Covid – KMZ Digest

5 ways schools have shifted in 5 years since COVID-19

itsme — Fri, 19 Dec 2025 20:48:10 +0000

Students sit in pop-up tents during wind ensemble class at Wenatchee High School on Feb. 26, 2021 in Wenatchee, Wash.. David Ryder/Getty Images

The U.S. educational landscape has been drastically transformed since the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered school campuses five years ago.

Access to high-quality teachers and curriculum developed by teachers is shrinking, for example. Likewise, there has been a loss of emotional support for students and a decline in the school use of technology and social media.

As education scholars focused on literacy practices in schools, we’ve identified five ways we believe the COVID-19 pandemic – and the rapid shift to remote learning and back – has transformed education:The U.S. educational landscape has been drastically transformed since the COVID-19 pandemic shuttered school campuses five years ago.

1. Teachers are leaving, and those staying are stressed

At the start of the 2024-2025 school year, 82% of U.S. public schools had teaching vacancies.

Schools have tried to adapt by expanding class sizes and hiring substitute teachers. They have also increased use of video conferencing to Zoom teachers into classrooms.

A teacher works from her home due to the COVID-19 outbreak on April 1, 2020, in Arlington, Va.
Olivier Doulier/AFP via Getty Images

Teacher retention has been a problem for at least a decade. But after the pandemic, there was an increase in the number of teachers who considered leaving the profession earlier than expected.

When teachers leave, often in the middle of the school year, it can require their colleagues to step in and cover extra classes. This means teachers who stay are overworked and possibly not teaching in their area of certification.

This, in turn, leads to burnout. It also increases the likelihood that students will not have highly qualified teachers in some hard-to-fill positions like physical science and English.

2. Increase in scripted curriculum

As of fall 2024, 40 states and Washington had passed science of reading laws, which mandate evidence-based reading instruction rooted in phonics and other foundational skills.

While the laws don’t necessarily lead to scripted curriculum, most states have chosen to mandate reading programs that require teachers to adhere to strict pacing. They also instruct teachers not to deviate from the teachers’ manual.

Many of these reading programs came under scrutiny by curricular evaluators from New York University in 2022. They found the most common elementary reading programs were culturally destructive or culturally insufficient – meaning they reinforce stereotypes and portray people of color in inferior and destructive ways that reinforce stereotypes.

This leaves teachers to try to navigate the mandated curriculum alongside the needs of their students, many of whom are culturally and linguistically diverse. They either have to ignore the mandated script or ignore their students. Neither method allows teachers to be effective.

When teachers are positioned as implementers of curriculum instead of professionals who can be trusted to make decisions, it can lead to student disengagement and a lack of student responsiveness.

This form of de-professionalization is a leading cause of teacher shortages. Teachers are most effective, research shows, when they feel a sense of agency, something that is undermined by scripted teaching.

3. Improvements in teen mental health, but there’s more to do

Many of the narratives surrounding adolescent mental health, particularly since the pandemic, paint a doomscape of mindless social media use and isolation.

However, data published in 2024 shows improvements in teen reports of persistent sadness and hopelessness. Though the trend is promising in terms of mental health, in-school incidences of violence and bullying rose in 2021-22, and many teens report feeling unsafe at school.

Other reports have shown an increase in feelings of loneliness and isolation among teens since the pandemic.

4. Crackdown on students’ technology use in schools

COVID-19 prompted schools to make an abrupt switch to educational technology, and many schools have kept many of these policies in place.

For example, Google Classroom and other learning management systems are commonly used in many schools, particularly in middle school and high school.

These platforms can help parents engage with their children’s coursework. That facilitates conversations and parental awareness.

But this reliance on screens has also come under fire for privacy issues – the sharing of personal information and sensitive photos – and increasing screen time.

And with academia’s use of technology on the rise, cellphone usage has also increased among U.S. teens, garnering support for school cellphone bans.

A student attends an online class at the Crenshaw Family YMCA on Feb. 17, 2021, in Los Angeles during the COVID-19 pandemic. Patrick T. Fallon/AFP via Getty Images

But banning these devices in schools may not help teens, as smartphone use is nearly universal in the U.S. Teens need support from educators to support them as they learn to navigate the complex digital world safely, efficiently and with balance.

In light of data surrounding adolescent mental health and online isolation – and the potential for connection through digital spaces – it’s also important that teens are aware of positive support networks that are available online.

Though these spaces can provide social supports, it is important for teens to understand the strengths and limitations of technology and receive authentic guidance from adults that a technology ban may prohibit.

5. Students and adults need social emotional support

Students returned to in-person schooling with a mix of skill levels and with a variety of social and emotional needs.

Social and emotional learning includes self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relational skills and decision-making.

These skills are vital for academic success and social relationships.

Teachers reported higher student needs for social and emotional learning after they returned to in-person instruction.

While some of this social and emotional teaching came under fire from lawmakers and parents, this was due to confusion about what it actually entailed. These skills do not constitute a set of values or beliefs that parents may not agree with. Rather, they allow students to self-regulate and navigate social situations by explicitly teaching students about feelings and behaviors.

A teacher provides instruction to a student at Freedom Preparatory Academy on Feb. 10, 2021, in Provo, Utah. George Frey/Getty Images

One area where students may need support is with cognitive flexibility, or the ability to adapt to current situations and keep an open mind. Classroom instruction that engages students in varied tasks and authentic teaching strategies rooted in real-life scenarios can strengthen this ability in students.

Besides allowing students to be engaged members of a school community, cognitive flexibility is important because it supports the skill development that is part of many state English language arts and social studies standards.

Social and emotional learning and cognitive flexibility are key components that allow students to learn.

Due to vague or confusing state policies, many schools have stopped teaching social and emotional learning skills, or minimized their use.

This, coupled with teacher stress and burnout, means that both adults and children in schools are often not getting their social and emotional needs met.

Message of mistrust

While we described five shifts since the start of the pandemic, the overall trend in K-12 schools is one of mistrust.

We feel that the message – from districts, state legislators and parents – is that teachers cannot be trusted to make choices.

This represents a massive shift. During the initial phase of the COVID-19 lockdown, teachers were revered and thanked for their service.

We believe in teacher autonomy and professionalism, and we hope this list can help Americans reflect on the direction of the past five years. If society wants a different outcome in the next five years, it starts with trust.

Rachel Besharat Mann Assistant Professor in Education Studies, Wesleyan University

Gravity Goldberg Visiting Assistant Professor in Education Studies, Wesleyan Universityy

theconversation.com/5-ways-schools-have-shifted-in-5-years-since-covid-19-246449

How COVID-19 Changed College Athletic Recruiting

itsme — Thu, 18 Apr 2024 21:57:40 +0000

Hoboken High School in Hoboken, New Jersey (Photo/Luigi Novi -Wikimedia Commons)

By Nicole McNulty

April 19, 2021

ARCELIA MARTIN, HOST: On average only about 6% of high school athletes go on to play sports in college. In a normal year, graduating seniors would be signed to their college teams by now. But COVID has disrupted this cycle. Nicole McNulty explores what that means for kids hoping to play sports in college.

NICOLE MCNULTY, BYLINE: Tyler Sims has been playing basketball since he was 9 years old. And like a lot of kids.

TYLER SIMS: My dream school is definitely Duke University. You know, I’ve been watching them since I was little. That’s my favorite basketball team.

MCNULTY: That would be tough enough any year. But with the pandemic it’s even harder. Tyler is a 17-year-old senior guard on the Hoboken High School boys varsity basketball team. Normally, coaches would be in the stands watching him play. But this year, they can’t watch in person. So his only way to get in front of them is his highlight reel. He had to make it himself. His friend filmed it. Here’s a clip of him making a layup in his red Number 2 jersey.

TAPE: [Basketball game.]

MCNULTY: Highlight tapes were always a part of the process – videos players make and send to colleges. But this year, his video might be his only chance. And his season was shorter. He’s played half as many games.

