 Hello, everyone, and welcome to our webinar today to mark the one year anniversary of the pandemic. It's great to have everyone here. I can't believe it, but a year ago today, the World Health Organization announced that this mystery disease COVID-19, that it's been sort of causing havoc in various countries, was more than just a mystery disease and was in fact a pandemic that affected us all. This was an action that led countries to shut their borders, start talking about lockdowns, those that went in lockdown already. And after March 11, 2020, we saw all of these things happening that now feel very normal, schools closing, homes become offices, meeting up friends and our family at a great distance, staying at home as much as we can. Since that day, we've all really been living under the shadow of this disease. We've lost 2.6 million lives to COVID-19 since that day in 2020 and hundreds of thousands of people have put themselves in harm's way to try and get this pandemic under control. It's no overestimation or overstatement to say that COVID-19 has completely changed us in the way we live our lives, whether we are frontline workers, key workers, or stuck at home on Zoom all day, schooling our children from home, very relieved that they've just come back to school, we are all moving about this world in a completely different way to how we did a year ago. So on this anniversary of the pandemic announcement, we really wanted to at the conversation take stock of how this pandemic has changed us. And to help us do that, we're joined by three behavioral experts who are going to discuss all these subjects and more. We have Unifar Ahmed, a lecturer in social sciences from the University of Bristol. We have Shihari Yabanuri, an associate professor in the School of Economics at the University of East Anglia. And we have Haywan Karan-Mac, a research fellow in behavioral science and health at UCL. Welcome, everybody. Thank you so much for joining us. We're going to kick off with a question for you, Shihari Yab. So I want to talk about how this sort of new pandemic world that we're in, how we comply with these new rules that we have. So we've got all sorts of rules and regulations and depending where you are in the world, it will be different. But currently the UK is under lockdown, which has various rules that go with it about what we can do, what we can't do, where we can go. What is it, according to sort of your research and the behavioral economics that you've looked at, what is it that makes people comply with these types of rules? Or on the flip side, what makes people not comply with pandemic restrictions? Thanks so much, Makin. That's a great question. And gosh, I can't believe it's been a year as well. It's hard to imagine. When it comes to compliance, so there's quite a few models that explain this sort of behavior, but one that's rather convincing and rising to the surface is the idea that we need to think about compliance as effort. So in order to comply with the restrictions that requires effort, that's not very controversial to say. And generally, when we think about people exerting effort, we can ask, well, why do people exert effort? And usually the answer is that either to obtain some good outcome, or we call them rewards, or to avoid some sort of bad outcomes, typically call them punishment. Now, compliance with COVID guidelines, it makes sense to focus on the avoiding a bad outcome, right? Even though it's not punishment in the traditional sense, but it's avoiding a bad outcome which is contracting the virus. Now, in order for us to avoid effort, one or exert effort, we need to, one, believe that the bad outcome actually exists. And two, that the risk of obtaining the bad outcome is affected by our effort. And by risk, what we mean to fix ideas is probability, right? So my probability of catching the virus will be lower if I comply. Now, this idea of probability for us humans, I mean, probabilities are not very intuitive. That's one of the problems that we have with this. So lots of times when we engage in behavior, we're working on off of perceptions or perceptions of risk. And typically, if we believe that if we perceive the risk of catching coronavirus to be really, really low, then exerting effort doesn't really make sense to us. And if we perceive the risk to be very, very high, then exerting effort is no problem. So one of the key aspects of this is this idea of risk perception, which make no mistake, can differ very widely across populations, across people, across demographics, even within the same country, within different environments. And so managing these risk perceptions is one of the most important things. And our research says that's really the main driver behind compliance. So it's really how likely we feel a certain action is going to be to result in us getting COVID-19 ourselves. That affects our compliance. Is there any sense of benevolence of trying to stop other people getting COVID-19, for example, healthcare workers or the elderly at play? No, of course. That's part of the effort spectrum as well. So you might, for example, believe that you have no chance of contracting coronavirus, but you do it to protect others out of an idea of service. I mean, it's essentially the same idea in the effort literature and what we call mission motivation, that I'm driven to help people, and that's why I engage in certain efforts. So that's certainly