Today, Explained - Vaccinated! (Still anxious.)

Episode Date: May 10, 2021

There’s no vaccine for Covid-19 anxiety. Nor is there one for those who aren’t ready to “go back to normal.” But, as Vox’s Sigal Samuel explains, there is hope. Transcript at vox.com/todayexplained. Support Today, Explained by making a financial contribution to Vox! bit.ly/givepodcasts Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

The all-new FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino is bringing you more action than ever. Want more ways to follow your faves? Check out our new player prop tracking with real-time notifications. Or how about more ways to customize your casino page with our new favorite and recently played games tabs. And to top it all off, quick and secure withdrawals. Get more everything with FanDuel Sportsbook and Casino. Gambling problem? Call 1-866-531-2600.

Visit connectsontario.ca. Here's the deal. About a third of the population in the United States is now fully vaccinated. And we can presume that a lot of these people were the types of people who were following COVID regulations to at least some degree. Social distancing, wearing a mask, only doing outdoor hangs for a while. And now is their time to get back into the world and celebrate, right? Only thing is, a lot of them are feeling anxious. Hi, my name is Cosette Gerardo.

I am 28 years old and I live in Southeast Michigan. As of this week, I'll be fully vaccinated. I'm feeling most anxious about being bad. Like, I know that I'm safe and all my friends are vaccinated or will be very soon fully vaccinated. But I just feel really wrong and guilty and I don't want people to know that I'm interacting with other people. I guess I'm wondering, is there anyone who can just give me permission or is there a way to trick my mind into giving myself permission to go out and reintegrate into the world?

Or am I wrong for even wanting to? With a new stage of this pandemic comes a new stage of pandemic anxiety. The anxiety of returning to normal. To help us work through some of the challenges today, we've got Seagal Samuel, reporter here at Vox, who recently reached out to a ton of Vox readers to discuss this very subject. I reached out to nearly 100 different buckets of worry here. One is the kind of worries that we're kind of just going to have to work our way through and get over. So people are worried about whether they're going to be really socially awkward now. I think there's also still a lot of health anxiety.

Rational or not rational, people just still feel anxious about potentially getting sick. And then there's also like a whole second bucket of worries that is worry about going back to quote unquote normal when normal society rules were actually really problematic and not good for a lot of people to begin with. So that's a whole different kettle of fish. Okay, let's do the buckets one by one, starting with social anxiety. Hi, my name is Georgia. I'm from Athens, Georgia. And the pandemic started my freshman year of college. So I have had no adult life outside of the constraints of living in a pandemic. And to be quite honest, I'm more nervous than I am excited. So a lot of cool things that could happen,

but there's also a lot of really bad things that could happen that I've never experienced, and I have no idea how to deal with them. So, yeah. Hi, Sean. Hello, Georgia. So a bunch of people said they're really nervous about whether they're going to be able to kind of act normally in social situations.

One guy told me that he doesn't think he'll be able to socialize again. And he said, I think many people will have to take some sort of course to learn how to correctly interact with people. Do they offer that at the DMV or something? I don't know. I think that, look, I think if you're someone who already had a lot of social anxiety pre-pandemic, now if you're kind of quote unquote out of practice for a year, re-entering that whole world of socializing and social interaction can be pretty nerve-wracking. One tradition I'm looking forward to keeping is the end of handshaking. This is Katie from Portland, Oregon. I will elbow bump, I will air five,

but I'll never again touch someone's probably dirty hands. People are saying they might never shake hands or definitely when they ride on an airplane or a train or something like that, are going to wear a mask despite being fully vaccinated for years, years to come. I mean, my mom's one of these. She's really into the idea of having not been sick for like an entire year. And she's been saying for a while now that she's just not going to stop wearing a mask when she goes out in public. I will wear my mask. I like it. I don't have to do my makeup or anything. Actually, like a substantial proportion of Americans are saying that. Hi, my name is Paul. I'm an emergency department nurse from Chicago, Illinois. Hi, this is RJ calling from Los Angeles, California.

And call me crazy, but I kind of liked having masks and social distancing. I did not get the flu this year, which is a huge godsend for me because I get the flu almost every year, even with the flu shot, because I come in contact with so many people. I tend to have a lot of sinus infections. And since we started masking, I haven't had a single one. And I used to get four or five of them a year. So I don't know. I think I want to keep masks and social distancing for the foreseeable future, especially in indoor spaces. I think it's polite. I don't know. Because everyone was wearing a mask this past year, we practically didn't have the flu.

