8 ms·

Wellbeing levels fell with the pandemic but improved under lockdown, data shows

58 points by samgilb 6y ago

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
I think this is less informative than the authors are thinking. Their methodology doesn't seem sufficient to distinguish concrete effects of lockdown from general hedonic adaptation. (The fact that suicidal ideation is significantly down is pretty surprising, though.)
- waheoo 6y ago
  I dunno, it looks like they cover the differences between groups in enough detail. I was wondering if, for instance the well-being of some people lowered during pandemic, but then the many who's life improved once they received pay to stay home and chill just outweighed all those who were diminished by the pandemic earlier.
bencollier49 6y ago
I'm convinced this is too high-level to draw any meaningful conclusions. Personally, as I have a family, staying at home with them while I work, and having no commute, is wonderful and has significantly improved my health and wellbeing. Someone stuck in a one-person flat will have a different experience.
- devalgo 6y ago
  >Someone stuck in a one-person flat will have a different experience. As someone in this position I can say that the lack of a commute has been amazing, I'm sleeping much better and less stressed overall but the lack of social contact is definitely weighing down.
  - bencollier49 6y ago
    I can sympathise. A lot of the time you don't even spot loneliness. Years later you realise it was eating away at your mental health. I think cultures which move their children directly from the family household into a marriage may be on to something.
    - occamschainsaw 6y ago
      Also cultures where multiple generations living under the same roof is the norm. I left home at 18 for university and had given up any expectations of living with my family for meaningful amounts of time (a couple of weeks a year is not the same, felt like a guest in my own home). Because of covid, I have been at home since a couple of months. My mental health has improved drastically. I didn't even realize the ways in which I was in a dark place when I lived by myself. I am really debating if achieving 100% of my professional goals is worth it, or if I could be satisfied with 80% but living with/close to family.
      - bencollier49 6y ago
        Hopefully cultural changes as a result of lockdown will mean you don't have to make that choice.
    - uallth00 6y ago
      Neuroscience has collected enough evidence to argue we crave social connectivity from the start, as our birth and early nurturing itself puts the habit into our daily working memory. Given that, it could be a gap from family to 20s single life may cause a shock to the system to be better understood. Is there such a thing as too harsh an emotional break to self reliance and does it have an epigenetic or other measurable response? And consider elites almost always have a big family watching their back, so to speak. Often nurturing and supportive in ways the hip youth find stifling and cowardly.
zhoujianfu 6y ago
I wonder if this can be treated as a little bit of an unscientific UBI study? Can we conclude from this that well-being levels would overall improve with a UBI as well?
- SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
  We can conclude that they'd improve in the short term, but most concerns I've read about UBI are about long-term effects.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  You can treat it that way you want but it's not going to wind up with UBI looking good. On the economic side: Huge sectors of the economy being shut down or running at reduced efficiency for possibly a year or more are basically the apocalypse for UBI because any UBI that is more than temporary fundamentally relies on the surplus generated by the working to support the non-working. UBI needs money going in to balance the money going out and the pandemic severely constrained the in-flow. On the social side: Almost nobody is going back to school, pursing the arts or any of the other good things they're supposed to start doing at scale when relieved (in full or part) of the need to work because of the pandemic. What they are doing more is drinking silver bullets after an exhausting day of setting off fireworks (a form of recreation I fully endorse). That's not exactly the vision of what people will do in their free time most UBI proponents seem to have. Normal times with the occasional financial panic or bust in select industry are a much better argument for UBI than the current pandemic.
- cc23 6y ago
  Idk about UBI, but I think we can conclude that better social support for the working class has a positive impact on mental health. The support doesn't have to be UBI, but any form of financial empowerment and stability for the working class. Universal healthcare would help, universal childcare, better unemployment benefits, more affordable housing, etc. You could even go so far as to say that people would be happier under socialism than capitalism :)
tempsy 6y ago
Also reports of far fewer premature babies under lockdown...likely a result of less stress on the working mother.
aminozuur 6y ago
In Denmark, prematurely born babies went down 90% due to lockdowns (source below). Researchers said the most plausible reason was due to reduced stress levels in pregnant women. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/health/coronavirus-premature-birth.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/health/coronavirus-premat...
