WELCOME TO THE `NEW' NEW NORMAL
As the responsibility for keeping safe shifts from governments to us, what rules will we live by? It's a challenging next phase of the COVID-19 pandemic, Susan Schwartz reports.
The effect of no more rules will be that people are confused. People are tired. I am a good citizen and I respect the rules — and even I don't know what they are anymore.”
For more than a year the Quebec government imposed rules, dictating strict limits on how many could gather in our homes or be in the grocery store at the same time, mandating curfews and prohibiting us from visiting loved ones in hospital or long-term care.
Restrictions were relaxed heading into summer and now, as fall approaches, the government seems to be moving toward a more de-confined society — one in which the vaccine passport functions as a control measure: all this as life moves indoors, where the risk of infection with the coronavirus causing COVID-19 increases — particularly the highly contagious Delta variant.
The government recently reintroduced mask mandates for students but otherwise seems to be leaving it mainly to us to decide how to keep safe. How will Montrealers respond to this shift in responsibility? What new ground rules will we live by? What will the psychological effect be of fewer clearly laid out rules? Is it prudent for the government to be stepping back as cases rise?
Most of all: What will this “new ” new normal look like?
At the start of the pandemic, “the government said, `Wear a mask' and `Stay home,' ” said Roxane de la Sablonnière, a professor of psychology at the Université de Montréal. “It was mandatory. The responsibility was solely at the government level.
“There was some debate, but people mostly complied. They respected the rules, which were clear and coherent,” she said. “Now the government is saying `Get vaccinated,' so it is in our hands. The majority will get vaccinated, but then what? I am not aware of what the message will be.”
The government is “going down the road of letting people decide” how to stay safe, but the eminent social psychologist and researcher questions whether the responsibility should rest on the shoulders of citizens.
“When guidelines are clear and coherent, people listen and they come to internalize them,” said de la Sablonnière. “People believed it was important to protect themselves and to protect others and they wore masks and washed their hands: That is an injunctive norm — something you have internalized: You think it is important: like recycling. Like eating well.”
But there's another powerful norm. “What you do and the vast majority of people do is a descriptive norm. We want to be loved by others, to be respected by others. You may think it is important to wear a mask, but if you see most people around you are not wearing masks, you might also stop wearing a mask.”
The government has an important role to play “or there will be a disintegration of descriptive norms,” she said.
It should choose a couple of
clear rules intended to keep the virus from propagating — rules reinforced by research and based on data and, even if it is not mandatory to follow them, “hammer that message home,” said de la Sablonnière.
“The effect of no more rules will be that people are confused. People are tired. I am a good citizen and I respect the rules — and even I don't know what they are anymore.”
That the government has been “quite authoritarian” in how it managed the pandemic until recently “is not a problem in and of
itself,” said Simon Bacon, a professor of health, kinesiology and applied physiology at Concordia University. “But what they have not done alongside that is provide the information to allow people to make decisions. They haven't explained the rationale, the benefits. They have conditioned everybody just to react.”
All along there has been “a lack of engagement from government,” and in the process, it has “sort of taken away people's sense of responsibility,” he said.
“This has been long and hard and now we have gone from very strict measures to being told everything is open — without any tempering of the context.”
Alberta native Emily Moore, a post-doctoral fellow in clinical psychology at Stanford University who in August completed her PH.D. at Mcgill University, said she finds the shifting of responsibility away from government “quite stressful.”
In July she was in California, where despite the fact that most counties don't require masks indoors, “everyone was wearing a mask,” she said. “Then I arrived in Alberta to a huge contrast currently where you are the odd one out if you are wearing a mask. I've had people make comments about the fact that I'm wearing one despite being vaccinated.
“It's hard to trust that other people have our collective well-being in mind when they're refusing to be vaccinated, spreading misinformation, not wearing masks, etc.,” Moore said. Most public health restrictions in Alberta were lifted July 1.
“Getting stuck in that headspace can become overwhelming and unproductive.
That's where I try to remind myself that the best use of my energy is to focus on my personal control. My ability to choose to do things to keep myself safe and advocate for close others to do the same despite the removal of black-andwhite rules feels empowering and helps me manage the uncertainty.”
