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Surviving Lockdown
Human Nature in Social Isolation
David Cohen
First published 2021
by Routledge
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and by Routledge
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Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business
© 2021 David Cohen
The right of David Cohen to be identified as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78
of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
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ISBN: 978-0-367-61301-3 (pbk)
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Contents
Acknowledgements vii
Preface viii
Introduction 1
1 Anxiety and the brain: taking control of your fears 13
2 The effects of solitude: case studies in isolation 20
3 Plagues through history: the past and its lessons for us 27
4 Variations in the national response to pandemics: paths
to success or failure 35
5 Love in the time of plague: how social isolation can affect our
relationships and sex life 45
6 Tensions during lockdown: anger, irritation and emotional
intelligence 49
7 The impact of lockdown on children: attachment, mental
health and resilience 58
8 Introspection is inevitable: mood regulation, dreams
and personal responses 68
9 Money fears and how to cope with them: connecting financial
security and mental health 77
10 My home is my office: working from home as the new normal? 82
vi Contents
11 Exercise your endorphins: how physical activity can
affect mood 86
12 Physical exercise: ideas for indoor activities 91
13 Making the most of lockdown: study something new 99
14 The experiment: what the pandemic has taught us so far
about human nature 104
Select bibliography 110
Acknowledgements
I owe a great deal to my editor Lucy Kennedy who was sharp, always encour-
aging and very astute. The only other time I have been so well edited was
when Peter Mayer (a publishing legend since he saved Penguin) took on my
book on how Freud escaped from Vienna in 1938 with the help of a ‘good’
Nazi. Maria Andrews helped, competent as ever with checking facts and the
references.
Preface
I have personal experience of social isolation though I’ve only spent one day
in jail as a prisoner and never been put in solitary confinement in a psychiatric
hospital.
In 1962, under pressure from my father, my mother left me to go to Israel
to sell a flat they owned. I was 12. Three weeks later he left to live with his
long-standing lover, Evi. I had to conceal from my school that I was on my
own because I was sure I would be sent to an orphanage if they found out.
I saw my father every Friday night for dinner and he gave me money for
food and fares. After we said goodbye I knew I would not see anyone till
Monday morning when I went back to school. So I know something about
coping with isolation.
Still I dedicate this book to my mother. If I had ever been isolated with her
she would have exasperated me. She complained constantly and was unhappy
and nervous, but she was also a fitness fanatic; she could do the splits when
she was 70. She would have seen isolation as a great opportunity to practice
every gymnastic exercise ever conceived. And nag me to exercise too.
So this is dedicated to Dolly Cohen.
Introduction
Since the 1720s the British Prime Minister has lived and worked at 10 Down-
ing Street. As they follow in the footsteps of the greats like Churchill and
Attlee, you would imagine anyone who got to No. 10 would date their letters.
Boris Johnson, however, didn’t bother with dating his only letter to me. Its
message was almost military. Coronavirus was a national emergency and the
Prime Minister ordered me and 1.8 million others: ‘Stay Home Save Lives’.
Four snappy words that echoed the four-word World War II mantra ‘Careless
talk costs lives’.
Only now, ‘Careless walks cost lives’, for myself and the 1.8 million others
who needed ‘sheltering’, which means we have a serious or potentially serious
condition and should only go outside for medical help or in a dire emergency.
On 1 June people in my condition were allowed to go out of our flats and
houses briefly. But I should put at least two metres between me and anyone
else unless they were part of my household. Two metres is actually more than
the width of a super king-size bed.
Boris Johnson, whose social views are liberal, then warned:
These rules must be observed. So if people break the rules, the police will
issue fines and disperse gatherings.
I wonder how many police ofcers are secretly delighted. Like Dixon of Dock
Green in the innocent 1950s, they can now dispense on-the-spot justice. A
clout round the earhole. A punch on the nose for repeat ofenders. For the
good of society.
Officers also now have a chance to practise their verbal skills on those loi-
tering and littering the streets: “On your way and don’t let me see you outside
till we get the all-clear or you’ll be fined.”
The British have been obedient on the whole. The Chief Constable of
Essex noted that in from mid-April to May 2020, his officers warned over
8,000 people for breaking the social distancing and other rules, but only had
to fine 17 incorrigibles.
2 Introduction
When it comes, and it is far off from when I am writing this in June 2020,
the all-clear will not be like the all-clear in the Blitz. The massed bombers of
the virus don’t head back across the Channel at the end of their raid. Com-
parisons with the war are inevitable as the restrictions in 1940–1945 are the
nearest to those we have now. The war also taught that humour could help
alleviate distress. The subject of this book is totally serious but there are delib-
erate moments of laughter too. The situation is grim, but to make it all totally
grim whittles away at morale.