- adventured 6y ago
  That happened elsewhere also. It's because they stopped doing as many early / preventative C-sections, not primarily due to reduced stress. It points to the developed world likely doing too many unnecessary C-sections (for example they may do 9 that are unnecessary for every 1 that actually turns out to be required to save a life, however they'll take that trade-off in non-Covid times rather than risk additional deaths). The C-sections spike the premature counts without any evidence that they're all required (it's strictly loose guesswork by the doctors in most cases, rather than being literally urgent; they have minimal fear of a C-section procedure today and liberally do them). This isn't uncommon, the developed world is frequently guilty of overdoing preventative & early detection medicine (we did it with mammograms, we did it with prostate cancer, and so on).
  - UncleOxidant 6y ago
    Cause or effect, though? Were there less C-Sections because pregnant women had less stress?
eric_b 6y ago
Lockdowns are terrible for human mental health. We're not meant to live that way. I mean, we put people in prison as punishment because it sucks. I don't care what these people read in to the data - lockdowns are hurting everyone's mental health and making people act strangely. We know a lot about COVID now - who's most vulnerable, how likely people are to die, etc. What staggers me is that huge groups of people are clamoring for more lockdowns and reduced freedoms. It's like Stockholm syndrome writ large. There is so much fear being peddled by the media and others that people have lost all perspective.
- msla 6y ago
  > I don't care what these people read in to the data - lockdowns are hurting everyone's mental health and making people act strangely. "I'm right and you can't convince me otherwise" is the cause of a lot of suffering in the world.
  - qubex 6y ago
    Since we can’t change their mind why are we even listening to this unilateral broadcasting of unsubstantiated and disproven-by-data comments?
- devalgo 6y ago
  You must be American. Becuase there's little push back in the rest of the Sane world. Governments are taking care of people's salaries who have lost their job so the only major downside is the mental health piece. The US has lost it's collective mind and meanwhile in places like New Zealand(up until a few days ago) have essentially beaten the virus and life is back to almost normal. The reality in the US is that we need a robust and strictly enforced lockdown for 6 weeks or frankly we aren't going to get back to normal until a major portion of the population has been vaccinated probably sometime in mid to late 2021.
- aantix 6y ago
  Agree. "People are dying". "People" isn't a useful cohort. Age/sex/location/lifestyle/environment/pre-existing conditions all contribute to our individual risk. Health/financial obligations/location/social patterns contribute to our individual risk tolerance. The CDC recommendations are not granular enough.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
tboyd47 6y ago
Headline is not complete. "After a rise in negative emotions at the start of the pandemic, wellbeing improved once lockdowns began – but not for everyone." That's the understatement of the year. Suicides, drug abuse, child sexual abuse, domestic violence, and food insecurity have risen sharply since the lockdown. Deaths of despair have already claimed more lives than COVID, even with the bogus death tallies. Yet we're all supposed to be okay with this because of some Google Trends data? I want to be far, far away from anyone who thinks like this. Like, catch me on the other side of the planet far.
- rossdavidh 6y ago
  "Deaths of despair have already claimed more lives than COVID..." is a pretty strong statement. I mostly agree that the headline seems highly questionable, but I'm wondering if you have a source for the "deaths of despair" totals?
  - tboyd47 6y ago
    I said this because I heard it referenced on one of my favorite morning shows. I looked for the source and found the CDC director's webinar. "We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from COVID. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose that are above excess that we had as background than we are seeing the deaths from COVID." [0] I can't tell from his wording whether he's talking about just young people or all age groups, but the context suggests he's talking about young people. Unfortunately, neither the CDC nor any other agency has published the nationwide suicide totals for 2020 yet so I can't cross-reference the CDC director's statement. Searching for anything related to "deaths" on Google or DuckDuckGo within the past month (which I am increasingly seeing as a front for Google) only returns COVID-19 death information. --------------- [0] https://www.buckinstitute.org/covid-webinar-series-transcript-robert-redfield-md/ https://www.buckinstitute.org/covid-webinar-series-transcrip...
jariel 6y ago