So, you know, there's something to that. I don't think that that is unreasonable. I know this has been a big year for like therapy and focus on mental health. What do professionals in the mental health world say about how people experiencing anxiety around returning to normal should handle it? Well, I think like the first thing I've heard from psychologists is we should really normalize this anxiety. Like if you are worried about reentering the world, have self-compassion around that because of course you're going to be nervous about reentering the world, right? We've been through this really traumatic, scary year.

There's also like really tried and true techniques for anyone who's dealt with anxiety, COVID related or not. Let's say for the first time in a year, you're about to step into a crowded subway car and you're worried about germs and COVID, and you find your palms are sweating and your heart is beating really fast. And you might normally interpret those physiological signs as an indication that you're about to choke, you're about to die, something terrible is about to happen. But you can reinterpret them as a sign that, okay, this is just your body saying, hey, I'm ready to go. I haven't done this in a while, but I'm ready to

face it. I'm excited. I'm getting pumped. Let's move on to the second bucket you mentioned, which is that, you know, maybe we don't need to return to that old normal anyway, because it wasn't really working out for a lot of people to begin with. We touched on this a lot on the show last year, but remind people what the idea there is. Yeah. So the whole second bucket of worries I heard from the people I reached out to was about, you know, the things that we should remain maladjusted to, right? So one example is the pandemic has really revealed how badly society fails on disability and mental health issues.

I heard from one American lawyer who's physically disabled, and pre-pandemic, she was always trying to get her boss to let her work from home some days because commuting is really hard for her and the boss just said nope you can only do your work in the office for her she actually had to start her own business to enable herself to get to have the accommodations she needs to work from home so it's fine for her but she's saying now what about for other folks who have disabilities? If everything goes back to normal and offices require everyone to work from the office again,

then people who have disabilities are again going to be screwed. A lot of people also told me about just mental health stuff. I think that during the pandemic, it kind of became socially acceptable and socially permissible to talk about mental health. That wasn't necessarily true before COVID-19 came along. I also just have to mention the number one thing that people told me they do not want to return to, and that is like the nine to five office job. Hi, this is Erica from Texas. My business is looking at returning to work throughout the year. And those of us who are self-proclaimed introverts are not exactly thrilled. The commute, the feeling surveilled by their bosses.

Our past year has been work-wise better than ever, but now they want to put us back to the chaos and the chatter. A lot of people told me the pandemic made them realize their real priorities are family and community, and they don't want to work crushingly long hours that make them burnt out. Please let us stay home. It's better this way. Of course, not everyone in the world is lucky enough to pivot away from that kind of lifestyle. What about all the people who have to commute, you know, an hour to a job that doesn't give them benefits or even sick leave? And in the meantime, they're, you know, shelling out

much of their money for child care. We took a moment to appreciate these kind of people last year, I feel like when we focused on essential workers. But are we going to lose that as we transition back into a world where everything looks a little bit more like it used to? Yeah, I think there's been a lot of talk in the media the past month or two about what we can each do as individuals to feel less anxious about returning to normal. And that's all good. And that can be really useful for dealing with the first bucket of stuff like health or social anxiety. But there's a limit to what we can do just as individuals. When it comes to the bigger societal problems, the aspects of normal that don't work in terms of disability, mental health, oppressive work cultures, all of that. What I heard from the people I talked to is that they don't want us to go back to normal because normal wasn't good enough.

We should be actually pressing the reset button on a lot of conditions in society that were unfair to begin with. My name is Catherine Gabriel-Jones. I'm calling from Rockland, Maine, part of the rural America. And I finally felt comfortable during the pandemic because I live with chronic pain and chronic illnesses. And for the first time, everyone around me was as concerned about their health as I am all the time. So I'm a little nervous about going back to quote unquote normal because normal for me is worrying about my health and being anxious about my health. So love the show. Love you, Sean. Thank you. Bye bye. Hello, Catherine. Thank you. Returning to normal, COVID anxiety gets a little political in a minute on Today Explained.

Support for Today Explained comes from Aura. Aura believes that sharing pictures is a great way to keep up with family, and Aura says it's never been easier thanks to their digital picture frames. They were named the number one digital photo frame by Wirecutter. Aura frames make it easy to share unlimited photos and videos directly from your phone to the frame. When you give an Aura frame as a gift,

you can personalize it, you can preload it with a thoughtful message, maybe your favorite photos. Our colleague Andrew tried an Aura frame for himself. So setup was super simple. In my case, we were celebrating my grandmother's birthday and she's very fortunate. She's got 10 grandkids. And so we wanted to surprise her with the AuraFrame. And because she's a little bit older, it was just easier for us to source all the images together and have them uploaded to the frame itself. And because we're all connected over text message, it was just so easy to send a link to everybody.

