What are people searching to help them cope with COVID-19 isolation?
- According to a new study, there was an influx of internet searches for mental health symptoms during the beginning of the pandemic, and this has slowly trended downwards.
- Researchers looked at whether mitigation policies correlated with Google searches for terms associated with depression and anxiety between January and June of 2020. Additionally, they monitored search terms for in-home activities.
- While searches for antidepressants and suicide did rise when social distancing measures were being implemented, research shows the search terms exercise and cooking also rose.
The beginning of COVID-19 in America:
- On January 21, 2020, the CDC (Center for Disease Control) confirmed the first case of CoV-SARS-2 (COVID-19) in the United States.
- On February 3, 2020 (three days after the World Health Organization declared a Global Health Emergency), a public health emergency was declared in the United States.
- A little over a month later, on March 13, 2020, a national emergency was declared.
- Over the next few months, various parts of the world (including the United States) would implement various levels of precautions: stay-at-home orders and restrictions to try to curb the spread of the virus.
- By the end of May 2020, the United States COVID-19 death toll passed 100,000.
Within four months, the COVID-19 pandemic changed everything, and our society was faced with unprecedented circumstances. (For a full timeline of COVID-19 in America, click here.) While researchers were hard at work attempting to learn more information about the virus and potentially come up with a vaccine, the mental health toll of the pandemic became noticeable.
According to a new study, there was an influx of internet searches for mental health symptoms during the beginning of the pandemic, and this has slowly trended downwards.
Study co-author Bita Fayaz Farkhad, PhD., explains to Psychiatry and Behavioral Health Learning Network: "We wanted to study how serious the mental health impact of the mitigation phase was during the initial COVID-19 outbreak last spring. Did it go beyond people feeling anxious or disheartened? Was it long-lasting, and did it increase suicide ideation and the need for medical treatment for depression?"
Mental health internet searches throughout the COVID-19 pandemic
This is one of many studies that have examined the mental health impact of COVID-19 isolation orders.
Photo by Maridav on Adobe Stock
In this study, researchers looked at whether mitigation policies correlated with Google searches for terms associated with depression and anxiety. Additionally, they monitored search terms for in-home activities. Researchers covered the time span from January 2020 to June 2020.
Two previous studies have examined the mental health effects of stay-at-home orders.
The first study (Hamermesh, 2020) used a simulation where time spent alone from the 2012-2013 American Time Use Survey forecasted negative impacts of the stay-at-home orders on happiness.
The second study (Brodeur et al,. 2020) examined the effects of the stay-at-home orders on mental health symptoms related to searches on Google. In this case, there were reported increases in searches relating to the following terms:
- "Boredom"
- "Sadness"
- "Loneliness"
- "Worry"
In this study, limited social contact had people searching terms such as "isolation" and "worry."
Findings from this study indicated that social limits (on restaurants and bars, for example) and stay-at-home orders correlated with immediate increases in searches for the terms "isolation" and "worry" - but the effects within a few weeks.
The beginning of the pandemic showed significant spikes in mental health symptom searches.
"At the outset of the pandemic, consistent with prior research, social distancing policies correlated with a spike in searches about how to deal with isolation and worry, which shouldn't be surprising," said co-author Dolores Albarracín, Ph.D. "Generally speaking, if you have a pandemic or an economic shock, that's going to produce its own level of anxiety, depression, and negative feelings, and we had both with COVID-19."
Within two to four weeks of peaking, however, such searches tapered off, the study showed.
Experts weigh in: time spent at home could be beneficial.
Why would mental health-related searches taper off when the pandemic was still raging on? This study found that more time spent with family (or working from home, taking up new hobbies due to isolation) because of the stay-at-home orders could have lead to improvements in health and may counteract any potential negative health effect of the isolation policies.
It's also important to note that not all changes in mental health searches could be in response to the isolation policies being enforced. Historically, infectious diseases have been responsible for the greatest human death tolls and function as a massive stressor on society as a whole.
Both positive and negative Google searches rose during the pandemic.
