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Petri Dish

Nice article about the pandemic being a great psychological experiment.

Individual resilience is further complicated by the fact that this pandemic has not affected each person in the same way. For all that is shared--the coronavirus has struck every level of society and left few lives unchanged--there has been tremendous variation in the disruption and devastation experienced. Consider Brooklyn, just one borough in hard-hit New York City. Residents who started the year living or working within a few miles of one another have very different stories of illness, loss and navigating the challenges of social distancing.

What is true about people separated by a few miles within the city is also true about members of an extended family scattered across continents. There used to a lot that they had in common before the pandemic but how they experienced the onset of the crisis and the aftermath was very different. My parents and their elderly friends for instance are not sure they are at all sure that they are safe venturing outside just because India is now re-opening. 

They continue to stay in as much as they can, they don't trust what they hear about what is going on outside and feel like they have to fend for themselves. The world will move on and the life or death of an old person is not the priority. This feeling of being dispensable is certainly a new one for these folks and arguably the psychological toll of the pandemic.

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