For Shelby Levine, a doctoral student in psychology at Mcgill, “it's so important to have our bubbles we feel safe and happy with, to trust our own resilience — that we are competent and able to handle the disappointment, challenge or frustration that comes our way — and to not feel bad when we feel bad: This has been tough on everyone.”
The pandemic meant that her wedding, originally planned for September 2020, was postponed three times before she and Michael Frohlich were married Aug. 15 in Ottawa before 60 fully vaccinated guests and another 100 on Zoom.
“We have autonomy at this stage — to choose the vaccine, to choose to protect others and even, with the election, to choose leaders who will actively help keep our communities safe,” Levine said.
Whereas some are happy to take on the shift in responsibility from government, “others are apprehensive, with good reason,” said Anne Holding, who is beginning a post-doctoral fellow in psychology at New York University; she defended her PHD thesis at Mcgill over Zoom not long after the COVID -19 pandemic was declared in March 2020. “Especially for those who are concerned about the vaccine or those who have health reasons for not taking it, it is a really uncertain time,” she said.
Concordia's Bacon is co-lead of an international COVID-19 behavioural study with researchers in more than 25 countries. What emerged in August from data about vaccine intention collected from 900 Canadians is that most vaccinated people gave altruism as the predominant reason for their choice, he said: protecting society. When unvaccinated people were asked what factors would influence their decision to be vaccinated, “the concern was mostly about themselves.”
In Quebec, “the talk has all been about getting everyone vaccinated — and COVID is over. This isn't really what is going to happen, or is happening now,” he said.
“A vaccine-only strategy won't stop COVID.”
The probability that someone fully vaccinated won't get COVID is high — 80 to 90 per cent — but “being vaccinated doesn't mean you can't get COVID or pass it on,” Bacon said. “The vaccines have been developed to stop hospitalizations and deaths — not transmission.”
Although fully vaccinated people can still get COVID, they are less likely to be symptomatic, he explained. “So you have a roomful of people in a bar or restaurant — and people who think they are safe because they are vaccinated. But if they pass the virus on to an unvaccinated person, that person is probably getting COVID and probably getting sick.
“Has any of this messaging been given out? No.”
Despite many large outdoor gatherings last summer, there was little impact on COVID numbers — probably because it was the original virus circulating, not the Delta variant,
and because many restrictions were still in place, he said. “Twelve months later, our level of lockdown and social interaction has changed completely. We are seeing large outdoor gatherings, along with a reduction in restrictions — and we are having four times the level of cases,” Bacon said.
“You might be feeling safe but you are much more likely to get infected than you were last year — even if you are vaccinated.”
With cases rising, the government backtracked in late August on a position staked out in June and announced a mask mandate for students in primary and secondary schools in nine regions, including Montreal and Laval. Also in August, the government said masks in post-secondary institutions would be mandatory — after saying earlier that they wouldn't be.
Considerable evidence exists for the effectiveness of masks in reducing coronavirus infection, said Bacon, and normalizing mask-wearing behaviour is an important behavioural concept.
“As a society, we are going to have to work out how to make masks more acceptable,” he said. “My perspective is to wear masks as much as possible. The more people wear a mask, the better off we will all be.”
An anti-vaccine passport protest on Aug. 14 in Montreal and the Pride march the following day, each of which drew thousands of people, “were dangerous events,” he said. Few of the thousands of participants wore masks or socially distanced.
“What the government has not done is empower people with the knowledge and freedom to have the capacity to make a good decision
We have to decode what the government is telling us and that creates a lot of stress for otherwise law-abiding, civilized people.”
and not a bad one,” Bacon said.
“There is no `safe' size of a gathering. Any time you have a lot of people gathering who can't socially distance, there is a risk. The risk increases the more people who are there — and the risk is significantly increased when you go from outdoors to indoors. I think we all still need to be vigilant and exercise caution in all situations.”
What makes deciding about new ground rules tricky is “that the current health situation is filled with uncertainty,” said Richard Koestner, a professor in Mcgill's psychology department who has been studying personality and human motivation for more than three decades. “Uncertainty is always difficult to manage psychologically and I think this is a case where we have compound uncertainty.”