While searches for "antidepressants" and "suicide" did rise at times when social distancing measures were being implemented, research shows the search terms "exercise" and "cooking" also rose. This suggests that people were actively searching for ways to combat the negative feelings the isolation measures brought out.
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If you were hoping, based on the title, that I was going to describe the time I saw strange lights moving at inexplicable speeds across the sky, then I am about to disappoint you. This column is actually about my experience in the public spotlight talking publicly about the connection between UFOs and extraterrestrial life. It was quite a ride.
Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence
On May 30, 2021, I wrote an op-ed in the New York Times titled "I'm a Physicist Who Studies Aliens. U.F.O's Don't Impress Me." I don't get to write titles for the op-ed pieces that I write for the Times — or most other places for that matter — but, as provocative as it was, I think it captured the essence of my point. As a scientist involved in the search for life and "techno-signatures" on exoplanets, I think a lot about what constitutes a good data set for that search. In other words, what kind of data would allow me to make the extraordinary claim that my colleagues and I have detected life and a civilization on another world?
The answer had better be "some really damn good data." By that, I mean we would need to take measurements that gave us strong and unambiguous evidence for the conclusion that a particular signal comes from a technologically advanced civilization. My main point in the op-ed was that no matter how intriguing those navy UFO sightings may be — and they are interesting — they don't provide the extraordinary evidence that we need to conclude that aliens are visiting us. My arguments are in the op-ed if you want to see them. What I want to focus on here is what happened after that argument appeared in the press.
The UFO brigade
Within an hour or so, my email and Twitter feed began to light up. By the end of the day, I was getting more messages about the piece than almost anything I had ever written before. Some of the messages affirmed the argument I was making. The majority, however, wanted me to know how wrong I was. These fell into two categories.
There was a fair amount of "the-government-knows-but-won't-tell-us" kind of narrative. Lots of these messages were pretty mean.
Some people wanted me to know that UFOs — or as the government calls them, Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAPs) — didn't need to be connected to aliens for them to be of interest. I had however made this exact point in my piece.
I have no problem with people wanting to have those navy sightings (and others) studied scientifically and openly. My colleagues on the NASA techno-signature grant made this point in an excellent Washington Post op-ed. I think the process of vetting those sightings would greatly help show the public exactly how science works. These days, we have a real problem with science denial, and anything that lets folks understand "what science knows and how it knows it" would be helpful.
Credit: IgorZh / 280582371 via Adobe Stock
But many folks (on Twitter and elsewhere) held that the connection between UFOs and aliens had already been made. I got floods of links to one video or website after another, the vast majority of which were people describing something they had seen in the sky. As I said in the op-ed, there really isn't much science you can do with personal testimony. One can't get accurate measurements of velocity or distance or mass or any of the other basic data that a physicist would need to tell if something really was moving in a way that's impossible for human technology.
Some folks reached out because they had seen a UFO themselves. I totally understand that these people would want someone to take their reports seriously. I would never tell them that they did not have their experiences. What I can say, however, is that there's nothing a scientist can do to transform the description of that experience into data that we would need to reach the extraordinary conclusion that they had seen evidence for extraterrestrial life.
The truth is out there
But a significant fraction of what I saw coming across Twitter and elsewhere was just pure vehemence. These folks were absolutely certain that UFOs were alien visitors. There was a fair amount of "the-government-knows-but-won't-tell-us" kind of narrative. Lots of these messages were pretty mean. I got the sense that, for these folks, no public investigation — no matter how open and transparent — would be satisfying unless it reached the conclusion that they already believed. This, of course, is the opposite of science.
So, it was an interesting week. My brief time in the UFO limelight (I did many interviews on places like CNN, BBC, etc.) showed me a lot about how people view the question. Since I am so deeply involved with techno-signature science, I felt it was important to try to explain how the science of life and the universe works as a science.