SIMS: I’m nervous, but at the same time, I’m very confident that, um, I’ll be in the hands of the right school. I’m pretty sure that I’ll play college basketball.

MCNULTY: Still, Tyler, like many other kids in the U.S., is now behind the ball. The recruiting process usually looks like this:

TIM NEVIUS: It’s about getting the athlete recognized by a college coach.

MCNULTY: That’s Tim Nevius, a lawyer who works with college athletes on eligibility and other issues.

NEVIUS: And then that coach making contact with them via email, telephone and establishing a connection and then offering a scholarship or a roster spot or admission.

MCNULTY: Nevius says the COVID disruption has created two major problems. One of them is what kids like Tyler are dealing with.

NEVIUS: Because of canceled seasons or postponement or the inability of coaches to travel, the athletes aren’t actually being seen playing their sports as they normally would.

MCNULTY: And the second problem? Overloaded rosters. Because of the pandemic, the NCAA extended college players’ eligibility. Coaches can hold onto their seniors for another year. That means fewer spots for high school hopefuls.

NEVIUS: For the incoming freshmen, then, that means that they’re faced with even a larger roster of juniors and seniors than they otherwise would have been.

MCNULTY: Take Bloomfield College in New Jersey, a Division II school. Gerald Holmes is the basketball coach there. He’s bringing back three of his seniors this fall. That only leaves room for three incoming freshmen. He might be able to take one more, but there’s another problem. This year the rules are more flexible for transfer students. They’re bigger, faster, stronger.

GERALD HOLMES: A lot of coaches would prefer to have a transfer versus a freshman. So, high school kids are taking the brunt of that.

MCNULTY: This year there are many new rules: each sport and division has their own. And the pandemic has changed a lot of them. An already complicated situation is worse — everyone from coaches to parents and students are confused.

HOLMES: It’s almost like the wild, wild west out there.

MCNULTY: For high school athletes, it’s a struggle to stand out. Holmes says he gets at least 100 emails a day from recruiting services and high school players. He agrees, the ripples of COVID are going to be felt in the recruiting process for years.

HOLMES: In reality, this is going to be a full cycle of four years, is going to be because a kid who is a freshman for me this year is still a freshman next year.

MCNULTY: The rules say that if a college player’s season was disrupted by COVID, they can play an extra year. As for Tyler, the 17-year-old in Hoboken, he sent his tape to a few schools. But no one knows when he’ll find out for sure about making a team. If he doesn’t get in this year, he’ll wait, keep training and try again next year.

Nicole McNulty, Columbia Radio News.

columbianewsservice.com/2021/04/19/how-covid-19-changed-college-athletic-recruiting

This story first aired on Uptown Radio.

About the author(s)

Nicole McNulty

Nicole McNulty is an audio journalist based in New York. She was born in Texas and spent her adolescence in Germany and Colorado. After traveling in her van for two years she now calls the city home. Her freelance print work can be found in The Boulder Weekly, The City Weekly and The West Side Rag. Nicole is currently studying at Columbia Journalism School where she’s focusing on crafting audio stories for Uptown Radio. Connect with Nicole on Twitter @nicole_mcnulty and via email nicole.mcnulty@columbia.edu

Moral Shaming: “You do You”

itsme — Fri, 29 Mar 2024 19:57:44 +0000

By Jill Neimark

November 4, 2022

Airline passengers, one unmasked and one wearing a face mask, await their flight at Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport after the Biden administration announced in April 2022 that it would no longer enforce a U.S. COVID-19 mask mandate on public transportation, following a federal judge’s ruling that the 14-month-old directive was unlawful. REUTERS/Kevin Lamarque

When people have different views about health and freedom, they misuse morality to demonize one another, letting policymakers and corporations off the hook.

One evening last September, Gavin Yamey, professor of global health at Duke University in Durham, North Carolina, dined indoors and tweeted a selfie of himself and his two tablemates—Chris Beyrer, director of the Duke Global Health Institute, and Gregg Gonsalves, a Yale epidemiologist and global health activist who won a MacArthur genius grant for his work on AIDS, global health, and social justice. Gonsalves has long been a voice for the vulnerable and disabled. Throughout the pandemic he lofted the torch of COVID caution and precautions, including masking, testing, vaccine boosts, and better ventilation indoors. He has been unafraid to critique those he regards as COVID minimizers, including President Biden himself (as in an article for The Nation, “No, Joe Biden, the Pandemic Is Not Over”).

Dining indoors these days certainly isn’t news. But within minutes, Pandora’s box had been flung open—unleashing an online tsunami of calumny directed entirely at Gonsalves. It was a moral condemnation of his life, his decency, his very self, based on this single, public act. Mike Hicks, one of Gregg’s online critics, summed up his view this way: “Does it make sense to engage in low-risk behaviors for 90 or even 95 percent of the time so you feel justified sticking a revolver to your head and pulling the trigger in a game of COVID Russian roulette?”

The reaction reveals a level of moral outrage increasingly entering debates over public health. For Gonsalves, it is concerning. “After three years of a pandemic we have to think about what’s sustainable,” he responds. Expecting responsible behavior from others is reasonable, but asking for totally, completely flawless behavior 100 percent of the time is not. “An absolutist moral framework pits us against each other and takes the public out of public health.”

We are now in the “You do you” phase of COVID-19, but that may be nothing new. Medical anthropologist Martha Lincoln of San Francisco State University notes that America has a long tradition of framing individuals as the most influential actors in their own lives, and this lets regulators off the hook. “We are reduced to looking to individuals as the major cause of and culprit for the outcomes that we’re living with,” she explains. “Diverting responsibility from institutions such as the CDC or the White House means that we can’t really locate a common enemy, and so enemies appear to be potentially everywhere. People may experience catharsis from identifying those who seem to be straying from the behaviors we think are correct. But it’s counterproductive.”

Instead of focusing on individuals, adds Gonsalves, “more lives can be saved when we shift the environmental and structural factors of society that throw us into the path of risk. The entire debate about individual interventions deals with downstream effects. Yes, individual interventions save lives, but they leave the larger sources of sickness unaddressed. It’s a ruse.” An analogy he likes to use is this: If you’re standing on the shore of a river watching hordes of people flailing as they drown in a fast current, you can either jump in and save one, or go upstream where you find the bridge has collapsed and needs to be repaired.

In America today, most of us are standing on that metaphorical shore, trying to decide whom to save from or blame for infection, climate change, staggering health care costs—one, two, ourselves, everybody, nobody? Moral frameworks about health can slide into our lives almost unnoticed and ignite self-righteous outrage as well as deeply felt betrayal, grief, or contempt. The result is more than toxic in today’s world, when so many engage in what molecular biophysicist Joseph Osmundson calls “these online clusterfucks of shaming, which never work anyway. Morality is so baked into our language of illness, it is almost the default setting, the language given to us to think about sickness,” he says. “It takes active, thoughtful work every day with every sentence one uses to reframe illness in ways that don’t make it a moral state.”

Mismoralization is exactly what it sounds like—the misapplication of the moral impulse in places where it does not belong and cannot help.

A powerful sense of right and wrong, of justice and injustice, forms early in life. Research has shown that toddlers as young as two are capable of judging what is fair and unfair. We may acquire an internal moral grammar in lockstep with the acquisition of actual language. But when moral frameworks spill into the realm of public health, we end up with what bioethicist Euzebiusz Jamrozik and his collaborator Steven Kraaijeveld have dubbed mismoralization.

Mismoralization is exactly what it sounds like—the misapplication of the moral impulse in places where it does not belong and cannot help. Mismoralization in public health can lead to shaming, blaming, and ultimately the fracturing of society. “Across societies,” write Kraaijeveld and Jamrozik in an August paper in Medicine, Health Care and Philosophy, “human beings are inclined to punish norm violations.”

“We as a culture don’t think about how policy makes people sick,” says medical historian Jim Downs, author of the book Maladies of Empire. “We’re much more willing to ask, ‘What did YOU do to become sick?’ As soon as you hear someone has lung cancer, the first question is ‘Do you smoke?’ That’s a moral question.”