He cited some of the myriad questions facing Quebecers: What will it be like for those returning to work in person? How will our children manage back in school with the Delta variant? What policies will the government mandate? Will my employer have a vaccination mandate? A mask mandate?
“As strict government mandates fall away and it is left to us to self-regulate, it means thinking through what we have done since March 2020 — and asking ourselves what we are comfortable doing now.
“People have very different life situations and this will influence the pressures they feel and how they are able to cope,” Koestner said. “We are worried about self-regulating, but those of us in positions of responsibility are also concerned about our parents, our kids, our students.”
It means “so much more decision-making and so many more demands on our self-control,” and that's tough, he said. Each of us has a reservoir of self-control “and almost all of us are maxed out. We are drained.”
From a mental health angle, “it has been a very trying time for people, to be sequestered, working from home,” said Dr. Rob Whitley, associate professor in Mcgill's department of psychiatry and an investigator at the Douglas Research Centre focused on how social and economic circumstances influence mental health. “Many have family abroad they haven't seen for nearly two years. We know that social contact brings a lot of meaning to people's lives; not having it can affect our mental health.”
“We have been looking forward to this moment for many months — and yet it is not particularly clear what we can and can't do,” he said. “And it is not helped by the ambiguity and the fact that the regulations are changing and then changing back, by ambiguity around the Delta variant, or by the situation in all provinces not being the same.”
“We have to decode what the government is telling us and that creates a lot of stress for otherwise law-abiding, civilized people.”
During the confinement, we all knew where we'd be on weekends: at home. “Now people will once again have the responsibility to set their own agenda and walk along their own path — and, psychologically, that is tougher,” Whitley said.
With regulations diminishing, we have much more choice. “Choice is one of the great things we enjoy in a free society — but choice is also threatening and can present a lot of stress when it is overwhelming.
“As a consequence of the new normal, there is a liberation — and when a liberation happens, people can go off the rails. We are going to see a lot of high spirits, a lot of merriment — and also a lot of social relationships that need to be rekindled.”
The confinement gave introverts an excuse. “Now that excuse
is gone. I think that, for introverts who work in occupations where they need to be present and to interact with the public, it will be a difficult transition,” Whitley said.
Ross Otto, an assistant professor in Mcgill's department of psychology, said he has “the sense everyone has found their own level of what they are comfortable with.
“I remember going to a bar to watch the Habs,” he said. “I was, like, `I am in a room filled with people enjoying themselves.' ”
One area he studies is risk-taking. “You have people who like to ride motorcycles and others who like to knit. These risk attitudes are fairly independent across domains,” he said. “Just because I know you trade in cryptocurrency doesn't mean I know how afraid you are of public spaces.”
One anecdotal observation Otto has made about risk and pandemic life is that “of the people you know, you didn't know how to predict who would be a scared shut-in.”
Montreal clinical psychologist and mindfulness teacher Dr. Joe Flanders suggested there will be “a differentiated response” to the new normal.
“The distribution on one end is people who are afraid and, on the other end, people who are not afraid at all and are annoyed by the restrictions on their personal freedoms.
“The more conservative types will get together virtually and, at the other end of the distribution, you will have people gathering and living their lives in a more liberal way — with the bulk of the people in the middle,” said Flanders, founder and director of the Mindspace clinic.
Any type of change — even positive change — is stressful, said Bianca Lafrenière, an honours psychology student at Mcgill and mother of two school-aged sons. “Everybody's situation is different and each person has their own thoughts, opinions, feelings and set ways of coping.”
Some behaviours are helpful in any situation: engaging in physical activity every week, for instance, getting enough sleep, taking breaks, even short walks, throughout the day “to reset thoughts and breathe fresh air,” and having a healthy support system, said Lafrenière, who has worked as a life coach.
“The other important part about managing change is living in the present moment and controlling what you can control,” she said.
She is fully vaccinated, wears a mask, washes her hands frequently and practises social distancing and believes her chance of getting COVID is low. She is aware that, should cases continue to rise, stricter measures could again be imposed by the government. “However, that is out of our control — and it is not worth the stress to worry about the future until it happens.”
Meanwhile, “focusing on more positive aspects of the present moment and controlling your own behaviours is more helpful — and a lot less stressful,” Lafrenière said.