You can save on the perfect gift by visiting AuraFrames.com to get $35 off Aura's best-selling Carvermat frames with promo code EXPLAINED at checkout. That's A-U-R-A-Frames.com promo code EXPLAINED. This deal is exclusive to listeners and available just in time for the holidays. Terms and conditions do apply. 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 sports book born in Vegas.

That's a feeling you can only get with BetMGM. And no matter your team, your favorite player, or your style, there's something every NBA fan will love about BetMGM. Download the app today and discover why BetMGM is your basketball home for the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sportsbook worth a slam dunk, an authorized gaming partner of the season. Raise your game to the next level this year with BetMGM, a sports book worth a slam dunk and authorized gaming partner of the NBA. BetMGM.com for terms and conditions. Must be 19 years of age or older to wager.

Ontario only. 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 bet mgm operates pursuant to an operating agreement with i gaming ontario emma green staff writer at the atlantic you recently wrote about a very different kind of COVID anxiety. Tell the people about it. So the story started as just a kind of ambient curiosity, the spidey sense that I had that there was something going on.

I observed in my own community and among friends, seeing on Twitter, talking to some sources around the country, that there seemed to be this pattern in really progressive areas among really progressive people, a certain subset who, after they had been vaccinated, had been kind of unwilling to adapt their lifestyle and loosen up based on the CDC guidelines. And I found this really interesting because it struck me that, you know, among progressives, we have this stereotype, those signs that everybody knows, the multicolored, in this house, you know, we believe, and then it has all of these statements, you know, women's rights are human rights, nobody is illegal, black lives matter, and there's usually a line, science is real.

So it was interesting to meet progressive people who are kind of going against our prevailing scientific authority in how they're acting with the pandemic. And I wanted to know, is there something here? I'm glad you looked into this because we know there's something here, right? This isn't just people, it's policy. Well, throughout the pandemic, we've seen a bunch of examples of this. Despite the governor easing mask mandates outdoors, some Massachusetts communities are still hanging on to face coverings.

It is a beautiful day to spend time at the beach, except Chicago beaches are supposed to be closed. And what safety experts are saying is it makes no sense to reopen museums and movie theaters but keep the beaches closed. My personal favorite is the fact that the state of California kept playgrounds closed until early December of last year. At Mather Lake Rotary Recreation Area, the playground has been roped off with this yellow caution tape. I wish it wasn't closed.

And this was long after we knew that surface transmission is not the primary way that COVID is spread. It's from person to person through breath. So, you know, this sticks with me because on the one hand, you think, oh, playgrounds, who cares? Like, not a big deal. But if you're a family who has kids on Zoom school and you don't have anywhere to take them to get out their crazy feelings and

run around and go on the slide, that suddenly seems like a really big deal. I think the real area, policy-wise, where this has come to a head has been over schools. Ah yes, the never-ending debate on whether to bring kids back into the classroom or not. I looked at one scenario of this in Somerville, Massachusetts, which is a little city outside of Boston. And there was this really dramatic, kind of nasty fight that happened within the community over schools. The mayor's office and the school committee chose to keep schools closed at the beginning of the school year. They proposed a plan in November for opening,

but it continued to get delayed and delayed and delayed. A handful of kids went back in February, but really most kids, and this is only elementary schoolers and middle schoolers, started back in March and April. And along the way, there was just a huge fight among these school leaders and certain sets of parents and then other sets of parents who also, because it's Boston, happen to be, you know, all very sophisticated scientists and engineers and child psychiatrists and COVID-facing physicians, they were all making the case that evidence showed there's really safe ways to get kids in school if you put mitigations in place. And they were worried about the harms that would come from not getting kids in school. But because they argued that, they were accused of being motivated by white supremacy on a hot mic. And I won't say this on your podcast because I don't

want to make anybody blush. But a local leader who was unmuted on the school committee meeting, appeared to call them effing white parents. Yikes. So it was really kind of nasty. And it just shows that, you know, even within these communities where people really believe a lot of the same things in terms of their politics, there can still be a huge amount of tension over the way that people think about the evidence and COVID. I mean, I think in D.C. there's still something on the books that says you can't dance at weddings. Some wedding planners say that D.C. is starting to feel like the mythical town of Beaumont

in the classic movie Footloose, the town that banned dancing. And it was King David. King David, who we read about. What did David do? What did David do? David danced. Where is the line between, you know, better safe than sorry and vital COVID preventative measure? Well, you know, that's a situation where there's a regulation put in place that kind of goes so deep into controlling people's behavior that it's almost ridiculous. I mean, if I'm wiggling my shoulders a little bit at my dancing at the wedding, you know, if I'm getting my groove on slightly, you know, I think that's a kind of place where maybe regulation isn't the best tool for us to use. But when you're talking about general attitudes in policymaking, I do think that we're in this kind of complicated period where on the one hand, thank goodness the U.S. is moving slowly towards 50% of the population having a first shot. And that slowly second group is going to catch up with a full vaccination, those two shots.