At its worst, mismoralization leads to criminal sentences. Thirty-five U.S. states still have laws that criminalize exposing others to HIV, even though AIDS is now a preventable and treatable disease. In some states, the maximum jail sentence is still life in prison.

On the other side of the coin, getting infected with HIV has also been moralized. “I cannot count the times I’ve been told I brought HIV on myself because I couldn’t keep it in my pants,” says Gonsalves. “I deserved what I got.” Even now, he says, he occasionally gets emails and direct messages calling him things like “an AIDS-infected f%#@*t.”

During the 1980s and 1990s, when HIV infection and mortality rose and peaked, there was a kind of moral calculus that went like this, says Osmundson: “Did you get it from a monogamous partner who cheated? Well, that’s bad but not that bad. Did you get it at a sex party? Oh my God, you should be ashamed.”

If you didn’t wear a condom back then, you were seen as killing yourself and others, adds Liz Highleyman, a medical journalist specializing in HIV and other infectious diseases.

Last summer, when monkeypox swept largely through gay communities—most often transmitted, it appeared, during the physical intimacy of sex between men—old stigmas resurfaced. One epidemiologist who caught monkeypox told the Philadelphia Tribune that he was afraid people would think, “If you got monkeypox, you got it in a very slutty way.” Public health officials applied harm reduction principles that had proved effective in the fight against HIV, says Highleyman, but the public response was not so forgiving. As one tweet put it: “So Big Brother shut down your churches and businesses for Cov19, but won’t tell gay men to stop having orgies for monkeypox.”

We have a long tradition in this country of shifting blame to those who don’t deserve it.

When confronting illness or frailty, this tradition of moral outrage does not recognize the systemic failures that are the true drivers of illness. “United States history has often featured the criminalization of infection,” observes medical ethicist Harriet Washington, author of the book Medical Apartheid: The Dark History of Medical Experimentation on Black Americans From Colonial Times to the Present, which won the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Nonfiction. Pellagra, for instance, was called a Black infectious disease that struck “African Americans because of their supposed penchant for living in filthy conditions.” It was actually a disease of malnutrition that largely afflicted the enslaved. It wasn’t until the 1920s that physician Joseph Goldberger discovered that the illness stemmed from nutritionally inadequate corn-based diets. Later researchers learned that the disease is due to a deficiency of the B vitamin niacin.

When the higher SARS-CoV-2 infection and death rate of African Americans was first documented, many causal theories tended to blame the victim, says Washington. She explains that some health officials asked whether higher drug or alcohol use, disparate genetics, or failure to don masks and shun crowds heightens Black Americans’ risks. Others, she says, invoked Blacks’ high obesity rate, although obesity is an American problem, not a racial one. “In any event,” says Washington, “obesity in African Americans is tied to living in “food swamps” where a dearth of affordable nutritious fare is worsened by saturation of tobacco and alcohol products whose marketing is targeted to racial groups.”

Tuberculosis, a scourge caused by Mycobacterium tuberculosis, surged in widespread epidemics in Europe and North America during the 18th and 19th centuries. Once it was understood to be an infectious disease, the sickness was moralized. Women and the poor were targeted—the former for apparent failures in keeping their houses clean, thus allowing tuberculosis to spread; the latter for living in squalid conditions that favored transmission and threatened the rest of society.

Early in the COVID-19 pandemic, a hundred Asian Americans were being attacked in this country every day, according to Washington. “People initially shun, exile, and then want to kill others who may be perceived as carrying dangerous infections.” Washington says this is an example of protective prejudice based on the fact that we are indeed more vulnerable to novel pathogens.

The principle is correct, but the application is often misguided. In the late 1800s, for instance, coastal West Africa was called “white man’s grave” because European soldiers and missionaries, exposed to infections to which they had no established immunity, died in high numbers there. Similarly, Native Americans succumbed to the strain of syphilis brought to the New World by European settlers. But where outbreaks of infection are concerned, “majority groups wrongly demonize minority groups,” Washington says, “avoiding them and then expelling them.”

We have a long tradition in this country of shifting blame to those who don’t deserve it. As anthropologist Lincoln points out, in almost every domain in American life where public health is at stake, large industries reflexively move their own responsibility out of view. For instance, nearly 60 years ago, a young lawyer named Ralph Nader wrote Unsafe at Any Speed, proving that car crashes were not caused only by “bad drivers “ but also by the auto industry’s unwillingness to spend on safety features like antilock brakes and airbags. During their long legal battle with the Justice Department over the opioid epidemic traced to its drug, oxycontin, Purdue Pharma and its owners, the Sackler family, shifted blame onto the individuals who became unwitting addicts. “Abusers aren’t victims; they are the victimizers,” Richard Sackler stated in one email. And the fossil fuel industry has long popularized the concept of an individual’s “carbon footprint” as a way to shift attention away from its own excesses—while individuals are left homeless from the wildfires, hurricanes, and vicious storm surges that are now commonplace effects of a changing climate.

These days it is the individual who is just plain tired of our current pandemic. That may be the case, but it does not constitute the basis of a valid public health response. It’s a form of manufactured futility that can be self-fulfilling. “A tired public is not an argument for public health policy,” says Lincoln. “So I understand why individuals are blaming other individuals. We all feel we’re trying to resolve a national public health crisis ourselves at home or online.”

What can we do to cope? First, recognize that “humans are gloriously messy,” says Osmundson. “We make mistakes, and there is no moral failing to wanting to have dinner with friends, eat pie when we’re on a diet, or have sex once without a condom. We have to build systems that are robust enough that these deeply human behaviors don’t lead to bad outcomes.”

If you lower your mask to take sips and bites at a wedding, should you be willing to go to jail for manslaughter, as queried in this tweet? If you insist that everybody wear a mask, are you robbing others of the opportunity to “richly connect, to fall in love, to live a full life”? Or are we shadowboxing to fill the vacuum left by the public health agencies that guide our national decisions—the CDC, the FDA, and the White House that presides over them both? “It’s not rocket science, what people need at a population level,” says Osmundson. “We need free health care, paid sick leave, an infrastructure that tackles public health head-on, and policy that reflects the fact that we function as a global superorganism.”

While we are nowhere close to that nirvana, we can stop hurling the slings and arrows of moral outrage at one another and join hands to demand more of our institutions, now and in the future. In that sense, we do have a moral obligation, for we are, as Gregg Gonsalves often says, “our brothers’ and sisters’ keepers. Even in our human imperfection, that’s all we’ve got.”

^{Jill Neimark is a writer based in Macon, Georgia, whose work has been featured in Discover, Scientific American, Science, Nautilus, Aeon, NPR, Quartz, Psychology Today, and The New York Times. Her latest book is “The Hugging Tree” (Magination Press).}

https://www.openmindmag.org/articles/the-moral-outrage-of-health-acts

Battling the Loneliness Ogre:

itsme — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:00:20 +0000

One Man’s Journey in the Remote Work Era

By Ragnhildur Thrastardottir

May 18, 2023

When Benjamin Schwartz, 25, moved from New Jersey to New York City in 2021, he felt lonely. He was working from home as an advisor for Deloitte, and his days would often start with him crawling out of bed to get his computer and then returning to do the work from his bed. Schwartz didn’t meet many people or take regular lunch breaks, and this lifestyle started to take a toll on him. “This sucks,” he thought. “Maybe this isn’t the way life is supposed to work.”

He tried going to coffee shops and libraries and renting a desk at a coworking space. But even though he was surrounded by people, he still felt alone.

As Schwartz, a soft-spoken young man who takes a pause before he answers every question about his business, found out, he wasn’t the only remote worker experiencing loneliness. Remote work became increasingly necessary when the Covid-19 pandemic started, and many who continue to work remotely feel pangs of isolation.