one part of the story as well. So it's risk that affects us, but also that can potentially affect other people. When we talk about these models, though, what we're thinking about is what sort of rises to the top. So what's the thing that drives most of the behavior? And that's your own risk perception. That's one of the primary drivers. And then, of course, with other people, that's also important. And by the way, I should also say we've sort of looked at rules and regulations. So you mentioned rules and regulations. And one of the things that policymakers often do is issue fines. That's our difficult knee jerk response to getting people to avoid behavior that we don't want them to engage in. The difficulty, of course, with doing certain things like that is that there's only so many behaviors that you can actually observe. And those behaviors, only upon being observable and being monitored, are you able to issue punishments on them? So for example, it would be ridiculous for me to suggest that we should have a fine for not washing hands. But there's other aspects to this as well. Sorry, I lost my train of thought in a second. No worries, that's great. I think you wanted to also from you on this question of why we comply. We comply, because actually we're quite social creatures as human beings. There is this innate altruism that we have towards other people. And we've seen that in droves during this pandemic. We've seen all the clap for carers. We've seen people raising money, of course, most notably, perhaps in some more raising all of that money. And that's something that we as social creatures, we do that. We have this sense of belonging to a wider group that's something that's bigger than us. And this pandemic COVID has brought it to like something that is bigger than any of us and that will take a huge concerted effort from everyone to tackle. And so as much as the media has been talking about people breaking rules and not complying with regulations, all of the research we have, all of the data we have shows is that overwhelmingly people are complying. They are paying attention to the rules and the lockdown. So we have this innate sense of doing something for someone or for an idea that is much bigger than any of us. And that's a really positive thing about our society that we continue to offer that support and look out for each other in that way. That's great. I really like that point because I think for every kind of photo of people doing the wrong thing on the front page, there's many of us who are sort of sitting at home extremely bored, but still doing the right thing. Karen, I wanted to come to you now because you're working on a fascinating project at UCL, which is polling. Is it 70,000 people in the UK on how they are coping during the pandemic and what their behaviors are? What you found and your colleague Daisy Frankfurt has written about this for us is that this pandemic is not affecting us all equally. We are all in this together, but we are not all feeling the effects in the same way. Can you just very briefly set out some of the differences that you found among different groups by surveying this kind of large group of participants? Yes, sure. So in our UCL COVID-19 social study, which has been following participants since March last year, we found that the pandemic appears to affect people differently. So for example, our study shows that depression and sciency and loneliness remain highest in young adults. Women, people from ethnic minority groups, those who with lower household income, people with a long-term mental or physical health conditions, and those living in the city and people living with children. So we also try to understand what were the causes for poor and mental well-being. And our study explored various stresses, including COVID-19 virus, unemployment, finance and food security. And we found that while the stress about catching COVID-19 or becoming seriously ill from it has decreased substantially since the start of the year, these decreases were only seen in adults aged 30 to 59 and 60 and older, which are more likely to have already received a vaccine or are nearer to doing so. Having said that, levels of worries about COVID are still highest in adults over the age of 30, together with women and people with diagnosed mental and physical health conditions, but the levels have been decreasing across these groups in the last few weeks. And we also look at the concerns about unemployment and finance. And we found that concerns about this remain highest amongst adults of working age, those living with children and people of minority ethnic group. And also, people with a diagnosed mental and physical health condition and people from lower household income are more concerned about accessing food. So really, it sounds like the pandemic, and we've heard this before, that the pandemic is really exacerbating disadvantages that already existed in society. So ethnic minority groups, young people, people with health conditions are feeling this harder. Is that fair to say? Exactly, yes. And I think particularly if a person fits into or falls into one of these categories, for example, for female gender or being ethnic minority and also having conditions and having low household income, they are probably the most at risk in this pandemic. Yes, because we're not all of us, just one identity, we're walking around in this world that these things