Was it lockdowns? Or the beginning of the realisation that this is not the black plague come to wipe us out, and that it's going to affect mostly specific groups? Edit: what they should map is probably a 'fear index'. Watching NYC / Gov. Cuomo on CNN every day, talk about 'hospitals overflowing' in NY, thinking 'OMG that is what is going to happen where I live soon' - literally Army Medical ships being sent in for civilian purposes, daily news clips of increasing numbers of deaths, all of the unknown - that was scary. We're no longer 'living in fear', rather, come to accept the uncomfortable terms of social distancing, not going to work etc.. The tone in the daily news is completely different. Also, we are now over the first wave of 'cognisance' of the situation. 3 months ago what happened was utterly unimaginable to all of us. Literally all businesses closing their doors, sports cancelled, we were in 'shock'. We're not in 'shock' anymore, we're dealing with 'the new normal'.
rossdavidh 6y ago
Wow, my initial thought was, either this is a deeply flawed analysis, or I am just totally wired differently than other people. Lockdown was _awful_, and we didn't even do it as long in Texas as in many places. Many friends of mine have expressed a lot of feelings of rage, despair, etc. during the lockdown. Whoever the people are that felt better, I don't know them, or at least they don't talk to me about how they're feeling.
Taylor_OD 6y ago
This data is questionable at best but great headline for those who want to hope that we have solved COVID.
- throwaway0a5e 6y ago
  I would argue that this headline is greater for the people who want to hope we haven't solved COVID than those who want to hope we have.
bmitc 6y ago
Speak for yourselves. For anyone whose wellbeing improved, they likely have everything in place already. They have stable jobs, stable families, stable savings and income sources, people they are either able to see in their homes or regularly elsewhere, and are not affected by travel bans and other effects of the viral outbreak. My wellbeing is at an all-time low and has continued to deteriorate since January. My family is split across the world due to unnecessary travel bans. Everyone in this thread is saying how the lockdowns were unnecessary long term but then everyone is seemingly okay with the government killing people's jobs and splitting up families with travel bans that don't take anything into consideration. There's no reason why travel for family members and H1B workers and immigrants, especially those in extraneous situations, is still blocked when hotel quarantines could be put in place, just like they are for inter-country travel. Just in my circle alone, the U.S. has lost a dozen or so Chinese citizens who hold advanced degrees or who are doctors who were either forced back to China, wanted to go back (and get out of the U.S.), or can't come back to the U.S. Good luck with the brain drain since these people were working for U.S. hospitals and companies. Not only are we losing people who were already here and wanted to be here, we're going to lose countless more who would have come to the U.S. in the future. This will have consequences. My fiancée is locked out of the country. We can't sell her car because she's not here and there are policies in place that protect against the situation. Online car selling websites have auto-locked our account since she logs in China, and I log in from the U.S., and they won't re-open it as "you can't sell your car while on vacation" (direct quote). The title transfer process is difficult if not impossible while she's out of the country, and we need help, but the RMV is not responsive. If you can even find a phone number for the RMV, you call and then it states they have high call volume and then says to call back tomorrow and then automatically hangs up on you. We're paying for a car, including insurance, that just sits around and can't legally sell it without embarking on a process that could take months and capital to simply secure the title before even attempting to sell. People always support insurance companies as if they decide your premium based upon statistics and probability. So what's the probability that our car that just sits parked and is driven once every week or two gets damaged and why haven't our rates gone down to reflect this greatly reduced probability? Yet, if I got a ticket tomorrow, they'd have no problem raising the rates. My rent actually was increased in March, and rent everywhere seems as high or higher than before as I try to move due to noise issues with my neighbors. Our marriage is getting delayed by years due to this. We can't get through the travel bans or anything else because we're not officially married (we had planned on doing it immediately after coming back from China), and we can't get married unless we're together, yet you can enter into all sorts of other legal agreements remotely. Policies are not updating with the situations, if anything they're regressing, and everything is moving in molasses. Everything is taking at least twice as long as it did before. Prices are actually increasing for things. All the predatory behavior on people has increased and now people have a new excuse (COVID) on why everything doesn't work or is slow. If your wellbeing has improved during this time, good for you. For those of us where it hasn't, it has deteriorated exponentially. And my family is in the best of the worst cases. We still have our jobs, have places to stay, and have supportive families. I truly feel for those struggling. The narcissism of people to think that they're happier because their commute is gone is mindboggling, when people are dying or living as death on a daily basis due to everything going on.