Earlier this year, Schwartz quit his advisor job and started a one-person events company that aims to solve the isolation problem, albeit on a small scale. It’s called The Tavern, with the name meant to evoke the idea of a central place where digital nomads can convene.

Since starting the company, Schwartz has hosted a few events for specific communities of remote workers. They meet in a restaurant, work in the same space, have lunch together and discuss challenges they face professionally, with the hope of finding a group solution. They then finish the day with a happy hour.

When the social isolation started to get to him during the pandemic, Schwartz thought: “What could I do for my community to fix this?”

With his friends Daniel Maron and Anna Kaplan, he started a pilot program at the Jewish Center synagogue on Manhattan’s Upper West Side last December. They brought together a group of a dozen people from different professions, and they worked together for a few afternoons. It was successful, and Schwartz decided to take the idea further.

He wasn’t interested in opening a regular coworking space where people rent out desks. He wanted to build a community, and that’s what Schwartz is now selling to his customers. He kicked off the first event, geared toward young professional women, in a Mexican restaurant in the neighborhood. Eight women showed up the first time and fewer the next. But Schwartz didn’t give up. He decided to step back, gather some data and reach out to others for advice. When he hosted the next event in early May at the coincidentally named restaurant Hudson Yards Tavern, the 25 slots he had available filled up.

“We had some learning moments, but now we’re ready,” Schwartz said, referring to shifts in his marketing strategy. He focuses more on reaching out to people through Instagram and TikTok than before, and that seems to be successful.

The event at Hudson Yards was open to people in their 20s. They filled the back of the restaurant, worked on their laptops and occasionally chatted.

Amrit Subramanian, an independent software engineer, was one of them. He’s been working remotely for two and a half years. He sometimes feels trapped in his apartment and finds it hard to disconnect from work.

“I think people have gotten too used to feeling isolated, and they are craving real-life experiences,” said Subramanian, who is working on an app to connect people with similar interests. “That’s why I decided to come out today.”

Vivek Murthy, the U.S. Surgeon General, declared in May that loneliness and isolation are part of a new health epidemic in the United States.

Many of the attendees at the Tavern’s May event have felt that epidemic. Janna Safran, who works in international public health, is one of them. She works in a hybrid model and had been to the office that morning. But she found it almost empty.

“There’s not a lot of overlap, and most of my colleagues are international, so I really appreciate coming into a space where I can see people,” Safran said. “It’s been very hard to connect with other people, so I was very grateful for this.”

Even though the attendees had tried coworking spaces and attended multiple networking events, mixers at bars often had loud music, so they found the Tavern’s event unique.

“It’s cool to be networking while still getting work done,” said Richard Damas, a hybrid worker who works in professional development for financial advisors at CitiBank.

Schwartz is starting small, with monthly events, but he hopes to expand to multiple times a week, with different communities of people each time. One of the groups he wants to reach out to is recent college graduates, and the reason for that is personal.

“I had a very hard transition when I moved to New York City, even though I’m from half an hour away,” Schwartz said. “I was right out of college, I came from a very close network of people, and I was just alone in this huge city.”

Each guest pays $10 to attend an event and is expected to purchase a meal and a drink at the restaurant. Because the Tavern brings customers to Manhattan restaurants during slow hours, more common after the pandemic, Schwartz gets the space for free in return.

People who work from home tend to have this disposable income, too. With fewer days at the office, people are spending much less money on restaurants and other services near their work, data from The Working From Home Research Project shows. Last year, annual spending per person surveyed decreased by $4,661 from the pre-pandemic year of 2019.

Babu Chow, one of the owners of the Hudson Yards Tavern, has felt this loss and was happy when Schwartz reached out to him with the idea of bringing in a group of coworking people.

“In this area, we need these kinds of things,” Chow said.

Schwartz is tapping into a big market, which grew tremendously during the pandemic. Even though many people have returned to the office, a significant portion of the American workforce remains at home, hybrid, or flexible on the terms, and many only come into the office a few times a week.

Research from the Partnership of New York City, a nonprofit group of CEOs from corporate, investment and entrepreneurial firms, shows that as of late January, only 9% of the borough’s office employees came into the office five days a week. Further, Manhattan employees who the organization talked to predict that the new normal average of daily occupancy of the borough’s offices will be 56%.

Schwartz isn’t the only one targeting this remote market. Other businesses targeting the remote and hybrid worker have launched, including The Wing, a women’s coworking club that shut down last fall. But Schwartz doesn’t worry about the competition.

“Coworking is thought of as real estate, but I see it as event planning and marketing, which is just totally different,” he said.

Schwartz is self-funding the company so far and has spent around $10,000, mostly on marketing and consulting. He’s hoping to make money through ticket sales, taking some percentage of the food and drink sold, and selling advertisements distributed during the events. He compares the advertising model to social media, where ads are directed at specific communities of people. By advertising with the Tavern, Schwartz said, companies can do precisely that, reach the targeted community that attends each event.

Schwartz sees a future for this business, especially when he mentions the Tavern ten years from now and speculates about the company’s growth. Still, he feels lonely sometimes.

“I think I’ve tapped into something in myself that’s very mission-driven,” Schwartz said.

About the author(s):

Ragnhildur Thrastardottir

Ragnhildur Thrastardottir is a journalist currently pursuing an M.S. degree in journalism at Columbia University.

The Power of the Chorale: How One Choir’s Love of Music Keeps Them Going During the Pandemic

itsme — Sat, 02 Sep 2023 19:23:46 +0000

By Vanessa Blankenship

January 27, 2022

Wearing special singing masks, members of the Stonewall Chorale rehearse at the Church of the Holy Apostles in Chelsea. (Credit: Vanessa Blankenship)

Inside St. Luke in the Fields, a whimsical church in the West Village, a choir group gathered for weekly rehearsal in November. On that Tuesday evening, a crisp late fall breeze blew through the open stained-glass windows. Of the 36 members in attendance, more than half were bundled in their overcoats, and some passed out hand warmer packets to help soothe their shivers. In the rows of pews, everyone practiced social distancing, and everyone was wearing a mask.

Despite the discomfort, they relished being there together – no small feat after more than a year of singing while being apart. The Stonewall Chorale, one of the first LGBTQ-friendly chorus groups in the country, continues to adjust to new normals. But as the pandemic drags on, so does the uncertainty.

Founded in 1977, the Stonewall Chorale puts on a concert series every year. Along with the rest of the world, it came to an almost complete halt when the coronavirus spread in March 2020. That spring, the choir was busy preparing for the second concert of their 43rd season, “Here Comes the Sun.” A week and a half before the show, the rest of the season was canceled.

Once a group of up to 70 singers, membership quickly shrunk to between 40 to 50 amid the pandemic. A canceled concert season resulted in choristers requesting a leave of absence. Membership dues were officially suspended. Some tested positive for Covid-19. A few got really sick. In-person rehearsals were out of the question. Like so much of the rest of the country, the Stonewall Chorale went online, performing and practicing over Zoom.

The “December Sunrise” program kicked off their 45th season. Weeks ahead of the concert, artistic director Cynthia Powell stood before the church’s altar like a priest addressing the congregation and led the opening vocal warm-ups:

Ma-Me-Mi-Mo-Mu.

“Are our Zoomers on?” Powell asked as she directed her attention to the chorale’s membership chair Larissa McDowell, who set up her smartphone on a tripod to include those who felt ill or couldn’t make it in person.

After roughly ten minutes of vocal exercises and stretches, it was time for “Wild Forces,” the second movement of award-winning composer Jake Runestad’s “The Hope of Loving.”

Sitting upright, chests up, the choir harmoniously chanted over and over:

There are beautiful, wild forces within us.

Let them turn millstones inside, filling bushels that reach to the sky.

“It needs to be louder,” said Powell. “Let’s try again and see if we can express emotions with our eyes. We want to give the audience something.”

This time, Powell, a conductor who has served as the chorale’s artistic director since 2002, had them all stand up and simultaneously sway side to side. The melody’s warm vibrations filled the freezing church. “Excellent, that was really something,” she exclaimed. “We’re starting to get somewhere.”