are intersectional. And I really recommend that everybody look into the work that Karen's team is doing at UCL because it's very, very interesting. And it is a real cross-section, as Karen has said, of some of the inequalities that already exist in our society. We're going to come back in here more about that in a bit, but just back to these kind of measures that we're all taking. You know, you've written a really great piece for our site that's up there today about pandemic burnout. So we've all been doing this for a year. I am exhausted. I'm sure other people are too. And I'm not even a frontline worker. So what are some of the psychological effects of having kept up all of these barrier measures and made the life changes that we've had to make for a year now? How does that affect our brains? Our brains are really primitive. We think that they're amazingly capable. And of course they are, but actually they're really quite primitive structures. And they struggle with the change. And we have been in this position for a really long time. And when we first went into the lockdown, it was really uncertain and our bodies just got very primed for what's going on. We immediately went into fight or flight response, which happens anytime our bodies receive a threat. And of course we couldn't either fight it because it's an invisible virus, nor could we flee because we were in lockdown. But our body and our brain doesn't understand that. So our brain kept pumping, our nervous system kept pumping out hormones to us to make us do something. And over time, once that hasn't happened, we're carrying all of these additional things in our brain, in our system. And it's really slowed us down. And that's why people are feeling exhausted. That's why people's immune systems feel a little bit low now. It's had a real impact on our wellbeing. Our brains just don't know what's going on. There's lots of conflicting messages about are we safe? How do we stay safe? Who gets the vaccination first? All of these things have a real impact on how we cope. And if you think back to it, when we first went into lockdown, there was a sense of it being absolutely terrifying, but also lots of excitement. The shops were selling out of baking goods, for example. People were doing things. So we had something to counter that terror, that threat in our brain. We were doing something creative to try and balance it out. Over time, as that exhaustion has sort of increased, we're doing less and less of that. And that's why people are feeling more exhausted now in this lockdown than they were previously. We just aren't taking that self-care and having those counterbalances to the stresses at this time round. And what are some tips you would have for someone who's dealing with that exhaustion and maybe just can't face doing another round of batches of salad over this time? Focus on what you can control. It's still very much that you can't control the virus. So what can I do around this? What are my working hours alike? At the moment, we're seeing people's working hours have just sort of morphed from being regular work time where people would go to work, they would leave work. We had that commute. We had these breaks that really helped our brain to reconfigure itself ready for a new task. Instead, we're just carrying on. We're going from one meeting to another. Even if we have our screens off, we're probably preparing for something else or we're scrolling on our phone. And it's this huge amount of constant interaction that the brain is having to do. It's constantly being hired and stimulated without those breaks. So thinking about how we can create breaks in our day, getting up doing a little bit of walking, trying to do some exercise, which we've done less of because we've gone into winter and it's dark and wet and cold outside. So people have been doing that less than they were first time around. But really forcing those breaks, forcing those conversations. People say, I've been speaking to people and I've got nothing else to say anymore. Everyone's in the same boat. So just talk about not having anything to say anymore. Or just talk to some people saying that they've connected with people that they haven't spoken to for a long time. And that's a really nice aspect of how we're seeing society change again is that people are making connections, new connections. So focusing on what we can do is a really good way of doing things. And also we hope the end is in sight. The vaccines, I think, we've just heard from you Karen that vaccines are already having an effect in your data. You're seeing people responding to that. I did want to talk to you a little bit more about the mental health findings from your study. I know you've been tracking loneliness, depression, self-harm, a whole range of different mental health effects throughout the pandemic. What are some of the mental health problems that have been exacerbated by this and how have they changed? Yeah, so we looked at various mental health and well-being over the pandemic, including levels of depression, anxiety, loneliness, life satisfaction, happiness, self-harm and thoughts of death. So our study shows that at the beginning of the pandemic, the levels of depression and anxiety were the highest, which were then decreased as the pandemic developed and along with the lockdown measures being eased. However, more respondents were reporting and feeling depressed