58 points by samgilb 6y ago

I think this is less informative than the authors are thinking. Their methodology doesn't seem sufficient to distinguish concrete effects of lockdown from general hedonic adaptation. (The fact that suicidal ideation is significantly down is pretty surprising, though.)

waheoo 6y ago
I dunno, it looks like they cover the differences between groups in enough detail. I was wondering if, for instance the well-being of some people lowered during pandemic, but then the many who's life improved once they received pay to stay home and chill just outweighed all those who were diminished by the pandemic earlier.

bencollier49 6y ago

I'm convinced this is too high-level to draw any meaningful conclusions. Personally, as I have a family, staying at home with them while I work, and having no commute, is wonderful and has significantly improved my health and wellbeing. Someone stuck in a one-person flat will have a different experience.

devalgo 6y ago
>Someone stuck in a one-person flat will have a different experience. As someone in this position I can say that the lack of a commute has been amazing, I'm sleeping much better and less stressed overall but the lack of social contact is definitely weighing down.
- bencollier49 6y ago
  I can sympathise. A lot of the time you don't even spot loneliness. Years later you realise it was eating away at your mental health. I think cultures which move their children directly from the family household into a marriage may be on to something.
  - occamschainsaw 6y ago
    Also cultures where multiple generations living under the same roof is the norm. I left home at 18 for university and had given up any expectations of living with my family for meaningful amounts of time (a couple of weeks a year is not the same, felt like a guest in my own home). Because of covid, I have been at home since a couple of months. My mental health has improved drastically. I didn't even realize the ways in which I was in a dark place when I lived by myself. I am really debating if achieving 100% of my professional goals is worth it, or if I could be satisfied with 80% but living with/close to family.
    - bencollier49 6y ago
      Hopefully cultural changes as a result of lockdown will mean you don't have to make that choice.
  - uallth00 6y ago
    Neuroscience has collected enough evidence to argue we crave social connectivity from the start, as our birth and early nurturing itself puts the habit into our daily working memory. Given that, it could be a gap from family to 20s single life may cause a shock to the system to be better understood. Is there such a thing as too harsh an emotional break to self reliance and does it have an epigenetic or other measurable response? And consider elites almost always have a big family watching their back, so to speak. Often nurturing and supportive in ways the hip youth find stifling and cowardly.

zhoujianfu 6y ago

I wonder if this can be treated as a little bit of an unscientific UBI study? Can we conclude from this that well-being levels would overall improve with a UBI as well?

SpicyLemonZest 6y ago
We can conclude that they'd improve in the short term, but most concerns I've read about UBI are about long-term effects.
throwaway0a5e 6y ago
You can treat it that way you want but it's not going to wind up with UBI looking good. On the economic side: Huge sectors of the economy being shut down or running at reduced efficiency for possibly a year or more are basically the apocalypse for UBI because any UBI that is more than temporary fundamentally relies on the surplus generated by the working to support the non-working. UBI needs money going in to balance the money going out and the pandemic severely constrained the in-flow. On the social side: Almost nobody is going back to school, pursing the arts or any of the other good things they're supposed to start doing at scale when relieved (in full or part) of the need to work because of the pandemic. What they are doing more is drinking silver bullets after an exhausting day of setting off fireworks (a form of recreation I fully endorse). That's not exactly the vision of what people will do in their free time most UBI proponents seem to have. Normal times with the occasional financial panic or bust in select industry are a much better argument for UBI than the current pandemic.
cc23 6y ago
Idk about UBI, but I think we can conclude that better social support for the working class has a positive impact on mental health. The support doesn't have to be UBI, but any form of financial empowerment and stability for the working class. Universal healthcare would help, universal childcare, better unemployment benefits, more affordable housing, etc. You could even go so far as to say that people would be happier under socialism than capitalism :)

tempsy 6y ago

Also reports of far fewer premature babies under lockdown...likely a result of less stress on the working mother.

aminozuur 6y ago

In Denmark, prematurely born babies went down 90% due to lockdowns (source below). Researchers said the most plausible reason was due to reduced stress levels in pregnant women. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/health/coronavirus-premature-birth.html https://www.nytimes.com/2020/07/19/health/coronavirus-premat...