In mid-November, Stephanie Heintzeler, one of the altos, sat toward the back in the 12th row or so. Heintzeler was raised in Germany and is a certified birth and postpartum doula and the founder of The New York Baby, a doula services agency. She’s been a pivotal member of the Stonewall Chorale for almost a decade and never once thought of leaving the group, even after the pandemic created chaos for the group. For her, it’s more than just a choir. Without it, she never would have met her wife, Janet Thompson.

“We have a very strong bond with the chorale and always felt that we are not only a member, but we are the chorale,” Heintzeler said. “It exists because of us.”

If Heintzeler’s life were a rom-com, the moment she first saw Thompson would be a classic meet-cute scene. It was January 2013, and Heintzeler had just spent the past several months looking for a chorus group. She wasn’t sure what kind of music she wanted to sing. She just knew she loved classical music and liked the idea of joining an LGBTQ choir to better connect with the city’s community. She joined the Stonewall Chorale, and at her first rehearsal, Thompson sat next to her. The group rehearsed Mozart’s Requiem, and Heintzeler left practice knowing Thompson would one day be her person. The feeling was mutual.

Thompson proposed to Heintzeler in August 2020. Weeks later, they pledged their unconditional love before 20 of their closest friends at a small ceremony by the Belvedere Castle in Central Park. Powell was the wedding officiant.

A year later, Heintzeler celebrated another monumental moment in her life: the end of the Stonewall Chorale’s hiatus.

“I just know I’ll feel five times better when I’m there,” Heintzeler said. “And that’s new. I always felt better after rehearsal before, but now, somehow, the benefit is larger. I feel it physically and mentally; I feel it more than I used to.”

***

Michael Conwill usually sits near the front of the church with the other basses. As president of the board of directors and member of the Stonewall Chorale, he’s spent nearly two years safeguarding the group’s physical and mental well-being by enforcing COVID-19 safety measures. His goal is to avoid the unthinkable – starting a superspreader event, like when the Skagit Valley Chorale’s rehearsal made headlines in early 2020. Out of the 61 members who attended, 53 singers contracted COVID-19 symptoms and two died.

To salvage what was left of the Stonewall Chorale’s membership and come back together in the safest way possible, Conwill and other board members appointed a COVID-19 task force made up of chorus members with medical backgrounds. The team spent weeks researching and analyzing what choirs around the country were doing and incorporated protocols recommended by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the New York State Department of Health. They decided they needed a bigger rehearsal venue, mask requirements, social distancing, temperature checks, proof of vaccination, sanitizing, and increased air circulation with open windows and portable filtration units.

“It’s been quite a journey to get here,” Conwill said.

Over the months, the weekly rehearsals began to serve purposes beyond singing. Some weeks Powell taught new vocal techniques or had guest performers join in. Others, members logged on for online check-ins just to connect with friends who, too, were feeling isolated. Many rehearsals were even designated as game nights, and once a month, the choristers participated in diversity, equity and inclusion workshops.

The chorus also managed to organize their entire 44th season virtually with a compilation of pre-recorded videos and announced several online concerts, like their holiday performance, “Home for the Holidays,” on the chorale’s YouTube channel.

“We all are happy that we hopefully will never have to do that again,” Conwill said. “The point of being in a choir is singing with other people. Sitting at home and singing into a camera and a microphone is not choral singing in any way, shape or form.”

***

Gwendolyn Stegall, an alto who has been singing with the choir since 2016, first fell in love with the chorale as a devoted fan in the audience. Stegall’s mother started taking her to the concerts when she was 10 years-old to watch their friend David Fanger, a tenor who still sings with the chorale. She recalled attending one show around the holidays when the chorale performed “A Musicological Journey Through the Twelve Days of Christmas.”

By July 2020, Stegall joined the board of directors as the new vice president and was driven by the call for social change after the murder of George Floyd unleashed a national reckoning. With in-person rehearsals on pause that summer, Stegall took the moment as an opportunity to encourage the chorale, a predominantly white group, to participate in open conversations about the movement.

“I think a lot of organizations, especially ones that are mission-driven like ours in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, wanted to rethink the way they operated,” Stegall said. “The pandemic also gave us an opportunity to reflect and have some time to think about things that we wouldn’t necessarily be able to address in a normal concert period.”

One Tuesday per month, Stegall helped organize workshops to explore mission-based initiatives that were covered in The Gay and Lesbian Association of Choruses (GALA) workbook, “A New Harmony.” The conversations ranged from race and ethnic identity, gender, sexual orientation, ageism to socio-economic status.

“It reinforced my love for this community,” Stegall said. “The fact that people were willing to show up and have these conversations and then make the connection between the sort of broad, abstract concept and the specifics of how the Stonewall Chorale operates and how we could change the way we do certain things, I think was really helpful and eye-opening.”

***

On December 7, the Stonewall Chorale gathered for dress rehearsals at the concert venue in Chelsea, Church of the Holy Apostles. It was the last time the singers would practice before performing “December Sunrise,” the debut of their 45th concert season, in front of a masked crowd of around 200 people.

The singers were accompanied by Powell, the conductor, pianist Eric Sedgwick and a symphony orchestra. In many ways, the concert would answer a central question: Can the Stonewall Chorale safely pull off a pandemic-era concert season? If all went well, the chorale’s March concert, “Music for the Soul,” and June concert, “Curtain Up!” could go on as planned.

“Things seem to miraculously come together,” Powell said that night. “When you get to the actual concert, and little things tend to work themselves out, little fairy dust happens.”

There was a slight pause during dress rehearsals, and the voices that once bounced off the church’s walls transitioned into whispers. Then, the vocalists focused on the movements from Morten Lauridsen’s “Lux Aeterna,” meaning eternal light. The group dedicated this work to the memory of Richard Froehlich, a Stonewall Chorale tenor who passed away at the age of 58 from a heart attack in late September, just when the choir finally returned to in-person rehearsals.

“It was a shock to all of us because he had just been at rehearsal the week before,” Powell said. “He had just come back after almost two years.”

After three hours, dress rehearsals wrapped up. The Stonewall Chorale roared in applause, and several members exchanged high-fives and bear hugs.

The evening of the concert, the Stonewall Chorale posted on Facebook a message thanking everyone who came to support the choir, along with a few lyrics from “Alway Something Sings,” a song they rehearsed often during the peak of the pandemic.

But in the darkest, meanest things

There alway, alway something sings.

***

Before the Omicron strain of COVID-19 struck New York City, the Stonewall Chorale rode on a high.

“We were very happy with the concert,” Conwill said in early January. “It was the first time we’ve sung in public and masked, and our audience told us that it didn’t make a difference in our sound. It didn’t seem to muffle us in any way. The singing masks must work.”

Many of the singers in the chorale started utilizing the Singer’s Mask, designed by Broadway Relief Project. These masks are specially designed to contain the user’s droplets and fit closely on the face while giving just enough room around the mouth to sing without distorting the sound.

Record-breaking Omicron cases in New York City, though, brought what Conwill called another “gut punch.”

Days after performing “December Sunrise,” two altos in the chorale tested positive, along with one orchestra member. Everyone who was at the concert was notified. One audience member also tested positive.

Because Omicron is extremely transmissible, the choir decided to conduct weekly rehearsals for their next concert, “Music for the Soul,” remotely through the month of January. If Omicron cases continue to rise, the March concert will most likely be postponed until a later date.

“We hope this strain will burn out in cold weather and that things will be a little better when we get into warmer weather,” Conwill said. “But it’s conjecture at this point.”

About the author(s)

Vanessa Blankenship

Vanessa Blankenship is a grad student at the Columbia Journalism School covering arts and culture.

