COVID-19 has become more lonely around the world: Research

It’s not surprising that pandemics are becoming more lonely around the world, but new research suggests that it may not be as bad as it was feared.

This study, which examined 34 studies of loneliness before and during a pandemic, was published in the journal American Psychologist on Monday.

This study suggests that the increase in loneliness during a pandemic was not as great as expected, and that the prevalence of loneliness increased by about 5 percent.

However, researchers warn that increased loneliness can still have long-term health implications and needs to be tracked more closely.

“The pandemic seems to be becoming more lonely,” said Mareike Ernst, lead author of the study. Said in a press release. “Given the small effect size, the disastrous warning about a’lonely pandemic’may be exaggerated. However, loneliness constitutes a risk of premature death and mental and physical health and should be carefully monitored. We believe that loneliness should be a priority in large-scale research projects aimed at investigating the health of a pandemic. “

So how do you measure loneliness?

Researchers pointed out that social isolation was certainly caused by life-saving measures such as blockages and physical distance, but this was not a one-to-one correlation with loneliness. People may be socially isolated and not lonely, depending on their close support system and their senses, just as one can be socially connected and still experience significant loneliness. I have.

In this paper, loneliness was defined as “painful emotion” or “social pain.” This results from discrepancies between quantity (eg, number of social contacts per day) and / or quality (see subjective experience of traits such as affection). , The intimacy of their desired actual social connection, or conflict). “

To track this, researchers usually look at previous high-quality longitudinal studies, including factors that measure loneliness, through surveys or questionnaires that require participants to report loneliness over a period of time. rice field.

They compared studies published in 2019 before the pandemic with studies published during the pandemic, and studies involving pre-pandemic and intra-pandemic elements, from four continents with a total of more than 215,000 participants. I examined 34 studies of.

By pooling the findings, they created photographs of the prevalence of loneliness reported before and during the pandemic.

“The evaluation during the pandemic gave a higher continuous loneliness score than the pre-pandemic evaluation,” the study authors said.

“This study extends previous knowledge of changes in loneliness during a pandemic, although the observed increases should be interpreted with caution, while loneliness is the usual non-pathological response to changes in circumstances. Many people experience it at some point in their lives, while in previous studies, especially persistent or chronic loneliness endangers mental and physical health. It has been shown. “

The study authors pointed out that further research on this topic is needed to better identify the factors that cause loneliness and who is more at risk.

“There is still limited strong evidence to support interventions to deal with loneliness,” Ernst said. “The growing sense of loneliness that accompanies a pandemic highlights the need for collaborative efforts to strengthen its evidence base.”

Research has some limitations. The author wanted to present a review of all studies on this topic that apply to the specification, but many studies had different designs or durations that could have affected the data and excluded specific groups. Said there is a possibility.

This study also had a risk of bias in some of the studies reviewed, and increased loneliness during pandemics if the pooled data were narrowed down to only studies with a moderate risk of longitudinal study design and bias. I also noticed that it looked bigger. “The pooled effects in this study may underestimate the effects in the at-risk population.”

Most of the work was also done from wealthy Western countries in Europe and North America, so the results may not be applicable to other parts of the world.