And, you know, especially in really liberal areas, I would suspect that there's going to be a super high rate of vaccine compliance. Right. Because, you know, again, our stereotype is that progressive people have that we believe in science premise on their lawn signs. And it's something that they're really proud of. So policymakers are then left to say, how do we deal with this intermediate period where you have some people vaccinated and some people not? I think it's a tough balance to strike. But what is really counterproductive is to have policies in place that clearly don't have much evidence behind them or that, in fact, you know, work against COVID but introduce some other harm. Bringing this back to the people who are maybe being inconsistent with what the CDC is saying,

I wonder, you know, you and I are both old enough to remember when Dr. Fauci was telling us not to even wear masks, right? Like, has this been inconsistent to the point where you can't really blame people for sort of being sticks in the mud about wearing a mask outside or about not letting their kids play at a playground that's been open for six months? Yeah, you know, one of the things that I heard over and over again in my reporting was this sense from progressives that the CDC might not have all the answers and, in fact, might not be trustworthy. And largely, this argument was made based on the notion that

during the Trump administration, the CDC was politicized. It wasn't leading with the evidence. It was being controlled for political reasons. And I think that undermining of trust during the Trump administration is carried over in a way that's kind of astonishing. If I think that undermining of trust during the Trump administration is carried over in a way that's kind of astonishing. If you think about it, again, the stereotype of progressives, of people who really trust expertise and scientific authority, who believe that public health measures and mitigations are important for us collectively, to not trust the foremost guidance body in America around how we should do public health is pretty astonishing. And I think just shows how much of a challenging situation this is, where there's kind of an absence of trustworthy authority on all sides.

And I think that leaves people feeling like they have to kind of freelance their own policies. Right. It's kind of ironic because liberals not trusting the CDC that certain conservative people and populations and policymakers were not going to take the pandemic seriously. They turned masks into a political thing where they said, this is impinging on my liberty. And these kinds of behaviors, a decision to just kind of write the pandemic off, that had really catastrophic effects. That was really damaging. And I don't want to seem like I'm saying that, oh, this is just the same, but for progressives.

I think it's a different story. I think it's a story about trauma, especially in places where progressives tend to live, right? New York City went through something last spring that basically no other part of the country went through, at least not until later. And I think that trauma has stuck with a lot of people. And I think the attitudes that people are going to forge

during the pandemic, I would imagine, are going to stick with us for a really long time. And the fact that, you know, for some progressives, that means that they're kind of veering away from fact that, you know, for some progressives, that means that they're kind of veering away from scientific evidence. You know, that's interesting. It's something to observe. I think it's an important thing to try to unpack and understand. But I don't think that it's the same as saying this pandemic, which we know exists and we know we need to change our lives for, we're just going to dismiss it and toss it away.

And I just wonder how long these habits and attitudes will stick around. I mean, we have listeners calling in and saying they're never going to shake someone's hand ever again. My mom's saying she's always going to wear a mask whenever she goes out. Does it feel like something has fundamentally changed about our interactions, about our society? It's possible. You know, I can't see the future and I can't tell you exactly what things are going to be like this summer or next year or five or ten years, but I think there's been a kind of fundamental shift in perspective. I'll give you the example of one guy I talked to in Boston, who is a progressive policy guy. He

worked on Ayanna Pressley's 2018 campaign. Thoughtful dude. And he was saying to me that the pandemic has kind of taught him that there are two kinds of people in America. There are people who are willing to radically change their lives in order to protect others. And there are people who aren't, who are, say, from the Republican Party are fundamentally selfish people who don't care about keeping other people alive, that makes it so hard to find any kind of commonality or common ground because you think they're grandma killers. You think that they're fundamentally callous. So that to me is the thing to track. You know, it's possible that

there are going to be people who do those behaviors, you know, the washing of the hands, the not shaking hands, the wearing of the masks, maybe even, hopefully not, but maybe even Lysol-ing your groceries continuously. I hope people give that up. But, you know, that attitude shift, I think that's the thing to watch. Hi, my name is Finn. I'm from Boston, Massachusetts. You know, before the pandemic, I was really an introvert. I didn't really want to go out too much.

I didn't have a big friend group. But now after the fact, after it's all done, I kind of want to go to a party, like a giant party with a bunch of people I don't know, you know, in the dark, light streaming everywhere, music loud, kind of deafening. Maybe make out with a few strangers. I don't know. We'll see where it goes. I want to take advantage of COVID being over. You know, I think other people do too.