The Unbearable Lightness of Being at Home

itsme — Mon, 28 Aug 2023 20:39:59 +0000

April 30, 2021

I hate meetings. Yes, everyone says that, but I am on the extreme end of the relevant bell curve here: I am introverted to such a degree that some people have confessed that they were unsure I had the ability to speak until months after we met. Therefore, in late March 2020, when stay-at-home orders began to go into force, schools began closing, and my workplace switched to telecommuting, my reaction was more sanguine than most. After all, introverts draw strength from within! Forced social interaction is what tires us most! With fewer meetings scheduled, surely my unpublished novel, a new personal best for pushups, and that foreign language I’d been meaning to learn would all be within my grasp.

Or so I thought.

There was one thing I had not factored into my calculations: depression. While these spells have been with me for much of my life, they increased in frequency after the pandemic began. After just a few weeks of staying at home, I began to notice that I was having more extreme reactions to even mild criticisms from my wife, from my colleagues, even from strangers on the internet. With fewer social interactions to distract me, I heard “I think you misunderstood the nature of this assignment,” “You didn’t use enough soap when you washed the dishes,” and “You might want to rethink your evaluation of this polling data” and understood “Your failure to accomplish small tasks means you are a failure in life and that you should stare at the ceiling.”

Those unaccustomed to spells of depression may not understand what this means. For my part, I tend not to appreciate the need for friendly social interaction until an unexpected triggering event takes place. And they’re almost always unexpected: unanticipated criticism, unpredictable monetary shortfalls, or an unexpected bout with fatigue. When something like that happens, suddenly I lose the ability to take care of everything I want or need to do. Work, entertainment, or even matters of basic sustenance and hygiene become more than I can handle.

Thankfully, over the years I’ve come to see these spells as temporary. After a career setback in my early thirties, I remember lying in bed for a whole day and watching documentaries about former professional athletes struggling with addictions to painkillers. (Never underestimate the morbid curiosity of a depressed person.) Eventually, the depression lifted, but I realized then that it would keep coming, and when it did that I would have to feel it—until I didn’t. In the time since then, I have gone to great lengths to manage my depression—going to therapy, steeling myself for rejection after job interviews, scheduling potentially disappointing events so that they don’t happen before other important engagements like speeches or deadlines.

Under the pandemic, however, I’ve come to realize just how much a lack of human contact contributes to these spells of depression. Not only do the triggering events seem to be coming more frequently, but being stuck at home has complicated my efforts to reach out for help. And I don’t think I’ve been alone in this feeling. While the country has been under lockdown over the past year, conspiracy theories have grown more popular. Experts have warned of the increasing risks of suicide, mental health issues, and domestic violence. And political polarization in our country seems to have worsened. Not only are we reacting to things more stridently, we’re having even greater trouble relating to those who disagree with us. Perhaps not being able to see other people in person—including those we don’t agree with—is contributing to these problems.

I’ve tried a few things to cope with these new conditions of life. I’ve taken part in work socials and joined clubs that meet online. However, if it’s a challenge for introverts to mingle in person, doing so when you’re on Zoom is an even higher hurdle. In these meetings usually only one person can talk, so it’s not as though you can approach one other quiet guy who is also left out and bond over your mutual distrust of the talkative. It took years for my excessively introverted self to learn to function like a regular person in social settings, and now I feel I’m learning anew.

I’m sure that the isolation of the pandemic has been even harder on the extroverted, and yet I’d like to think that under lockdown they’ve come to appreciate some of the subtler joys of introversion. After all, the pandemic has been a fine time to hold detailed and vigorous conversations in one’s own head, a favorite pastime of us uber-introverts—not just because no one wants to talk to us, but also because no conversation in real life can measure up to the ones we have with ourselves. More importantly, there are advantages to a more introspective—and, for that matter, less cheery—attitude. The easily depressed tend to think more analytically and with greater focus, research finds. In general, introverts are less preoccupied with the whirligig of current events and more able to take a long view.

Personally, while I’m prone to occasional bouts of brutal self-evaluation, my assessments of others are much kinder, and I tend to be optimistic about overall trends. That’s why I’m not so anxious about our country’s current political unrest and the uncertain prospects for its post-pandemic economy. Indeed, there may be long-term benefits to the crises we’re going through, as traditionally ignored segments of our electorate have their voices heard, and as employers start to realize how much time and energy can be saved by cutting down on commuting, unnecessary meetings, and the micromanaging of employees.

The rapid rollout of vaccinations in recent months offers hope that we will soon be back to some semblance of normal socializing again. When that happens, introverts like myself will have a greater appreciation for face-to-face interactions. Yes, soon enough we’ll be back to hating meetings, interruptions, and the unjustifiable gregariousness of extroverts, but those first few days should be glorious.

Rob York Rob York works for a think tank in Honolulu and still prefers communication by Post-it Notes.

Reviving the ‘Can-Do’ Spirit Is Key to Recovering from the COVID Years

itsme — Mon, 24 Jul 2023 19:47:28 +0000

Lawrence W. Reed

June 13, 2023

“In life, your attitude determines your altitude,” a wise person once said. I agree. I’ve observed many people with bad attitudes over the years. Without exception, they didn’t amount to much until they fixed their attitude problem.

A bad attitude manifests in multiple forms: Arrogance. Dishonesty. A sense of entitlement. A thirst for power. Laziness. Pessimism and negativity. Cheerlessness. Jealousy. Defeatism. Disrespect for other people’s rights, choices, and property.

After three years of destructive Covid policies—from lockdowns to mask mandates—some are finding it challenging to get their engines going again. That’s perfectly understandable, given what many have endured including illness and death among friends and family to serious financial losses. Let’s not trivialize any of that but at the same time, let’s note that a bad attitude is a hindrance to recovery and progress. This short 1905 poem titled Thinking by Walter Wintle offers a few keen observations:

If you think you are beaten, you are;
If you think you dare not, you don’t.
If you’d like to win, but think you can’t,
It’s almost a cinch you won’t.
If you think you’ll lose, you’re lost,
For out in the world we find
It begins with a fellow’s will;
It’s all in the state of mind.
If you think you’re outclassed, you are;

You’ve got to think high to rise.
You’ve got to be sure of yourself before
You can ever win a prize.
Life’s battles don’t always go
To the stronger or faster man;
But sooner or later the man who wins
Is the one who thinks he can.

Americans have been body-slammed before but we’ve always bounced back. The agony of the pandemic is Sunday school compared to the hardships of Valley Forge, the crucible of the Civil War, the injustices of slavery and Jim Crow, the heartbreak of the Great Depression, or the existential threat of World War II.

Even some past health crises were proportionally worse than Covid. The 1793 yellow fever epidemic claimed about 10 percent of the citizens of Philadelphia and forced President Washington and his Cabinet to move to nearby Germantown. The Spanish Flu of 1918-19 killed half a million Americans when the country’s population was less than a third of today’s.

Many Covid measures were clearly counterproductive and even deadly. “Progressive” Governors in New York, Michigan, Illinois, and New Jersey forcing nursing homes to accept Covid-19 patients is Exhibit A. We must learn from the experience and insist that nothing like it happens again.

What we traditionally refer to as a “can-do” spirit, so vital to the country’s past success, must be front-and-center again. Its magic is evidence of personal character as well as the political and economic liberty in which we can put that character to work. Nations that suppress the can-do spirit are plagued with endless, intractable problems from poverty to poor health to lousy government.

If you think things are tough here, take inspiration from courageous Ukrainians. They are taking the can-do spirit to the next level, will-do, under the most difficult of situations.

To walk away from any challenge would be an unthinkable forsaking of our ancestors who bequeathed us so much. It would likely make many problems worse for us as well. No matter the obstacles, we have no good reason to ever give up on the future. Pessimism is a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The pandemic changed death rituals and left grieving families without a sense of closure

itsme — Mon, 12 Jun 2023 20:20:36 +0000

Natasha Mikles

The unexpected death of a friend and colleague to COVID-19 in January 2021 led me to start researching how American death rituals were transforming during the pandemic. My friend was Hindu, and while watching his funeral on Zoom, I witnessed the significant transformations that had to be made to the traditional rituals to accommodate COVID-19 safety guidelines.