and anxious at the beginning of autumn last year when there were new restrictions, including three tiered systems and when there were news about the second wave in winter. But since then, the levels seems to have been stabilizing and anxiety levels may be decreasing, maybe beginning to decline probably because of the reducing number of COVID cases and also the rollout of vaccination program. And so we can see the trend and also the pattern of life satisfaction and happiness were very much in line with this trend. Like the lowest at the beginning of the pandemic and were then increased along with the easing of lockdown. And the positive note of this is that there has been an increase in life satisfaction in the last month. So we also track individuals about whether they have any thoughts of death or whether they have experiencing any self-harm and also their levels of loneliness. And we found that these have been relatively stable throughout the pandemic, although remain higher among younger adults and those with lower health of income and also people from ethnic minority group and those who have mental or physical health conditions. So I think that's really interesting and I was interested in this one when your colleague Daisy wrote about it, is that we're not just seeing that COVID-19 itself has a greater effect on people with lower household income and ethnic minority groups, but also the mental health effects. I suppose that's not surprising if you're at greater risk then you are going to have more concerns. And did you also find an increase in discrimination? I think Daisy mentioned against ethnic minority groups as well. Yes, so we also found that some groups of people are more likely to experience discriminations, including ethnic minority groups and also people, sorry, and also female gender during this pandemic. So however, because this is a data analysis that we were not able to understand what sorts of discrimination or what happened in them, but then we know that from the data that they have been experiencing during the pandemic. And I wanted to talk also about, you know, I've mentioned before that you've had a very different experience of this pandemic. If like me, you just sort of started working from home and as opposed to if you have to keep going into work and there's a huge proportion of our society who are key workers, essential workers, whether that be in the health system or in the transport system or in supermarkets and shops, kind of the part of our economy that really needs to keep going so the rest of us can shelter at home. What have been some of the differences there? How might this pandemic have affected you differently if you are a key worker as opposed to someone who's been working from home? Yeah, this is a very good question. So we found that compared to key workers, as you said, including health and social care work, support, also teacher and people working in transport and utility or food chains, compared to them, people who have been working from home are more worried about unemployment and finance, and they also have slightly lower levels of life satisfaction and happiness. And this could be because of the social contacts, a lack of social contacts, especially face-to-face contacts, and which is perhaps likely to make you feel less happier and feel stressed about not getting enough work done. And also they may feel a bit more overwhelmed either with the lockdown or with opening up. And also, especially for people with children and those who live in a shared room or shared or living in overcrowded households and on top of that, with no escape socially out of work time, could also make people feel a bit stressed. And even when people who are able to work from home, those living with them, for example, their partners, may be identified as high-risk individuals who need to be shared or may be facing risk of unemployment, or they might be a key worker themselves. So this is making the mental health more challenging. It's, as I was saying before, we are all intersections of identities and there's just so many different ways for a pandemic like this to affect us. And it's so interesting to see kind of how it breaks down. Cheheyah, I want to come to you because we've heard from Karen that the way people feel about this lockdown, and from you, the way people feel about this lockdown has changed over time, because we haven't been able to stay where we were in March 2020 in our mind the whole time. You've written for us also about how complying with lockdown rules or regulations does get harder for people over time. We call that sort of pandemic fatigue or lockdown fatigue. Why might it be more difficult now for people to keep going with the pandemic restrictions than it was back in March? Well, you know, one of the answers to that is coming back to this issue of thinking about compliance as effort, right? So it's hard to sustain effort for a long amount of time unless you have some sort of certainty or some sort of idea about the benefits that that's going to carry. And so what happens over time is that effort levels remain the same. I mean, it just gets harder and harder because exerting effort consistency is hard. Alongside that, as we sort of repeatedly don't experience a bad outcome or maybe people around us don't experience a bad outcome or we don't have personal experience about anybody contracting the virus, our perceived risk, there's