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SprinkL3 · Jan 10, 2022 at 01:54 AM

Exhaustion, fear, and resignation: Welcome to Covid-19, 2022 edition - Vox

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The pandemic is the first time in my life that I’ve experienced something like this: an ongoing collective trauma with many underlying chronic stressors with punctuated acute stressors.”

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Even if Covid-19 disappeared and all our pandemic problems cleared up today, Holman believes the hardship people have already endured will have knock-on effects for decades to come. Going forward, researchers expect to see more recurring mental illness and continued substance-use disorders, as well as an increase in physical health consequences, including heart attacks and stroke.

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While the data on 2021 is still pouring in, the rollback of governmental support and the fracturing of social cohesion also may have contributed to an even harder year than the one that preceded it. Health care workers are stretched to extremes. Parents hoping for a vaccine for children under 5 continue to be disappointed. And, as hard as it is to believe, more Americans died of Covid-19 in 2021 than in 2020. Now, the rapid spread of the omicron variant all but guarantees more hardships are on the horizon.

Recall that more people died, also, in the 2nd Wave of the Pandemic of 1918. Could this also have been from pandemic fatigue before the term "pandemic fatigue" was even invented?

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There might be one boon to finally surrendering to the pandemic, however: honesty. As masks, vaccines, and other safety precautions became politicized, it became harder for some people who were supportive of attempts to curb the spread of Covid-19 to talk openly about their own difficulties. Some instead opted for toxic positivity. “We all had to lie to each other and say, ‘I didn’t mind it that much!’” McKenna says. “I think that’s something people are more honest about.” For McKenna, masking up “is exhausting, it’s uncomfortable,” they say. “I’ll still do it, [but] I don’t have to like it.”

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Letting up on the moral judgments, perfectionist tendencies, and insistent stiff upper lip of the last two years could prove crucial in other ways, too, says psychologist Nicole Ruzek, director of Counseling and Psychological Services at the University of Virginia. “I hope people are talking about it with each other,” she says of the pandemic’s many annoyances, big and small. “My worry has been that we’re displacing our feelings of helplessness and hopelessness and anger.” Instead of letting things explode, that energy can be harnessed.

So, what’s a bummed-out and boosted American to do? Ride out this pandemic, while working on preventing the next one, says Steven Taylor, a professor in the department of psychiatry at the University of British Columbia and the author of The Psychology of Pandemics.