In the spring and summer of 2021, I conducted over 70 hours of oral history interviews with people involved in the medical and funerary professions, as well as grieving families and those who worked closely with them, including grief counselors, hospice workers and even spirit mediums.

As a historian of religion interested in how different cultures make sense of death, I noticed what appeared to be a momentous cultural shift happening in America in terms of death rituals as over 850,000 Americans died from COVID-19. During this period, funerary customs dramatically shifted and, in many cases, failed to bring any comfort to grieving friends and families.

What changed in funerary rituals

In my conversations, funerary professionals described the initial chaos as funeral size had to be dramatically curtailed, sometimes with only one to two hours’ notice. Eventually, many began to innovate with new technologies that allowed them to hold virtual funerals.

Richard Davis of the Cook-Walden Funeral Home in Pflugerville, Texas, described how early in the pandemic he utilized radio technology for grieving families who could be in their cars in the parking lot, tune the radio to a specific station and listen to the person giving the eulogy inside the funeral home.

Some funerary directors partnered with wedding videographers whose business was suddenly upended because most weddings were canceled or delayed. These videographers found that the high-quality equipment used to produce wedding videos could as easily be put to use broadcasting a Zoom funeral.

I also spoke with three spirit mediums who all described a marked increase in clients seeking postlife words from loved ones who died on ventilators. They described how anguished families sought to know that their loved one had not died alone and did not blame them for their death. One medium in particular also noted that the pandemic saw an increase in family members seeking to connect with those who had died of drug overdoses brought on by the stress of the pandemic.

The end-of-life work of religious leaders was transformed as well: Catholic and Episcopal last rites were performed via FaceTime, sometimes with consecrated oil being carefully administered by a Q-tip.

The Jewish tradition of sitting with a body before burial – usually performed by volunteers in shifts at the funeral home – became an at-home experience. Although the volunteers, called shomer or shomeret in Hebrew, could not sit next to the body as usual, they worked on the honor system to ensure that someone was always praying and keeping the deceased in their thoughts, even while far away.

Muslim leaders described working with local health agencies to obtain Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and specialized training for those performing the full-body washing of a corpse known as ghusl in Arabic.

Virtual commemorations

These adaptations reflect a long history of transformations for the American funeral.

In the 17th and 18th centuries, most Americans generally prepared the body themselves and hosted the funeral at home. However, by the 19th century, more Americans were dying in hospitals as a result of the availability of medical care and because the corpse was believed to be carrying disease. This spurred the development of the funeral home. Individual funeral homes often personalize their offerings to the needs of local cultural or religious communities.

Funeral homes became most popular after embalming – a form of preservation performed by mortuary specialists – became the norm after the Civil War. The war spurred a crisis to preserve soldiers’ bodies while they made the long trip home, and embalmers would sometimes follow the military troops to accept payment in advance for the procedure.

Today, the funeral industry has grown to a whopping US$20 billion, and embalming remains the predominant treatment for the body after death.

With the rise of the internet, funerals are once more undergoing rapid transformations. Scholar of death and dying Candi Cann has shown how the internet gives rise to new forms of social remembrance after death. These can include mourners going to Facebook or Instagram pages on the anniversary of the death and leaving a message about how much they miss the deceased. Online marketplaces allow for the purchase of individualized mourning paraphernalia like T-shirts or bumper stickers, and public memorials at the site of death.

_{People tried to memorialize their loved one in different ways. Images of COVID-19 victims from Detroit are displayed in a drive-by memorial at Belle Isle State Park. Aaron J. Thornton/Getty Images}

Such tools thrived during the pandemic. During my research, several individuals who lost loved ones explained creating memorial items, including stickers and face masks commemorating a lost loved one, as a way to encourage others to wear masks. Virtual online communities of COVID-19 mourners adopted the yellow heart as a public expression of loss of a loved one to the pandemic in the U.S. and Europe.

Unprocessed grief

Funerals and other rituals surrounding death are important to begin the grieving process. Research has found that performing rituals has a major role in alleviating grief through increasing feelings of control and transitioning mourners to accepting their loss. Funerals can provide important structures for families to say goodbye that have been correlated with better grief outcomes.

J.Z. Smith, one of the most influential theorists of religion in recent years, said that “ritual relies for its power on the fact that it is concerned with quite ordinary activities placed within an extraordinary setting.” In other words, ritual takes elements from the ordinary world – words, gestures, symbols, etc. – and imbues them with extraordinary meaning.

We might cry or wear black clothing every day for any number of reasons, but in funeral rituals these activities have special significance and bring a sense of closure. It is this repurposing of ordinary things that makes rituals so effective.

Psychological studies too have shown that the greater the difference between what happens in the ritual and “normal” life, the more effective it is for individuals.

But in my conversations with those who lost loved ones to COVID-19, it became apparent that for many, the transformations in funerals and rituals of mourning failed to help them in dealing with their grief. As one individual explained to me, “I knew my grandmother would pass away sometime, but I always imagined I would be there; I never imagined I would be watching it virtually on Facebook. It felt like a parody of a funeral.”

Another interviewee explained how the isolation necessary in the pandemic era fundamentally undermined the comfort these rituals could provide: “Because my family has been so terrified of COVID, we have not been able to gather together to process my mother’s death. That has been really hard for me culturally – especially in Indigenous families, you grieve together.”

Reverend Richard R. Andre, C.S.P. of St. Austin Catholic Parish in Austin, Texas, echoed these thoughts as he described assisting those losing loved ones in his own spiritual community: “The funeral helps you to start a process of closure. But without the funerals they envisioned, people are just getting stuck and are unable to grieve.”

The COVID-19 pandemic has forced us to consider how rituals can lose their extraordinary power when our sense of “normal” is shattered and remains shattered for years. As religion theorist J.Z. Smith noted, rituals work by framing the ordinary as extraordinary. But if nothing feels normal, then nothing can feel extraordinary either.

Covid supercentenarian

itsme — Mon, 23 Jan 2023 20:43:25 +0000

Lucile Randon DC (French: [ly.sil ʁɑ̃.dɔ̃]; 11 February 1904 – 17 January 2023), also known as Sister André (French: Sœur André), was a French supercentenarian. Living to the age of 118 years and 340 days, she had been the world’s oldest verified living person since April 19, 2022, following the death of Kane Tanaka.^[1][2] ^]

Randon was blind and used a wheelchair from the early 2010s.^[6] In January 2021, she tested positive for SARS-CoV-2 in an outbreak at her retirement home. She was asymptomatic and tested negative days before her 117th birthday, making her the oldest known survivor of the COVID-19 pandemic.^[1][3][10]

Your Brain on Red Alert

itsme — Mon, 21 Nov 2022 20:50:41 +0000

In February of 2020, as a mysterious zoonotic virus winged its way across the planet, I resolved to do whatever I could to stay on top of pandemic reports. I created a coronavirus browser folder, filled it with trusted news links, and checked it multiple times a day. But as the pandemic’s finish line receded into the future, my optimism flagged and my resolve to stay informed dwindled. Soon I felt like a panic-saturated sponge, incapable of absorbing any more bad news. I descended into the numbness so many of us have experienced, but the alerts kept coming.

When alarm signals bombard us from every direction, our concentration and judgment both take a nosedive. According to research at hospitals, where health care workers face a constant barrage of alerts, an endless blare of warning signals can cause people to overlook important cues. Brain activity studies also show that alarm overload can sap our cognitive focus and ability to handle tasks. There’s a clear connection between this kind of alarm fatigue and the cognitive overload that follows an onslaught of bad news. Like health care providers frazzled by perpetual alerts, we often inhabit a mental space in which danger signs never seem to abate.

Absorbing a barrage of crisis content leaves people “exhausted,” says Cherie Armour, who studies stress and adversity at Queen’s University Belfast in Northern Ireland. “You’re probably feeling less energy—you’re just done. People get to that stage, and then they completely disengage.”Not only can unrelenting crisis story lines take a toll on our mental health, but we sometimes grow numb to them. That numbness can potentially make it harder for us to distinguish between true crises and trumped-up ones. But setting strict news consumption limits and opening up real-world dialogues, experts say, can help buffer some of the worst effects of crisis fatigue.

