The people who suffered the most psychologically due to Covid were the children. "It is thought that compared to other age groups, children will be more negatively affected psychologically because of the difficulty of making sense of all these COVID-19 experiences and lack of self-expression skills." (Karatas and Akat, 2019). Similar to what happens when an adult finds himself or herself in a new situation than what the children had to go through. However, unlike adults, children did not have any experience with the virus. Everything that happened, did right before their eyes. They saw people lose their lives, they saw people mourning their dead, they saw people lose their property and this was simply hard for them. As if that was not enough, they witnessed their parents struggle to make ends meet over the period. In addition, these children had to adjust to a completely new life, different from the one they had before.
Other groups that suffered the most psychologically were middle-aged and the elderly. These are the groups that were more vulnerable to the disease. Their immunity is not strong to prevent them from the craws of the virus. The pain of seeing their age mates succumb to death affected them psychologically. “Elderly population is the most vulnerable group for coronavirus disease. Besides the infection, social isolation and quarantine put them at a high-risk category for various physical and mental health problems”. (Sethi et al, 2020). Seeing that they were the most delicate age group, they were always isolated and taken care of. In realization, old age is the age when one wants to spend time with their loved ones and especially their grandchildren. However, this could happen because of the efforts to curb the disease. In return, the isolation denied the elderly and some of the middle-aged population from accessing these things and this saw them suffer mentally.
Regarding Education, Covid disrupted the learning schedules and this saw billions of children out of school. The efforts to learn online were not effective. Having classes online was challenging;
Because online education requires an excellent infrastructure. Every student needs to be access to online or distance education. But unfortunately, access to the internet is not the same everywhere. Likewise, not every student has a PC. Moreover, some regions of the world do not even have electricity. Even if the infrastructure problems are resolved in some way, the constant exposure of students to distance or online education is tedious to them. For this reason, the motivation of the students for learning decreases, and the learning goals are not achieved. (Akas & Karatas, pg.7, 2020).
Children were therefore forced to spend hours on social media trying to get in touch with their friends. This attracted a lot of mess up with the internet as they had enough time to explore. In addition, they dealt with trolls and scammers which affected their Psychological welfare.
The practice of staying at home had its effects too. Seeing that before the pandemic everybody in the family set up met in the evening, people had to get used to seeing each other on days due to Quarantine. The parents had a hard time trying to keep their children in check and also get them their basic needs. The prices of products had gone up and the parents had to dig deeper into their pockets to afford the scarce necessities. During this period, therefore, parents were going through a lot of troubles and this affected their psychological welfare. In addition, parents especially of the middle-aged population could not find happiness like the younger population did. They ended up having stress and this affected their psychological welfare as well. Moreover, children of parents who lost their job due to COVID-19 were more affected than those of retired parents and those self-employed. (Baqleh et al, 2021). This position put the parents into a lot of psychological challenges as they sought to make their children more comfortable.
In conclusion, Covid 19 affected mostly, the elderly, children, and parents psychologically. Seeing that the effects of the virus were severe, it is safe for people to observe some precautions to ensure that in case another pandemic hits, we are ready. People need to have multiple income streams so that if something happens, they will have money to hold them on the surface for a while.
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