adventured 6y ago
That happened elsewhere also. It's because they stopped doing as many early / preventative C-sections, not primarily due to reduced stress. It points to the developed world likely doing too many unnecessary C-sections (for example they may do 9 that are unnecessary for every 1 that actually turns out to be required to save a life, however they'll take that trade-off in non-Covid times rather than risk additional deaths). The C-sections spike the premature counts without any evidence that they're all required (it's strictly loose guesswork by the doctors in most cases, rather than being literally urgent; they have minimal fear of a C-section procedure today and liberally do them). This isn't uncommon, the developed world is frequently guilty of overdoing preventative & early detection medicine (we did it with mammograms, we did it with prostate cancer, and so on).
- UncleOxidant 6y ago
  Cause or effect, though? Were there less C-Sections because pregnant women had less stress?

eric_b 6y ago

Lockdowns are terrible for human mental health. We're not meant to live that way. I mean, we put people in prison as punishment because it sucks. I don't care what these people read in to the data - lockdowns are hurting everyone's mental health and making people act strangely. We know a lot about COVID now - who's most vulnerable, how likely people are to die, etc. What staggers me is that huge groups of people are clamoring for more lockdowns and reduced freedoms. It's like Stockholm syndrome writ large. There is so much fear being peddled by the media and others that people have lost all perspective.

msla 6y ago
> I don't care what these people read in to the data - lockdowns are hurting everyone's mental health and making people act strangely. "I'm right and you can't convince me otherwise" is the cause of a lot of suffering in the world.
- qubex 6y ago
  Since we can’t change their mind why are we even listening to this unilateral broadcasting of unsubstantiated and disproven-by-data comments?
devalgo 6y ago
You must be American. Becuase there's little push back in the rest of the Sane world. Governments are taking care of people's salaries who have lost their job so the only major downside is the mental health piece. The US has lost it's collective mind and meanwhile in places like New Zealand(up until a few days ago) have essentially beaten the virus and life is back to almost normal. The reality in the US is that we need a robust and strictly enforced lockdown for 6 weeks or frankly we aren't going to get back to normal until a major portion of the population has been vaccinated probably sometime in mid to late 2021.
aantix 6y ago
Agree. "People are dying". "People" isn't a useful cohort. Age/sex/location/lifestyle/environment/pre-existing conditions all contribute to our individual risk. Health/financial obligations/location/social patterns contribute to our individual risk tolerance. The CDC recommendations are not granular enough.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

tboyd47 6y ago

Headline is not complete. "After a rise in negative emotions at the start of the pandemic, wellbeing improved once lockdowns began – but not for everyone." That's the understatement of the year. Suicides, drug abuse, child sexual abuse, domestic violence, and food insecurity have risen sharply since the lockdown. Deaths of despair have already claimed more lives than COVID, even with the bogus death tallies. Yet we're all supposed to be okay with this because of some Google Trends data? I want to be far, far away from anyone who thinks like this. Like, catch me on the other side of the planet far.

rossdavidh 6y ago
"Deaths of despair have already claimed more lives than COVID..." is a pretty strong statement. I mostly agree that the headline seems highly questionable, but I'm wondering if you have a source for the "deaths of despair" totals?
- tboyd47 6y ago
  I said this because I heard it referenced on one of my favorite morning shows. I looked for the source and found the CDC director's webinar. "We’re seeing, sadly, far greater suicides now than we are deaths from COVID. We’re seeing far greater deaths from drug overdose that are above excess that we had as background than we are seeing the deaths from COVID." [0] I can't tell from his wording whether he's talking about just young people or all age groups, but the context suggests he's talking about young people. Unfortunately, neither the CDC nor any other agency has published the nationwide suicide totals for 2020 yet so I can't cross-reference the CDC director's statement. Searching for anything related to "deaths" on Google or DuckDuckGo within the past month (which I am increasingly seeing as a front for Google) only returns COVID-19 death information. --------------- [0] https://www.buckinstitute.org/covid-webinar-series-transcript-robert-redfield-md/ https://www.buckinstitute.org/covid-webinar-series-transcrip...