this difference between actual risk and perceived risk, our perceived risk starts to drop. And as that risk perception starts to drop, compliance similarly starts to drop. So managing that sort of risk perception is one of the key factors of this in terms of policy. Now, one of the other things, of course, is that in recent times we've also had lots of good news that comes alongside this, right? Which is vaccines are coming out and the end is in sight, if you like, right? So that alongside that contributes to what I've written about this idea of optimism. And one of the issues in psychology, and Neelu knows this well, I'm sure, is this idea of unrealistic optimism, that the likelihood of us personally experiencing a bad event we think is objectively lower than somebody else in a similar situation. And so these factors, this sort of dropping of perceived risk as well as our own optimism about our future environment leads us to engage in less compliance than we would at the beginning of these things. So I want to come to vaccines later, but just before then, what are some of the levers that a government can pull to deal with this fact that compliance and fades over time, particularly kicks in. So the way that we sort of think about this and one literature that sort of informs this behavior is one on taxes, right? So taxes have a similar the similar property. People don't really want to pay taxes. They don't perceive benefits and so on. There's two types of compliance that authorities can think about. So there's what they call what we call enforced compliance, which is complying to avoid a fine or avoiding some sort of bad outcome. Or it's voluntary compliance, which is complying. This is more altruistic like Neelu was saying, complying because it's the quote unquote the right thing to do. And so the policy levers for enforced compliance are straightforward and we've already seen them. It's raising fines. It's increasing the number of fines. It's increasing monitoring more police out on the streets, that sort of thing. The voluntary compliance part, that's the real difficult one. And that one requires trust, communication and engagement. And for that, I mean, we've had previous data from previous pandemics and even this one where people that have higher trust in authorities are more likely to comply. And that's really driven by this sort of engagement and communication. So that leads to this question about how do you inculcate trust? And that requires, again, clear and consistent communication. We've had a similar data from previous pandemics, which have shown that clear and consistent messaging leads to greater trust, which then leads to higher levels of compliance. So trust on the one side, communication, engagement, and on the other side, fines and monitoring. I wonder if I can just do a quick follow up there, because trust has been a key issue, particularly in the UK. And we saw a pretty big rupture in trust very early in the pandemic with the Dominic Cummings situation where the government advisor drove to Barnard Castle famously. Do these kind of individual events relating to the government, do they affect trust? And do they, as a result, affect compliance? If they think, oh, it's one rule for him and one rule for me? Most definitely they do. I mean, this is an example of inconsistent messaging. Now in the UK, one of the good things that we have here is a health institution that has a high degree of trust. So people's level of trust in the NHS, for example, is much higher than in most countries in the world. And so that's great. But at the same time, these sorts of inconsistent behavior, giving Dominic Cummings a free pass for engaging in what we can all agree is quite silly behavior. That leads to an inconsistency which then detracts or erodes trust, which would then reduce compliance here. Nilo, I'm going to come to you. We've talked a little bit about the effects of the pandemic and the effects of work. As I mentioned, you've written this brilliant article for us today about how to deal with, for those of us who have been lucky enough to work from home for the past year. What are some of those tips? Can you just sort of go through, for those of us who've been stuck on Zoom for 12 months, what are some ways to kind of break the cycle that we've been in of working from home? Just give you a little recap of that article. One of the reasons why we're getting so exhausted is that we are literally in each other's faces all of the time. We're so, so close to each other and our brains aren't primed for that. Our brains think, if you're close to me, then I must know you. You are somebody who's part of my intimate network. You are a loved one, a family member. But of course, our rational brain is saying, no, this is my work colleague. This is somebody I've just met on Zoom. And those conflicting messages, that's what's part of the exhaustion, the Zoom fatigue as it's been called. And so to try to avoid that, maybe try and position yourself a little bit further away. Try and avoid having the camera on all of the time when you're doing these meetings. And certainly when you're switching your camera off, please don't do something else. Please don't multitask and use that little bit of brain effort that you're trying to restore by using that energy elsewhere. Have a little space where work things go into at the moment. I really should practice what I preach, but I've