COVID 19 has taken the world by a complete storm and now we are seeing potential long term effects of COVID on the world. For a while we were able to see the world united to fight this pandemic but, even that isn’t enough for what is happening. Mental health, physical health and even Thanksgiving is now drastically impacted by the world wide pandemic due to shutdowns from COVID. 

When the pandemic first started, the world had little to no insight on what the mental health side effects of lockdowns and of the pandemic itself were as we had never had any pandemic to this scale since the Spanish Flu, but now we now know what the damages of the pandemic are to mental health. According to the KFF(Kaiser Family Foundation which is a non partisan non profit group and is a very reliable source according to the Media Bias Fact Check) the amount of people who have said the COVID 19 has negatively affected their mental health has increased dramatically from the start of the pandemic to the end of it, “A broad body of research links social isolation and loneliness to poor mental health, and data from late March shows that significantly higher shares of people who were sheltering in place (47%) reported negative mental health effects resulting from worry or stress related to coronavirus than among those not sheltering-in-place (37%).” said the KFF, which shows a clear parallel between people not in lockdowns and those that aren’t.

Though a majority of people are perfectly fine when/if they get Covid, governments across the world decided to shut down many non essential businesses for the fact of protecting more vulnerable people. This led to people not being able to exercise and since people were stuck in home they gained some weight. “Coronavirus-related concerns may affect dietary habits, leading to higher calorie consumption that could promote weight gain,” said Nuvance Health (A network of convenient hospitals in the North East), which is a bad thing as weight gain could lead to things like higher chance of Diabetes. 

COVID will finally have an effect on a major holiday in the United States as for the first time in the entire pandemic, as we have finally reached the holidays that forces people to stay indoors due to the weather. According to the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention which is a government agency)  people during thanksgiving should keep the 6 feet worth of distance at any holiday celebrations and always try to keep a mask on. This will significantly alter how people deal with thanksgiving and how people will deal with Christmas as families will have to take a bit more precautions to have the holidays with their families.

We as a world didn’t know what the effects of Covid on someone’s mental health, people’s physical health etc, no one still knows what the true long term effects of COVID but we do know the certain: Mental health has been seriously damaged during the COVID pandemic due to lockdowns, people’s physical health is seemingly affected due to people being stuck at home for months and the holidays will be the most different holiday season we will ever see.