Has Covid-19 Broken Our Sense Of Time?

Back in 1974 a rock group called ACE released a hit song called How Long Has This Been Going On....it was a sweet groove with lyrics that sort of fit this post on Corona-Time.

OK.  As of this writing it's been 102 long days of National Coronavirus Emergency.(seems so much longer already!)

"In December 2019, a novel (new) coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2 (“the virus”) was first detected in Wuhan, Hubei Province, People’s Republic of China, causing outbreaks of the coronavirus disease COVID-19 that has now spread globally.  The Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) declared a public health emergency on January 31, 2020, under section 319 of the Public Health Service Act (42 U.S.C. 247d), in response to COVID-19."

Dealing with the Coronavirus has altered our sense of time.

You might have noticed the days all bleed into one another during quarantine, As Mashable reports, University of Houston psychology Professor Melanie Rudd   says “We’ve got this objective time construct, measured by clocks and calendars. But that doesn’t tell the whole story. We all get 24 hours in a day, 365 days in a year. But we all experience the same amount of time very differently.”

The disrupter in all of this with our usual sense of time is "uncertainty".

We normally run on what we would call our normal schedules which give us the ability to expect and to plan.  Without certainty we are in limbo.

The pandemic halted work and school schedules, stopped professional sports, and could even “cancel” summer this year. Events, activities, season act as markers in tracking the progression of time so the lack of activities surrounding these events makes it more difficult for our brains to keep track of time.

Science says the pandemic time warp won’t last forever, the cognitive effects of its interruption could stay with us for a long time.  Professor Rudd says we are living through an event, like 9/11 or John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and it will leave a permanent mark, and change the way we see the era we live in. She explains, “There is such a distinct separation between the ‘new normal’ and ‘the before.’ That’s part of why it feels like time is dragging on right now.”