got my table that's got all of my work things spread out and I'll push it to the side to have dinner on it if at all, if I'm not sitting on the sofa. But that's always there. It's in your eye line. It's in your peripheral vision. And so you do not have that break between work and home and relaxation. So have a little box. I've got a box at the side where I'm planning to dump everything, take it out later in the mornings because that's part of our ritual of work. If we're not doing the commute, we can at least establish behaviors that are work related that are part of starting my working day and ending my working day, having really discrete boundaries for stuff. One thing you mentioned was this idea that we do a fake commute, which I thought was very interesting. Yep. Going out for a little walk, which has all kinds of additional benefits. A, we get some fresh air, which most of us haven't had since we've been in this particular lockdown, the third one, because we've been in winter and it's been miserable. So our bodies are desperately lacking vitamin D. It gives us a bit of fresh air. And most of us, when we go out for a quick walk for five minutes outside, it does often turn into 10 minutes or 15 minutes. So a little route around. Some people I've heard do a full commute to their workplace and back or halfway. And that's probably something interesting to look forward to when we are looking at reintegrating back into society after the pandemic. But just getting out and about wherever you do that commute, whether it's just a little walk around the block or something more formalized, or even doing a different route every day, just planning something, something to look forward to and something to do that will have benefits as well. That's great. Karen, I wanted to talk about a recent report that's come out from your unit that's a new, I think you sort of mentioned some of this already in what people are worried about currently. Because I imagine the things that we're worried about have changed very much over the pandemic. We're in a very different situation now as we were in March 2020. So what are people most concerned about currently according to your research? Yeah, so people were most concerned about the potential increasing number of COVID-19 cases, and also people not following the social distancing rules after the lockdown. So we have more than half of the sample reporting having this concerns. We also found that over 40% of the respondents were worried about the hospitals being overwhelmed. However, the bright side of it is that the concerns that we conceded in our study were reduced when comparing to the end of the first lockdown in May 2020. So people seem to be less worried about how things would be like after the current lockdown. Do you think there's a sense of that's because we've done this before? So we've been in and out of lockdown. So we know that there's an end, even if that means that another lockdown might be there in the future. Yes, absolutely. So I think the feelings of uncertainty has been removed because we have been through that. And also with the very effective vaccination program, it also makes people a bit less concerned. And I would also like to say that perhaps the schemes of the follow and also the support that the government has been giving might have also reduced some stress of some people. And so we are seeing that a lot of the concerns are not have been reduced in this second lockdown. So there's a sense of, well, I've kept my job so far or I've kept on the furlough scheme so far. So maybe it'll be okay as opposed to maybe April 2020 where it's like, well, I'm furloughed now but I don't know what's going to happen in a few months. Yes, exactly. And I'm also wondering whether perhaps the weather also helps. But I know where we know that the second wave of the pandemic has gone already. And we also can kind of see perhaps the end of the pandemic. And so it's kind of like a brighter future ahead. And that might also make people feel a bit less stressed and less concerned. That's interesting. And I want to raise this point on vaccines now with Scheheria because we are in this situation where people we love have been vaccinated, maybe we've been vaccinated ourselves. And that surely is going to change people's behavior. However, we are still in lockdown. And I'm wondering how this vaccination scheme might affect people's compliance with the measures that are in place and going into the future. Is it going to be even harder to get people to follow the rules if they had their first jab and they're feeling invincible? Yeah, that's a really interesting issue actually. And I think it speaks to kind of this push and pull that we've had throughout this pandemic that as we get positive news and things, we sort of let our guard down if you like. And that tends to increase cases, increase transmission. And then we go into lockdown, we issue these sort of strong rules to bring it under control and that sort of brings it back down. And then we get some positive news about cases going down and that makes us relax and try and go back to normal. And that brings us back up. I think when the news of the vaccine broke globally, there was this idea that COVID had been cured, right? And that essentially led to a reduction in compliance again because it was that the end is in sight. It leads to optimism. It leads to a dropping of this perceived risk. And