Pandemic sheds new light on struggle with loneliness

The stranger’s call came when Dianne Green needed it most.

Alone in the home where she’d raised four kids, grieving recently deceased relatives, too fearful of COVID- 19 to see her grandkids and great-grandbabies, she had never felt lonelier.

Then, one day last spring, her cell phone lit up.

The cheerful voice on the line was Janine Blezien, a nurse from a Chicago hos- pital’s “friendly caller” program, created during the pandemic to help lonely seniors cope with isolation. Blezien, 57, lives with her rescue dogs, Gordy and Kasey, in a suburban brick bungalow, six miles from Green’s two-flat apartment in the city.

“She wasn’t scripted. She seemed like she was genu- inely caring,” said Green, 68, a retired dispatcher for the city’s water department. The two women started talking often and became friends without ever setting eyes on each other.

“I called her my angel.” Rampant loneliness existed long before COVID- 19, and experts believe it’s now worse. Evidence suggests it can damage health and shorten lives as much as obesity and smoking. In addition to psychological distress, some studies suggest loneliness may cause physi- cal changes including inflam- mation and elevated stress hormones that may tighten blood vessels and increase blood pressure.

Yet loneliness as a public health issue “has kind of been swept under the rug,” said Dr. Ada Stewart, president of the American Asso- ciation of Family Physicians. There’s no formal medical diagnosis and no mandate to screen for it.

A month before a global pandemic was declared, a National Academies report showed that one-third of U.S. adults aged 45 and up were lonely. Surveys have surprisingly found higher rates in younger adults.

A British online survey in 2018 of more than 55,000 people in 237 countries found that loneliness affected 40% of young adults, compared with 27% in those older than 75. Rates were high- est in countries including the United States that prize individual success over col- lectivism.

The true impact from the pandemic is yet to be seen.

U.S. Surgeon General Vivek Murthy, who has called loneliness a public health crisis, points out that much of the world including the U.S. “was struggling with remarkably high levels of loneliness before COVID-19.”

“The pandemic has shed new light on this struggle and reminded us we need each other,” he said.

The United Kingdom in 2018 created a parliament position called the minister of loneliness, believed to be the world’s first. In February, Japan appointed the second.