Opinion: Covid still warps our sense of time

Four years after lockdowns began we are still learning about pandemic hangovers. Photo / Getty Images

OPINION

The other day I had a disturbing conversation with my doctor. I had gone to see him about a minor ailment when he suddenly started asking me about some sort of herbal pill.

“What?” I said blankly. You know, he said, the ones I told you to buy from the health food store that you told me worked well.

“I did?” I said, certain the poor man had mixed me up with a patient who believed in homeopathic guff.

“You did,” he said, swivelling around to his computer screen to read out a gushing email I had sent to thank him for recommending a herbal tablet I had called a “blessedly welcome” success.

As glints of memory returned, I asked him when I had sent the email, and in an instant all was revealed. It was 2019, before the first pandemic lockdown that began in the UK almost exactly four years ago.

For reasons I cannot fully explain, events in my life — and work — around that time can still sometimes feel as if they happened at least a decade earlier.

Equally, I am surprised to learn that meetings or trips that I could have sworn happened last year actually took place as far back as 2021.

The way our sense of time was warped during the pandemic has been well documented across the world. Italians thought time dragged. Some Britons thought it sped up. In the Australian state of Victoria, a lockdown hotspot, researchers compared the distortion with jet lag.

But it is almost a year since the World Health Organisation declared Covid-19 was no longer a global public health emergency, so shouldn’t we have reset by now? Not necessarily, say academics.

Covid has left a “long tail for society” that is still affecting how we value and feel about time, says Ruth Ogden, a professor of the psychology of time at the UK’s Liverpool John Moores University.

Her research during the pandemic showed that more than 80 per cent of people in the UK felt time passed faster or slower than normal, depending in part on how sad, bored or content they were.

But distortion was also caused by the way the pandemic upended routines that helped to anchor us in time, she told me last week. So not remembering when and what I had told a doctor about a herbal pill might not have been surprising after a period when “everything’s lost in time”.

I hope she is correct because other researchers have just come up with less agreeable explanations for poor post-pandemic memories, like a loss of IQ.

Brain fog is a Covid complication that has been well documented, especially for those suffering the hell of long Covid whose symptoms last months.

But a study published last month suggests that even people who completely recovered from what felt like a mild dose of Covid might have suffered a cognitive deficit equal to three IQ points, compared with someone who was never infected.

The finding surprised the authors of the research, which did have limitations. Covid sufferers’ results were not compared with their own past scores but with those of people who had never been infected.

Still, other scientists have made some disturbing calculations about the study’s findings. The average IQ in the US is about 100, says Dr Ziyad Al-Aly, a long Covid expert, and an IQ below 70 generally suggests a level of intellectual disability that can require “significant societal support”.

He estimates a three-point downward shift would increase the number of US adults with an IQ below 70 from 4.7 million to 7.5 million, meaning an extra 2.8mn adults needing a lot of social care.

This is a potential problem, for those adults themselves and for their relatives or carers.

And it is just one of many pandemic hangovers that deserve attention. They include the impact of remote working on a US commercial property market where the owners of one New York building recently offloaded their stake for just US$1. Or the effect of lockdowns on students, young and old. Or the rising use of digital technologies spurred by the pandemic.

That is not an exhaustive list of problems and of course the lasting effects are nowhere near as bad as the exhausting Covid crisis that unleashed them. Ultimately, that is something we must never forget.

Written by: Pilita Clark

© Financial Times