But I don't really want to spend a whole lot more time in that limelight. It was kind of exhausting, in large part because of the vehemence of the true believers. I will follow whatever happens after the government's report comes out with interest. But my bet (and every researcher makes a bet when they choose their research topics) is that the data I need to know about life elsewhere in the universe will come from telescopes, not jet fighters.
This following is an excerpt from Viruses, Pandemics, and Immunity by Arup K. Chakraborty and Andrey S. Shaw. Reprinted with Permission from The MIT PRESS. Copyright 2021.
Koch's Postulates, Anthrax, Tuberculosis, and Cholera
Robert Koch was born in Germany in 1843. His father was a mining engineer. He taught himself to read by the time he was five years old, and was a brilliant student from a young age. After a brief time studying natural sciences in college, he decided to pursue a career in medicine. Koch held positions as a physician in various capacities in Poland, Berlin, and other places, including service as a doctor during the Franco-Prussian War. Koch also developed a deep interest in basic scientific research. Today, we would consider him a clinician-scientist, someone who tries to understand clinical aspects of diseases using basic scientific principles. Anthrax is a disease that affects both animals and humans, and was a problem in Koch's time. Koch showed that, for a wide variety of animals, he could transfer disease from one animal to another by transferring blood from the infected animal to the healthy animal. All animals thus infected exhibited the same disease symptoms, and had the same rod-shaped bacteria in their blood. This convinced Koch that this specific bacterium caused anthrax. Koch's work on anthrax was the first to associate a specific microbe with a particular disease.
Credit: Wikipedia / Public domain
It was known that healthy cattle got sick if they grazed on fields long after anthrax-infected cattle had grazed there. This was a puzzle because Koch had determined that anthrax bacteria in the blood of infected animals lost their infectivity after a few days. He decided that he would need to watch the bacteria over time and would need to develop methods to grow the bacteria in the lab. Koch developed methods to keep bacteria growing for days. This process is called "growing bacteria in culture" — "culture" refers to the medium in which the bacteria are grown. This method is now used millions of times every day around the world. When a doctor suspects that you have a bacterial infection, a small sample is collected from the suspected site of infection (e.g., a wound) and is sent to the pathology department. If the sample contains bacteria, they grow out in culture and can be identified. The doctor can use such a positive test result to prescribe the right treatment to kill the identified bacteria.
With the technique to culture bacteria in hand, using his careful observational skills, Koch noted that on occasion anthrax bacteria would convert into opaque spheres. He showed that these spheres could be dried and then reconstituted weeks later by immersing them into fluid. He suspected that the bacteria, if converted into the dry spheres, or spores, could remain dormant for years. Indeed, this is the case, and they can cause bacterial infection when ingested by uninfected cattle. Some readers will remember the anthrax scares in the United States right after the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks when an individual placed anthrax spores into envelopes that were sent to members of the US Congress.
As Koch become more skilled in the identification of disease causing bacteria, his methods became codified into rules known as "Koch's postulates":
- The microorganism must be present in every instance of the disease.
- The microorganism must be isolated from a human with the disease and grown in culture.
- The microorganism grown in culture must cause the same disease upon injection in an animal.
- Samples from the animal in which disease thus occurs must contain the same organism that was present in the original diseased human.
These principles were applied successfully to determine the causative agents of many of the infectious diseases known today. Knowing the identity of specific bacteria that cause a particular disease, scientists and drug companies can develop antibiotics that can kill the bacteria and cure disease. Before the discovery of antibiotics, a small skin cut could get infected and result in death. We live in a world that would be unrecognizable to a nineteenth-century inhabitant because many previously lethal infections and diseases are easily treatable today.
Koch's other significant discoveries were the bacteria that cause tuberculosis and cholera. Tuberculosis (TB) is a disease that has longed plagued the world. It was often called consumption, because it made the person look pale and thin as the disease progressed. In opera, it is the disease from which both Mimi in La Bohème and Violetta in La Traviata suffer, reflecting a nineteenth century association of romantic tragedy with this disease. TB caused enormous numbers of deaths in the nineteenth century. Since it is a contagious disease, it flourished partly because of the increased population density in growing cities during the industrial revolution. Throughout the nineteenth century, about one out of a 100 people living in New York City died of tuberculosis, roughly the same percentage as the number of reported COVID-19 deaths in the city and ten times more than die of influenza in an average year.