jariel 6y ago

Was it lockdowns? Or the beginning of the realisation that this is not the black plague come to wipe us out, and that it's going to affect mostly specific groups? Edit: what they should map is probably a 'fear index'. Watching NYC / Gov. Cuomo on CNN every day, talk about 'hospitals overflowing' in NY, thinking 'OMG that is what is going to happen where I live soon' - literally Army Medical ships being sent in for civilian purposes, daily news clips of increasing numbers of deaths, all of the unknown - that was scary. We're no longer 'living in fear', rather, come to accept the uncomfortable terms of social distancing, not going to work etc.. The tone in the daily news is completely different. Also, we are now over the first wave of 'cognisance' of the situation. 3 months ago what happened was utterly unimaginable to all of us. Literally all businesses closing their doors, sports cancelled, we were in 'shock'. We're not in 'shock' anymore, we're dealing with 'the new normal'.

rossdavidh 6y ago

Wow, my initial thought was, either this is a deeply flawed analysis, or I am just totally wired differently than other people. Lockdown was _awful_, and we didn't even do it as long in Texas as in many places. Many friends of mine have expressed a lot of feelings of rage, despair, etc. during the lockdown. Whoever the people are that felt better, I don't know them, or at least they don't talk to me about how they're feeling.

Taylor_OD 6y ago

This data is questionable at best but great headline for those who want to hope that we have solved COVID.

throwaway0a5e 6y ago
I would argue that this headline is greater for the people who want to hope we haven't solved COVID than those who want to hope we have.

bmitc 6y ago

Speak for yourselves. For anyone whose wellbeing improved, they likely have everything in place already. They have stable jobs, stable families, stable savings and income sources, people they are either able to see in their homes or regularly elsewhere, and are not affected by travel bans and other effects of the viral outbreak. My wellbeing is at an all-time low and has continued to deteriorate since January. My family is split across the world due to unnecessary travel bans. Everyone in this thread is saying how the lockdowns were unnecessary long term but then everyone is seemingly okay with the government killing people's jobs and splitting up families with travel bans that don't take anything into consideration. There's no reason why travel for family members and H1B workers and immigrants, especially those in extraneous situations, is still blocked when hotel quarantines could be put in place, just like they are for inter-country travel. Just in my circle alone, the U.S. has lost a dozen or so Chinese citizens who hold advanced degrees or who are doctors who were either forced back to China, wanted to go back (and get out of the U.S.), or can't come back to the U.S. Good luck with the brain drain since these people were working for U.S. hospitals and companies. Not only are we losing people who were already here and wanted to be here, we're going to lose countless more who would have come to the U.S. in the future. This will have consequences. My fiancée is locked out of the country. We can't sell her car because she's not here and there are policies in place that protect against the situation. Online car selling websites have auto-locked our account since she logs in China, and I log in from the U.S., and they won't re-open it as "you can't sell your car while on vacation" (direct quote). The title transfer process is difficult if not impossible while she's out of the country, and we need help, but the RMV is not responsive. If you can even find a phone number for the RMV, you call and then it states they have high call volume and then says to call back tomorrow and then automatically hangs up on you. We're paying for a car, including insurance, that just sits around and can't legally sell it without embarking on a process that could take months and capital to simply secure the title before even attempting to sell. People always support insurance companies as if they decide your premium based upon statistics and probability. So what's the probability that our car that just sits parked and is driven once every week or two gets damaged and why haven't our rates gone down to reflect this greatly reduced probability? Yet, if I got a ticket tomorrow, they'd have no problem raising the rates. My rent actually was increased in March, and rent everywhere seems as high or higher than before as I try to move due to noise issues with my neighbors. Our marriage is getting delayed by years due to this. We can't get through the travel bans or anything else because we're not officially married (we had planned on doing it immediately after coming back from China), and we can't get married unless we're together, yet you can enter into all sorts of other legal agreements remotely. Policies are not updating with the situations, if anything they're regressing, and everything is moving in molasses. Everything is taking at least twice as long as it did before. Prices are actually increasing for things. All the predatory behavior on people has increased and now people have a new excuse (COVID) on why everything doesn't work or is slow. If your wellbeing has improved during this time, good for you. For those of us where it hasn't, it has deteriorated exponentially. And my family is in the best of the worst cases. We still have our jobs, have places to stay, and have supportive families. I truly feel for those struggling. The narcissism of people to think that they're happier because their commute is gone is mindboggling, when people are dying or living as death on a daily basis due to everything going on.