Human beings are, as Edgar Rice Burroughs (1916), the creator of Tarzan,
puts it in The Beasts of Tarzan,
creatures of habit, and when the seeming necessity for schooling ourselves
in new ways ceases to exist, we fall naturally and easily into the manner
and customs which long usage has implanted ineradicably within us.
Once he left public school, Tarzan’s habits were swinging from tree to tree,
saving the hapless Jane and doing a spot of loincloth laundry. No girl wants
to be saved by a hero who smells. Te government tells us to wash our hands,
but don’t forget to wash your clothes. Tis book is not just academic!
The 1890s psychologist G. Stanley Hall, who never swung from branch to
branch, had the same idea as Tarzan’s creator. He wrote:
Man is largely a creature of habit, and many of his activities are more or
less automatic reflexes from the stimuli of his environment.
G. Stanley Hall was friends with John Watson, a famous psychologist who
invented deodorant, which is useful when stuck at home for long periods.
We are living through the most dramatic break in our habits for over
100 years. Our world has been turned upside down, which makes creatures
of habit anxious and mostly unhappy. To give us some sense of control, offi-
cial agencies and the media produce a cascade of statistics on the number of
people affected by the virus, deaths and how various interventions work. The
New York Times, The Washington Post, The Spectator, the BBC, the World
Health Organization and many national governments provide daily data.
I have tried to cite all specific sources, but sometimes in a relatively short
book it seems excessive to give the date of a newspaper article both in the
text and then in the Select Bibliography. Some papers have more authors
than a football team. Most remarkably, there are 12 authors for a two-page
paper that covers 41 patients in Spain who were bald. I have noted just the
first four and then added ‘et al.’, which is more than enough for readers who
want to check.
The coverage, academic, journalistic and from government agencies, shows
some depressing trends, which include that prescriptions for antidepressants
have risen some 20%. Incidents of domestic violence have been rising too.
Introduction 3
Charities in China, the United States and Italy all report a spike in vic-
tims reaching out to family violence hotlines and organisations. In Singapore,
AWARE’s Women’s Helpline has seen a 33% increase in February over calls
received in the same month last year. In Britain, calls to the National Domestic
Abuse helpline were 25% above average in the second week of lockdown and
49% higher after three weeks. According to the Times and other papers, divorce
lawyers are reporting they are getting more 40% more inquiries than usual.
Psychology often throws up ironies. Some personality types will relish the
solitude. No more having to pretend to muck in with chatty extrovert types.
No more having to pretend to be interested in football.
The virus also highlights two of our greatest fears – firstly, fear of the
unknown, since the virus is mysterious. If you are imaginative or just scep-
tical, you may wonder if we are being told the whole truth about it. And,
secondly, fear of death. Every news bulletin reports tragedies of men and
women who fell ill, suffered and died rather quickly and often alone –
without the comfort of children, spouses or even friends at their side. Is
that going to be our fate? Nurses and other health care workers have never
been so important.
The pen is mightier than the sword in some situations, but not this one.
A book cannot unmake a pandemic, but it can give help in coping and
perspective. This book does not peddle the positive – Dr Pangloss, Voltaire’s
character who thought all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds,
does not feature – but one should remember that a crisis is also often an
opportunity. Cue the amazing Captain Moore, who kept walking round his
garden at the age of 99; he has shown that it is never too late to do something
extraordinary and worthwhile. His walk raised £32 million for the NHS.
This book looks at the history and psychology of pandemics and how to
cope. Pandemics have been endemic since biblical times. Different personal-
ity types will react differently, especially to isolation. Introverts may some-
times find it easier to manage because they will feel less pressure to fit in with
others than before. Extroverts will find it harder.
The book also looks at the effects of social isolation on children and fam-
ily life, and economic worries. Being passive and spending hours in front of
television or watching ‘athletes’ playing video games is not ideal.
We will also need fun to get through this. The virus should provoke much
black humour, that time-honoured way of dealing with tragedy, but Sophie
Scott (2020) warned in The Psychologist,
I haven’t seen many jokes that get beyond the frankly relatively simple
humorous relationship between the name of the kind of virus and the
name of a beer. Indeed, it appears that this same relationship has been
enough to make the stock market lose some faith in the Corona beer
brand. So maybe we are due a really excellent Coronavirus joke that can
start to cheer everyone up.
4 Introduction
It may be slow coming because, as Scott points out, we are keen to police
humour nowadays and not to offend. Her partner speaks of how extremely
unfunny his dad found the famous ‘One leg too few’ sketch by Peter Cook
and Dudley Moore. “Having lost a leg at the age of 11, his dad was not espe-
cially minded to see the funny side of someone with two legs hopping around
to comic effect.”
His reaction is very understandable, but jokes and humour are a way of
dealing with anger and hostility, and we are all bound to feel angry at times
now. So this book is also a light-hearted self-help guide to coping in these
strangest of times.