Until Koch showed that it was an infectious disease caused by bacteria, many thought that TB was an inherited disease. In 1882, using his postulates, Koch identified the causative organism and called it Mycobacterium tuberculosis. This discovery led to a better understanding of the disease and the development of TB-specific antibiotics, which along with better sanitation resulted in a significant decline in infections and deaths. However, TB is still widespread and remains a scourge in many parts of the world. In 2018 TB killed 1.5 million people globally. An especially worrisome development has been the recent emergence of antibiotic-resistant forms of M. tuberculosis. A vaccine that is used around the world to protect against TB infection has only limited efficacy.
Cholera is a waterborne disease that causes severe diarrhea and vomiting. Cholera outbreaks still cause havoc in the developing world today. The most recent outbreak of cholera was in Sudan in 2019. Another recent cholera epidemic was in Haiti in 2010 following a devastating earthquake. There are indications that, sadly, peacekeepers from the United Nations who came to provide aid may have inadvertently brought the disease to Haiti.
Koch received worldwide fame for his identification of the organism that causes cholera. However, the causative bacterium was, in fact, first described by an Italian physician, Filippo Pacini (1812–1883), many years earlier. During the period from the late 1810s to the early 1860s, there were worldwide cholera pandemics that started in India in the state of Bengal. Pacini was a doctor in Florence, Italy, when the pandemic spread into that city. Using a microscope to examine tissues collected during autopsies of those who had succumbed to cholera, Pacini discovered the bacterium, Vibrio cholerae, that causes the disease. Remarkably, few, including Koch, knew of his discovery, perhaps partly because the germ theory of disease was not widely accepted when Pacini described his observations. Better sanitation has made cholera a disease that is nonexistent in the developed world.
Koch, who passed away in 1910, received many significant recognitions for his work, including the 1905 Nobel Prize for Physiology and Medicine. We now turn to the work of his bitter rival, Louis Pasteur.
Pasteur, Rabies, and a New Paradigm for Vaccination
Pasteur was born in 1822 in France. His father was a tanner. Pasteur did not distinguish himself academically as a youngster. After earning a bachelor's degree in philosophy in 1840, he was drawn to the study of science and mathematics. As is true today, in Pasteur's time only the very best students in France were admitted to the École Normale Supérieure. Pasteur was ranked very poorly the first time he took the admission test, but he was ultimately admitted in 1843. This hiccup at an early stage of his scientific career did not prevent Pasteur from going on to make transformative discoveries.
Credit: Albert Edelfelt via Wikipedia / Public domain
When he was a professor at the University of Strasbourg, in France, Pasteur made a very important fundamental discovery which involved the mathematical concept of chirality. Two similar objects that have non-superimposable mirror images are chiral. The simplest example is our right and left hands — look at images of your hands in a mirror and you will see what we mean. While studying crystals of salts of certain acids, Pasteur demonstrated that molecules can also be chiral, either "right-handed" or "left-handed." He developed a way to detect the handedness of such so-called optical isomers. A good example of handedness is sugar. Sugar is a chiral molecule that is right-handed, and sugar substitutes can be composed of its left-handed optical isomer. The molecule in our body that metabolizes sugar does not act on its left-handed isomer, and thus we do not metabolize it. But our taste buds cannot tell the difference between the right- and left-handed molecules, and so such sugar-substitutes would taste the same to us — a free lunch, so to speak.
Pasteur's next big achievement was inventing a process which was later named pasteurization. One of Pasteur's students was the son of a wine merchant, and he interested Pasteur into thinking about how to prevent wine from spoiling. It was commonly believed at the time that wine spoiled because it spontaneously decomposed into constituents that tasted like vinegar. Pasteur showed that this was not true and that a microbe called yeast was required to carry out these chemical transformations. Pasteur also showed that contamination of wine with various other microbes causes it to spoil. He invented a process to prevent this, which exploited the fact that microbes die at high temperatures. The wine was heated to about 120–140°F, and then sealed and cooled. Although this pasteurization process was invented to prevent wine from spoiling, it is rarely used for this purpose today. Rather, pasteurization is used all over the world to prevent milk from spoiling.
