Across the world, Covid-19 anxiety and depression take hold

His bewilderment as France suffers its fifth wave of the pandemic, with cases of the Delta variant rising sharply along with Omicron anxiety, captured a mood of exhaustion and simmering anger across the world two years after the deadly virus began to spread in China.

“I’m so tired of all these routines,” Mr Chen Jun, 29, a tech company worker in the southern Chinese city of Shenzhen, said the other day. He was forced to take three Covid-19 tests in June following an outbreak in the city, and then had to quarantine for 14 days. “I know it will only get worse, it won’t stop, the pandemic will only turn more life-consuming,” said Ms Natalia Shishkova, a teacher in Moscow. “It is all chaos, like a fantasy film. You watch all these apocalypse films and realise their writers were real prophets.”

At the Paris laboratory of Dr Maria Melchior, a French public health researcher who specialises in mental illness, in-person meetings had just been reinstated when, this week, she was told they would cease, with a return to Zoom gatherings. Ms Corrie Mwende, a communications specialist in Nairobi, said she had felt like “freedom was coming back” after a long period when “you could say it was like the end of the world”.Such hesitation is pervasive. The pandemic began with evasiveness from the great powers of the 21st century, first president Xi Jinping’s China and then president Donald Trump’s America. Trust was dented, time lost. Ever since, a cohesive global response has appeared elusive.

In Brazil, whose president, Mr Jair Bolsonaro, has persistently minimised the pandemic’s threat, the death toll has plunged to fewer than 300 a day from 3,000 in April. Samba concerts are back in the streets. Fireworks, after some back-and-forth, will light the sky over Copacabana beach to mark the New Year — unless some new disaster strikes.

In Italy, hit to devastating effect early in the pandemic, access to everything from movie theaters to offices has been strictly curtailed for anyone who does not have the “green pass” of the vaccinated. The government is promising a “semi-normal” Christmas without the need to resort to lockdowns. Still, the mood of the country is somber.

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