-social way. It's a way we can come together and show solidarity. We don't just need social distancing. In a very deep way, we need a commitment to solidarity, to social solidarity. Ezra, thank you so much. Maybe we can have you back to talk about this once someone makes chat roulette without the perviness. Once they do that, I'm not going to come back because I'm going to be on chat roulette so much

having great socially connecting conversations. Ditto. Ezra Klein's aforementioned podcast is The Ezra Klein Show. I'm Sean Ramos-Furham. This is Today Explained. The team is working remotely in Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C., but we still make time to check in every morning via Zoom. Afim Shapiro has big hair. Amna Alsadi has noisy neighbors.

Jillian Weinberger has a spare room. Bridget McCarthy has a Dan Charles. Noam Hassenfeld is always wearing headphones. And Halima Shah is clearly a cat person. Liz Nelson joins us once a week. And Desmond joins her about once a month so far, but he's always welcome. Cecilia Lay is checking our fax from San Francisco. The Mysterious Breakmaster

Cylinder makes music from outer space, I'm guessing. We had extra help this week from Paul Mounsey. John Delore did us a few solids too. Today Explained is part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Thank you.