Pasteur also played a significant role in laying to rest the popular idea that many living organisms were spontaneously generated from nonliving matter. As old bread begins to grow mold and maggots suddenly appear in old meat, it wasn't illogical to believe that these changes occurred spontaneously. Evidence against this so-called spontaneous generation theory had already been presented many times by other scientists, but Koch's postulates and an elegant and definitive experiment that Pasteur did in 1859 finally proved to be its death knell. Pasteur stored boiled (pasteurized) water in two curved, swan-necked flasks. Boiling the water ensured that there were no microbes in it when the experiment was started. The construction of the swan-neck flask was such that microbes in the air would get stuck to the walls of the tube and not reach the water if the flask was vertically positioned. Pasteur positioned one flask vertically, and the other was tilted. As time passed, the water in the vertical flask did not show any signs of a developing biofilm (you must have seen such disgusting biofilms when you leave food in the refrigerator too long and microbes grow on it). A biofilm developed in the water in the tilted flask because microbes in the air could reach the water. This demonstration was the end of the spontaneous generation theory.
Most scientists can only dream of making contributions as important as Pasteur's discovery of optical isomers, his invention of pasteurization, and his experiment ending the debate on the spontaneous generation of microbes. But his contributions to vaccination had such a major impact on humankind that the achievements described above have been completely overshadowed.
Pasteur's paradigm-shifting advance in vaccine development was the result of a serendipitous observation he made while studying chicken cholera. On one occasion, after chickens were injected with the bacteria that causes this disease, they did not fall ill. On further investigation, Pasteur discovered that the batch of chicken cholera he had injected had spoiled. Rather than buy new chickens, he reinjected the first set of chickens with the properly cultured bacteria. To his surprise, the chickens did not fall ill. Pasteur is often credited with the famous remark, "In the field of observation, chance favors the prepared mind." Pasteur's mind was apparently prepared, as he immediately understood that he had stumbled on to an important finding. He realized that you could protect animals from infection with a live disease-causing microbe by vaccinating them with a weakened form of the same microbe.
This was a paradigm shift compared to previous methods. Variolation involved administering the real pathogen. Jenner's use of cowpox involved finding a pathogen that was harmless to humans but related to the one that caused human disease. Pasteur's new method did not involve hunting for a related harmless pathogen or risking the life of the patient by administering the real pathogen. Rather, a weakened or attenuated form of the pathogen could be used. It is worth remarking here that variolation involved powdering material from smallpox scabs and waiting a few days before administering it. These procedures were probably inadvertent ways to attenuate the virulence of the pathogen. But it was Pasteur who in the period between 1879 and 1880 formalized the procedure of using an attenuated pathogen to protect people from infectious diseases, and established a method that continues to be used today. Pasteur labeled his new method of protecting against various infectious diseases "vaccination," in honor of Jenner's use of vaccinia (cowpox) to protect against smallpox. Pasteur used his method to vaccinate birds to prevent cholera and vaccinate sheep to prevent anthrax.
Pasteur then developed a vaccine to protect against rabies. Rabies is an infection of the brain caused by the bite of an infected dog or, more often today, a bat. People infected with rabies exhibit symptoms like paralysis and fear of water. This fear of water is why the disease is sometimes called hydrophobia. Almost everyone afflicted with the disease died. Pasteur was a chemist and not a physician, but having successfully developed two animal vaccines, he was keen to use his skills to cure a human disease or protect people from it. We know today that rabies is caused by a virus, but the concept of a virus was not known at that time. Therefore, Pasteur could neither follow Koch's postulates to identify the causative agent of the disease, nor grow the microbe in culture using methods that worked for bacteria. It was known, however, that the infectious agent was present in saliva. Pasteur is claimed to have been fearless, having used his mouth to suck on a glass tube to draw saliva from a rabid dog.