The nurses’ minds were so used to the alarms’ cry-wolf clangor they barely registered what they’d done.

Some of the best insight comes from hospitals, where workers suffer literal alarm fatigue.

Nurse-scientist Michele Pelter has faced an assault of alerts for decades. At the University of California, San Francisco (UCSF) Medical Center, where she does her research, a cacophony of beeps dominates the soundscape, most potentially signaling something wrong with a patient. The lowest-level alerts are flashing lights next to patients’ beds. “Advisory” alerts, one level up, are intermittent single beeps. “Warnings” are spaced-out double beeps, and “crisis” alerts, the highest level, are strings of piercing beep-beep-beeps that don’t stop until a nurse actively silences them. In a typical critical care ward, one study reports, anywhere from 150 to 400 of these alarms may sound on every patient every day. Approximately 90 percent of them are “nuisance” alarms that are either false or clinically irrelevant.

Amid this sensory chaos, it’s tough to imagine how a nurse could manage all the alerts from just one patient, let alone the five or more patients they attend to in some wards. There are so many false alarms, Pelter says, “that people will just hit ‘OK, OK, OK,’ and those alerts just get lost.” About 8 in 10 clinicians, in fact, report having disabled an alarm at least once.

While conducting her research, Pelter watched nurses press alarm-silencing buttons over and over. When she asked what alarm they’d just silenced, they would say, “I don’t remember.” The nurses’ minds were so used to the alarms’ cry-wolf clangor that they barely registered what they’d just done. Though this adaptation might seem to work for a while, it can have deadly results.

In March 2012 in Pennsylvania, a nurse dosed 17-year-old Mariah Edwards with the powerful opioid fentanyl after a routine tonsillectomy. Soon after the drug hit Edwards’s system, she went into respiratory distress. No one responded. By the time a nurse finally reached her, Edwards had suffered severe brain injury due to a lack of oxygen; a couple of weeks later, she died. Afterward, investigators found someone had muted Edwards’s respiratory monitor, which was supposed to sound if there was a problem.

Designing more human-friendly alarm systems, Pelter says, could begin with setting higher alert thresholds to protect providers’ brains from becoming overwhelmed or habituated. For instance, current heart-rhythm tracking devices sound an alarm after just six abnormal heartbeats, but these six-beat sequences rarely signify something is truly wrong. Now Pelter and her team are testing alarm systems that sound only after 30 abnormal beats. Colleagues of Pelter are working on a more nuanced machine they call a SuperAlarm, which would sound an alarm only when a combination of troubling signals from hospital monitors and lab tests in the patient’s electronic health record met a threshold that predicted a deadly “code blue” event. Pelter hopes reducing the sheer number of alerts in the soundscape will help providers focus on the remaining alarms and respond more thoughtfully.

While alarm fatigue is an overt sensory challenge in health care, we’re all prone to impaired judgment when up against the brain’s normal processing limits. In one study, researchers at Brigham Young University exposed subjects to dozens of security warnings on their digital screens over a five-day period and scanned their brains with functional MRI once a day. It was hardly a surprise, but the right and left insula regions of subjects’ brains, centers of attention, displayed decreasing levels of activation as the study progressed. The muted response showed that participants’ brains were habituating to the warnings, directing less focused attention to them over time. This may happen, Armour says, because the brain adapts to constant alarms by setting the bar for response higher. In the same fashion, we adapt to certain mind-altering drugs by requiring a greater quantity to produce the desired effect.

Something similar likely happens when we have news notifications turned on. Because our phones are buzzing more or less constantly, we start to gloss over each distressing headline as it comes in. Over time, a constant state of distress becomes unsustainable, so the brain downgrades the apparent risk—a kind of distancing that could be dangerous in a true crisis.

Processing never-ending alarms can also hamper the brain’s ability to perform other tasks. Researchers at Japan’s Osaka University had 15 adults use a computer flight simulator to attempt flying a plane through racecourse gates. While flying, they also had to press a joystick button whenever they heard or saw an alarm. The researchers observed that when participants missed an alarm, they had greater activity in the brain’s right inferior frontal gyrus and the superior medial frontal cortex. Because activity in these regions was also present when they demonstrated poor flying performance, the results suggested an attentional bottleneck. With so many demands on their attention, the subjects’ brains reached their cognitive limits.

In a news-consumption context, that kind of cognitive overload can mean we chew through 12 alarming stories between work meetings but barely digest any of what we’re reading. It can also leave us more vulnerable to misinformation, Pelter observes. We can “get sloppy and say, ‘Oh, OK, somebody published this; this must be true. I’m not going to do the work to figure out if it is true or false.’ ”

Immersion in a sea of crisis narratives ultimately takes a toll on our well-being, reports psychologist Alison Holman of the University of California, Irvine. In a survey study of media consumption habits after the 9/11 attacks, Holman and colleagues found that when people watched more than one hour per day of TV news related to the attacks, they had more post-traumatic stress symptoms up to three years later than did those who watched less.

All this adds up to reducing the number of alarms vying for your mental space.

Fortunately, this state of constant overstimulation isn’t inevitable, even in the age of the 24/7, social media–amplified news cycle. As researchers test strategies to reduce hospital alarm fatigue, their findings suggest new ways to address broader, news-driven crisis fatigue. Reducing the number of alarms that invade people’s mental space, as Pelter and her team are trying to do, is a promising tactic.

In an ideal world, alarm reduction would start with news producers. Newsrooms would set policies that nix needlessly inflammatory headlines. They would spend more time reporting stories with public service potential and less time on minor scandals. But since media companies’ profit motives drive them to bang the crisis drum hard—in the absence of overload, viewers generally tend to pay more attention to negative news—the onus will remain on consumers to do much of the filtering themselves.

You can raise your own alarm threshold with a three-pronged strategy.First, carefully curate the news you consume, making sure it’s from trusted outlets that vet the accuracy of their content. “Make sure that you go and check bona fide sources,” Armour says. “A lot of information is not correct,” and that incorrect information can set off false alarms in your brain, aggravating your crisis fatigue and blunting your judgment.

This isn’t always easy; there’s lots of false information on sites like YouTube and TikTok, but experts share valuable information on these platforms as well. If you’re in doubt about whether a particular source passes muster, check to make sure that it has a transparent means of correcting errors; that it clearly indicates the source of facts it provides (citing journal articles or named officials, for instance); and, if it’s a traditional news outlet, that it distinguishes between straight news and opinion pieces. Trustworthy news sources will also be up front about how they update their content as a developing story unfolds. And be wary of supposed experts with a product to sell on social media.

Second, limit your total daily media use to reduce the number of crisis narratives on your mental radar. “If you want to stay on top of what’s going on in the news, do so in very deliberate, brief periods,” such as 15 to 30 minutes at a time, Holman says. “Then shut it off. Don’t look at it again.” Other ways to curtail your media use include turning off notifications on your phone, unfollowing influencers who draw eyeballs by stoking fear, and deleting the apps that leave your brain in a jangled state. (I’ve removed Facebook from my own phone because it’s a prime offender here—its algorithms have proved to boost divisive and anger-generating content.)

Finally, extricate your mind from its bad-news bubble by seeking out meaningful connection with people close to you who can provide a sounding board as you try to separate overblown crisis story lines from those that truly merit your concern. At the same time, since misinformation can spread easily through social ties, you should subject any story a friend passes along to the reputable-news test.

All this adds up to reducing the number of alarms vying for your mental space and signal-boosting the ones worthy of attention. When you curtail the amount of crisis news coming through, Armour says, you’ll be better equipped to process what you encounter and make meaning from it. Addressing the true crises we all face will require freeing up mental bandwidth so we can filter the critical signals from all the beeping, blinking, stultifying noise.