It is clear pandemic and post-pandemic effects will last longer than opti-
mistic politicians – and not just President Trump – believe, even if a vaccine
is developed quickly. In the UK alone, 68 million people will need to be
vaccinated and there are thousands who are hostile to vaccines and fantasise
they are a medical conspiracy. This book also looks at lessons we can learn
from the pandemic and how it has affected and will affect human behaviour.
At first many experts suggested that by October 2020 the virus’ effects would
be fading. Now with fears of second or even third spikes of the illness, that
optimism has faded.
Before examining the science of virus, a small history detour. When he
defeated the Gauls in 45 BC, the Roman Emperor Julius Caesar boasted ‘Veni
Vidi Vici’: ‘I came I saw I conquered’. It was lucky for him he did not run into
Asterix and his magic potion, which enabled him to biff every Roman who
came near him into unconsciousness. If the virus could speak, it might smirk
and snarl imitating Caesar: ‘Veni, Vidi, Viri’: ‘I came I saw I virused’. Freud
wrote a book on jokes that stressed the value of humour and emphasised how
it could help defuse anxiety. The problem is that we are lacking good jokes,
and so many are shit jokes in both senses of the word. One runs ‘Your COVID
test came back positive’, to which someone replies, ‘That can’t be right, I’ve got
300 rolls of toilet paper’. Please stop me laughing, I don’t think.
Basics
Viruses don’t speak or smirk of course, but they do raise questions. It is impor-
tant first to know just what a virus is. Can you tell it from a bacterium or a
microbe or a dendrite?
For about a century, as reported in Scientific American in 2018, scientists
have changed their minds over what viruses are. First they were seen as poisons,
then as life-forms, then as biological chemicals. Today they are placed in a grey
area between living and non-living: they cannot replicate on their own but can
do so in living cells and can also affect the behaviour of their ‘hosts’ profoundly.
In the late 19th century researchers realised that certain diseases, including
rabies and foot-and-mouth, were caused by particles that seemed to behave
like bacteria but were much smaller. Viruses were then thought to be the
simplest of all living forms.
Introduction 5
Tobacco changed that theory. In 1935, Wendell M. Stanley and his col-
leagues, at what is now The Rockefeller University in New York City, crys-
tallised a virus into – the tobacco mosaic virus – for the first time. The
tobacco virus consisted of complex biochemicals, but they were not living
organisms. Stanley shared the 1946 Nobel Prize, but it was for chemistry,
not medicine.
A virus may not be alive but when it enters a cell (called a host after infec-
tion), it becomes active. It sheds its coat, bares its genes and oils the cell’s own
replication machinery to reproduce the intruder’s DNA and manufacture
more viral protein. The newly created viral bits assemble and turn into more
viruses. Without the raw materials and energy of the host cell the virus does
not multiply and spread.
Most known viruses are innocuous and may remain dormant for long peri-
ods or take advantage of the cells’ replication apparatus to reproduce at a slow
and steady rate. Slow and steady is too boring for Hollywood, which has
had a crush on viruses that threaten to wipe out civilisation since the cinema
started.
That fear is the background to The Seventh Seal, Ingmar Bergman’s mas-
terpiece about a knight playing chess with death. There have also been many
turkeys like Contagion and The Rabies That Ate Our Street and Outbreak of
1995. The plot such as it is: When a new viral disease breaks out in a small
American town, scientists race against time to stop it from spreading. Unfor-
tunately, they also have to deal with a bloodthirsty Army general who wants
to use the virus as a bioweapon and is determined to prevent a cure from
being found. Wolfgang Petersen ‘helmed’, as Variety always puts it, and put
the gloss on this celluloid germ.
Viruses affect all life on earth, often determining what will survive. But
viruses also evolve. The Nobel laureate Salvador Luria declared in 1959,
“May we not feel that in the virus, in their merging with the cellular genome
and re-emerging from them, we observe the units and process which, in the
course of evolution, have created the successful genetic patterns that underlie
all living cells?”
In the last 30 years we have seen a number of frightening viruses such as
AIDS (causing HIV-1), SARS and Ebola. These may be the only biological
entities that researchers can actually see come into being, providing a real-
time example of evolution in action.
So the virus sneaks into cells and begins to do its damage. The virus has
no psychology, but its victims do, and their reactions depend on their basic
health, their psychology and money. Money matters because if you do not
have the money to eat properly, you are more likely to suffer.
Get the grub in
At the start of the pandemic in the UK supermarkets shoppers were in a
toilet paper frenzy. One colleague told me his wife had bought 1,600 rolls.
6 Introduction
He was only a little embarrassed. Such panic buying has passed but it is still
sensible to make sure you have the supplies you need – and a little extra.
What are your essential supplies will depend on taste and on money, which
is a crucial factor.