Using a method developed by his close collaborator, Emile Roux, Pasteur then attenuated the infectious agent. Pasteur and Roux administered the attenuated infectious agent and showed that multiple doses of this vaccine could protect dogs from rabies infection. Pasteur was anxious to try his vaccine in humans. He knew that the onset of symptoms usually lagged the dog bite by about a month. His idea was to vaccinate people soon after the dog bite, and hope that the protective mechanism (about which they knew nothing) would kick in quickly enough to cure them. The first two patients on whom this procedure was tried were in the late stages of the disease, however, and both died before they could receive the second dose of the vaccine. But Pasteur persevered.
In 1885, Joseph Meister, a 9-year-old boy living in Alsace, was bitten multiple times by a rabid dog that was subsequently shot by the police. His doctor learned that Pasteur had developed a vaccine to treat rabies. In an attempt to evade what was a certain death sentence, he brought Joseph and his family to Paris the next day to seek Pasteur's help. Emile Roux refused to use the vaccine on Joseph as he worried that it was not ready for humans and was too dangerous to try on a child who did not yet have any symptoms of the disease. Pasteur found another physician to administer the treatment and it worked — the boy was cured. Subsequently, others would undergo the same procedure with similar success, and Pasteur became a hero. Years later, Meister, who was devoted to Pasteur, would serve as a caretaker at the Pasteur Institute.
Throughout this period, Pasteur worked on an anthrax vaccine even though Koch, who discovered the bacterium that causes anthrax, was also working on a vaccine. This led to terrible arguments between the two acclaimed scientists. Koch and his students wrote that Pasteur did not even know how to make pure cultures of bacteria. Pasteur fought back. These arguments took on an even more vicious tone during the Franco-Prussian War. In 1868, Pasteur had been awarded an honorary degree by the faculty of Bonn in Germany. He returned it during the war with an angry accompanying note. Thus began a division between German and French immunologists that would continue for decades, to the detriment of scientific advances. Pasteur ultimately achieved success in a public experiment in 1881 when he successfully vaccinated several sheep and cows, and a goat, to protect them from anthrax. He then declared it to be a great French victory. Ironically, an anthrax vaccine had earlier been developed by Jean Joseph Henri Toussaint (1847–1890) in France. Pasteur used the same method as Toussaint, but claimed that his approach was different.
When Pasteur died, he left his laboratory notebooks to his oldest male child, and his will stipulated that these notebooks should never leave the family and were to be passed on from generation to generation by male inheritors. In 1964, Pasteur's last surviving direct male descendant donated his laboratory notebooks to the Bibliotheque Nationale in Paris. Scholars studying these notebooks found that Pasteur often cut corners in his work, sometimes did not describe exactly how experiments were done, and did not always publicly report results transparently. This straddling of ethical boundaries or, worse, fraud is severely punished by the modern scientific community. Indeed, as it should be, because the scientific edifice is built on the trust that scientists have described their studies honestly. Mistakes can happen, of course, but deceit is not allowed.
Pasteur's straddling of ethical boundaries notwithstanding, he made groundbreaking advances that had a transformative effect. Vaccines designed using Pasteur's methods have saved more lives than any other medical procedure. Vaccines that protect children from diseases are a major contributor to the dramatic reduction in childhood mortality. Today, we crave a vaccine against the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, and hopefully, we will have one soon. Pasteur's work is the foundation for this hope.
For his achievements, Pasteur received many honors and awards. Many streets around the world are named after him, and the Pasteur Institute in Paris is a famed medical research laboratory that Pasteur himself founded. He died in 1895, when he was 72, and his body is interred in the first floor of the original building of the Pasteur Institute. Visitors are welcome to see his tomb and the apartment where Pasteur lived at the end of his life. Pasteur did not receive a Nobel Prize because the first of these was awarded in 1901.
