Despite Reopening Some Will Continue to Quarantine

keeping the quarantine going. Thanks for joining us, Allen, Thanks for having me. As the country is starting to reopen, people are starting to get back out there, there's still a big segment of people that are isolating, and we're getting into three months now. Some of these people can be doing because they're elderly, they might be medically vulnerable, or just scared to get out and back to normally

get scared of the coronavirus and what it can do. Alan, you wrote an article about how, really, you know, humans aren't meant to be alone so much, and there's still the this segment of people that are isolating that haven't really had that human contact for quite some time now, So Alan, tell us a little bit more about it. Yeah, it was interesting. I mean as we started seeing all these different states moved to reopen their economies. You know, this isn't a analysis of whether that's a good idea

or bad. It's just we realized that there are just thousands and thousands, possibly millions of people who have been isolated all this time and who have no intentions of joining that reopening parade. And it's just been fascinating talking to these folks just kind of what they're experiencing. As you can imagine a lot of depression, a lot of isolation,

a lot of missing the grandkids and their children. But it was really good to see some flickers of hope in there, like things that they're doing to kind of get through. And I can tell you just personally, I learned a lot of lessons from from these folks about how to get through this. Tell us a little bit about some of this, because there was a study that was being done about how quickly this forced isolation from the pandemic was affecting people. You know, you spoke to

a few people that were part of this study. Yeah, it's you know, I spoke to this one professor at a b y U or Her name is Julianna Holt Lunstead, and she has studied loneliness as part of her career, so she had studied this well before this pandemic came on. And so what they found previously was that it's not just a mental thing, isolation loneliness. It doesn't just affect you mentally. It's something that can have physical effects on people.

It can raise your blood pressure, it can you know that anxiety, that constant, that that stress that you may have from being alone may lead to all sorts of physical problems. And they find increased more rapid mortality among people who are isolated, who are lonely, So they're quickly diving in to see how quickly those kind of symptoms can appear in people based on their isolation. It's not

something they've studied before before. It was just sort of like, Okay, this person is isolated, let's look at how they do compared to somebody who's not um. But now they're trying to ramp up and it's an international effort with researchers from around the country trying to see how quickly those kind of sin THMs can really start materializing in people. Is it a month, is at two months, is at three months. So they're they're trying to take a close

look at what that's doing. And we hear a lot about sort of the mental problems that come with it. You know, just straight depression is something that a lot of people have described when they're in those situations, and those are very easy to identify. Those are mental things that we can see. But it's that question of how it affects these people mentally or physically, excuse me, and whether that can lead to some you know, pretty drastic

effects on them down the road. Yeah, and this is an interesting situation in that some of these uh, moments of isolation, they come on gradually. Maybe you you know, loved one dies off, things like that. Some of these things can happen kind of gradually. And this was as you mentioned the article forced isolation, This happened at the drop of a hat in March. You know, we we

even know the date that it happened for everybody. So yeah, how quickly this stuff could affect you physically is going to be interesting to see what happens when it all

pans out. And you also write about you know, you spoke to a lot of people, you know, how they were dealing with their isolation, and a lot of them said that, you know, they were finding certain reasons for hope, whether it be you know, I need to force myself to get out and see my grandson, or I just need to get out and and experience nature and kind of center myself that way. There was a lot of

different stories you came across. Yeah, it was interesting, and there's a there's a ton more examples that we couldn't get into the article, but it's you know, one of the ones we mentioned was this seventy seven year old woman who for eight years has been trying to write a book and finally it was during this quarantine that she got the piece in quiet that she needed to

find the finished Um. So that was just a really you know, you know a lot of these people I expected to speak to it would be sort of very you know, sad interviews talking about just what they're enduring. But really most of the people I spoke to, um, you know, talked about finding those things that to to to sort of brighten their day, to help them get through it. M One gentleman who lived in Georgia, who had moved to the small mountain town and really hadn't

gone up into the mountains all that much. Kind of one day he just realized, wait a second, why did I move up here in the first place, and just took a dray I've been in the mountains, jumped into a river, uh, and just said he had the time

of his life. As states are opening up, and all the people that you spoke to, did you get a sense that most of them were ready to get back to it or they're still going to continue to tasilate since the once I spoke to, we're doing so for very specific reasons, being elderly, um, having some sort of pre existing medical condition. Most of the people I spoke to just are not going anywhere. Some of them just don't trust their local governments that they're going to put

in place a responsible reopening plan. A lot of them talked about like, hey, I went out to the store one time and half the people weren't wearing masks. I ain't going back out there again, you know. And so it's this combination of suspicion of either the local government

or their neighbors of not taking this seriously enough. But for a lot of them, it really sounded like they had sort of okay now that they've settled into this, now that they've kind of figured out how they're going to get by, now that they've figured out how to get food, how to how to entertain themselves, how to keep themselves, saying during this, they just don't see a reason why they're gonna suddenly break all that, jump out into a restaurant and just risk being exposed when we

just have so many cases still out there in the country. Alan Gomez, reporter for USA Today. Thank you very much for joining us. Thank you so much for having me. I'm Oscar Ramirez and this has been your daily Coronavirus EPTE. Don't forget that. For today's big news stories, you can check me out on the Daily Dive podcast every Monday to Friday. So follow us on my Heart Radio or wherever you get your podcast