The impact of covid-19 on the physical health of the world’s citizens is extraordinary by mid-May there were upward of four million cases spread across more than 180 countries The pandemic’s effect on mental health could be even more far-reaching At one point roughly one third of the planet’s population was under orders to stay home That means 2 6 billion people—more than were alive during World War II—were experiencing the emotional and financial reverberations of this new coronavirus “[The lockdown] is arguably the largest psychological experiment ever conducted,” wrote health psychologist Elke Van Hoof of Free University of Brussels-VUB in Belgium The results of this unwitting experiment are only beginning to be calculated © 2020, Scientific American Inc All rights reserved
The biggest psychological experiment: What can the pandemic teach us about how people respond to adversity?