Pandemic Timescape 2020-23: A Synthesis

Novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) disease (COVID-19) became a pandemic early 2020 and a salient public health emergency and psychosocial shock event. From Wuhan in China the virus spread around the globe over 2020 and significantly influenced the lives of almost all humans on their planet, if only via indirect (economic) consequences and government control, and this study provides a synthesis to describe the timescape 2020-23. Within two years >663 million humans were infected and >21.3 million had died due to Covid and secondary excess mortality, and >70% of all humans were subjected to various societal restrictions and lockdowns, such as ~4.5 billion humans over may 2020 alone. The societal lockdowns and major socioeconomic perturbations over 2020-23 coincided with a collective drop in life satisfaction and mental health and well-being, especially more anxiety, depression, suicides, and domestic violence against children and women. Coronavirus exploited social contact and transport, urbanization, liberalism, anxiety, and societal lockdowns, and elicited the strongest global economic perturbation in a century (-3% world GDP). Humans showed marked emotional, cognitive, physical, social, and societal responses over 2020-23, and the collective focused on virus mutations, vaccines, breakthrough infections, long-Covid, and more stress, loneliness, polarization, demonstrations, riots, violence, and conspiracy theories, with more authoritarianism and government coups around the globe (e.g., US Insurrection, 2021). When Russia invaded Ukraine (≥22w8) war returned to Europe. The timescape 2020-23 showed major individual, sociocultural, geopolitical, and technological changes, from the rise of TikTok and Artifical Intelligence to #BLM and second wave of #MeToo, which affected the collective psyche and discourse, and coronavirus and overt nuclear threat coincided with a series of natural disasters and record heatwaves that confirmed humans had created a #ClimateCrisis of planetary proportions. The human industrial revolution (>1830) had pushed the planetary climate into uncharted territory in 2023. The pandemic years 2020-22 were the hardest and most stressful years that most humans had experienced in their lifetime, and affected a generation of young humans. Over 2023 the collective return to “normalcy” was hampered by an European war, cost-of-living crisis, and climate disasters that made humanity realize the world had changed. The pandemic timescape 2020-23 was an unique period in time and a natural experiment to learn about human psychology and collective preparedness, as engagement with natural hazards is a master task of civilizations. Psychological theories could be examined across contexts and in diverse samples, often exposed to comparable collective stressors of personal significance. Such perturbations can help to study human stress dynamics and complex social systems, beyond what can be learned from more stable periods. The collective changes and interconnected consequential events over 2020-23 made this timescape a mini "Axial-period" that shapes the decades ahead.