Day 209: This Sort of Vague, Uneasy Feeling

Back in the height of the pandemic, CTV News reported on the phenomenon of losing track of time during lockdown. (PlagueBlog reminds readers that it's not a quarantine if you're not actually ill or the contact of a known ill person.)

Steve Joordens, a psychology professor in the department of Cognitive Neuroscience at the University of Toronto, described [daily routines] as a sort of “anchor” that gives people a sense of where they are in time.

“They are kind of like a rhythm to our lives,” he explained to CTVNews.ca during a telephone interview from Toronto on Tuesday. “They tell us where we are within a given day, you know if it's lunchtime, but also within the given week, you know if it's Thursday or Friday, they feel very different than a Monday or Tuesday do.”

When suddenly all of those rituals are gone, as in the case of a pandemic, Joordens said it’s easy for people to lose that sense of where they are in the workday or the workweek.

“They also lose sense of who they are,” he said. “This is what a lot of people kind of feel too, is that they feel a little adrift. They’re not really sure what they're supposed to be doing and they have this sort of vague, uneasy feeling.”

Although by now we may all have daily routines of going nowhere and doing nothing, but the article addressed that eventuality with the help of a Manitoba psychologist:

On the other hand, Abdulrehman said even those people who do develop a routine in quarantine may be susceptible to losing track of time if there isn’t enough variety within it.

“They don't know what day it is because it's the same thing every day,” he said.

This is all to say that the staff at PlagueBlog headquarters somehow forgot it was cities and towns day yesterday, so we're a bit behind with the cities and towns data. We have, however, updated last week's map to show Stop the Spread cities (outlined in maroon) and to include the old whole-pandemic case rates in the popup info (though not on the map). This week coming soon...

P.S. Massachusetts' cases are up three-tenths of a percentage point today. Our death toll has reached 9,008 (including presumptive cases). Here is the new daily/biweekly map:

(Pop out.)