Millions who have worked and never would have dreamed of needing to
use a food bank have found they have to in this crisis. The German play-
wright Bertolt Brecht, whose plays include Mother Courage and the Resistible
Rise of Arturo Ui (a satire on Hitler’s rise set in Chicago gangland), once said
‘first grub then philosophy’.
In a rich country like the UK no one should go hungry, but they do. The
many financial schemes the government has set seem to miss many people,
including over 1 million self employed people. By 1 June 2020, 16 million
Americans were unemployed as compared to 3 million at the start of the
pandemic, the U.S. Bureau of Labour (2020) reported. The Chancellor of
the Exchequer often preferred to use the word ‘furloughed’, which sounds
less grim than unemployed. But any worker who is furloughed is likely to be
anxious about when, and if, they will return to work.
When it comes to grub, and also social analysis, the Trussell Trust does
good work. It supports a network of 1,200 food banks that “provide emer-
gency food and support to people locked in poverty, and campaign for
change to end the need for food banks in the UK” (The Trussel Trust End
of Year Statistics, 2019). The Trust argues that 14 million people are living
in poverty – including 4.5 million children. Their food banks provide a
minimum of three days’ emergency food to people in crisis. Between April
2018 and March 2019, their food banks sent 1.6 million food supplies to
people in crisis, a 19% increase on the previous year. Emma Revie, its Chief
Executive, said:
As a nation we expect no one should be left hungry or destitute – illness,
disability, family breakdown or the loss of a job could happen to any of
us, and we owe it to each other to make sure sufficient financial support
is in place when we need it most.
In America, food banks are also seeing unprecedented demands as unemploy-
ment soars to over 20 million people. Adele La Tourette, who leads the New
Jersey Anti-Hunger Coalition, told me that she had not seen so many people
using food banks before – and many were unexpected. Tey had had decent,
well-paying jobs before the virus decimated the economy.
Poverty is affecting groups it has never affected before. Carlos Rodriguez,
who heads a small New Jersey food bank, reported that one Wednesday in
March 2020, his food bank served 1,300 casino workers and their families,
who waited patiently inside their cars wrapped around Harbour Square Mall
while emergency meal kits and fresh produce were loaded into their trunks.
One a day in late May the drive-through distribution at Newark’s Branch
Introduction 7
Brook Park helped an additional 2,065 families; 3,365 families were served
during drive-through distributions in Newark and Egg Harbour Township.
Suddenly having no job and no money is a psychological shock. Some
research by Martin Seligman on dogs has made clear how feeling helpless is
corrosive – and the virus and its economic impact is causing such feelings.
Seligman followed the operating conditioning model of the behaviourist B.F.
Skinner. Rats, pigeons and human beings are affected by the probability that
their behaviour leads to a reward or punishment. Skinner famously taught
pigeons to play table tennis by this method. In the first part of his experiment
Seligman put three groups of dogs in a harness. In Group 1, the dogs are
simply attached to their harness for a short time and then released. Groups
2 and 3 remain attached. Group 2 is given an electric shock, which the dogs
can stop by pressing a lever. Each dog in Group 3 suffers a shock as long
and as intense as those in Group 2, but the dogs in Group 3 cannot stop the
shock. The only way for a Group 3 dog to escape the shock is for a Group 2
dog to operate its lever. Group 3 dogs could not act on their own to escape.
In the end, dogs in Groups 1 and 2 recovered quickly from their experience,
while dogs in Group 3 learned to be helpless and showed symptoms similar
to chronic depression.
One way of combatting the anxieties provoked by the virus is to prepare
for action, even if it is the kind of action you never expected to take. It gives
you some control.
Be prepared if you are afraid of being unable to buy food. Research your
nearest food banks, too – and how you can get food from them.
Anything that informs you (from a reliable source) is useful, as it is vital
to make sense of the swirl of statistics, but they are complicated and often
contradictory. Different countries record deaths in different ways. Still so far
from 1 January to 1 May 2020, there seem to have been some 250,000 deaths
worldwide. And there will be thousands more. Each death is a tragedy for the
victims, their friends and families, but this pandemic seems to be less vicious
than the Spanish flu of 1918, which killed an estimated 40 million, let alone
the mediaeval Black Death. It is worth remembering our ancestors had it even
worse sometimes.
This is an international crisis but there are cultural differences. As I discuss
ways of coping, I know my ideas will apply most to European and American
cultures. I would not presume to offer advice to cultures like India, Japan
or China, but there are some events that show how when human beings are
afraid, they will try the oddest remedies. Madagascar soldiers went door-to-
door doling out sachets of a local herbal tea touted by President Andry Rajo-
elina as a remedy. COVID-Organics is a tonic derived from artemisia – a
plant with proven efficacy in treating malaria. It has not been tested interna-
tionally, which did not discourage the President of Madagascar either. “This
herbal tea gives results in seven days,” Rajoelina announced at its official
launch.