that's sort of important. The difficulty is it's important for our mental well-being to actually be optimistic and be happy. And in fact, optimism does have a whole host of very positive life benefits. We've got lots of research about optimistic people living longer, eating better, having less health issues and so on. At the same time though, it also makes us drop our guard right at the time when we shouldn't. And so what we are likely to see is compliance dropping after the first jab before the second as compliance was dropping after the announcement of the vaccine. But this is another one of those things where trust and communication can counter this quite effectively, which is to say just reminding people that until you get the second vaccine and even beyond that actually, you still shouldn't engage in lots of things because you can still potentially transmit the disease and so on. So that's, you know, on the one hand, it's really great. It's optimism. It helps with a lot of our mental health issues. But on the other hand, it's easy to fall back into, oh, the pandemic is over and now we can go back to doing what we were doing previously. It's a bit of an emotional roller coaster, isn't it? I remember at the end of the last year, it was like, hooray, vaccine. And then it was like, oh no, new variant. And then it was Christmas and then it was lockdown. I mean, these are extreme emotions that we're having to deal with. I don't know if you have any insight on what that kind of emotional roller coaster does to us. It's absolutely exhausting. It's no wonder that every one of us is feeling really exhausted. And then for those of us who have been lucky enough to carry on working or be in safe jobs, we sit around and think, you know, I haven't even left the house. I've got a job. I don't have these worries. Why am I feeling so exhausted? And it is that constant roller coaster of, are we out of lockdown? Is it safe? Oh no, we're not in lockdown. We're back to lockdown and we saw this at Christmas time and people were looking forward to seeing their family. Finally, we had something to look forward to, just as Sharira was saying, about having that optimism that we've been in lockdown for so many months. We haven't seen our loved ones and now hopefully at Christmas time we'll get the opportunity to see them. And then suddenly that hope was dashed from us. And that led to a sense of hopelessness setting in and people just began to wonder, well, when will this end? We've had these constant broken promises. Again, going back to Sharira's point about the clear communication that's needed, the really clear messages that people want to hear. And so we're being told actually you can see your loved ones. You can have a couple of days to catch up. And then that just didn't happen. There is so much research about the importance of hope and optimism and how it really impacts our well-being and how as soon as we lose that optimism we can experience a real dip in our health. And so we kind of went into that straight after Christmas when the announcement was made that we wouldn't have those five days. And then we were told we were going into another lockdown so that dipped even further. And we're just coming out of that. And as Karen was saying, the changing weather will really help that. The sunshine will really help to improve our moods, hopefully. I want to talk, have one more question and then we're going to go to some of our questions that we've got from our viewers. And it's about the future, as you say, that hope is so important. I'm interested, you know, big world events like this, they do change us. And we've seen that, you know, with the Spanish flu and the world wars. How might this pandemic, and I'm going to start with you, Nilu, but everyone's welcome to come in after. How might this pandemic change the way we behave in the long term, hopefully when we're on the other side of it? I think there are three key domains that we will see transformed. There's the work domain. People have seen that it is possible for many of us to work from home and people have reprioritized their lifestyles. Many people are thinking about moving away or have moved away from big cities and just to have a little bit more balance. And if we are able to do that, and this does take the buy-in from big organizations to allow people to work from home. But if that happens, we'll see society change and people will no longer have to move into big cities to take jobs. They'll be able to do them remotely from home, which will have a real transformative effect on local communities, local economies, if they can retain younger people who will buy homes in those local economies, which are much more affordable than in coming into big cities. So we'll see that transformation. Hopefully a real well-being transformation when people are able to work from home and manage other things and have that better balance with their lifestyle. I think also education will have changed for the long term. So many institutions went in in a panic about blended learning and delivering online teaching in the first lockdown. But since then, they have developed fantastic resources all the way from primary school up to university. They're seeing really strong learning ability materials being produced, creating a much more inclusive environment for lots of students who do have other responsibilities, whether it's care responsibilities or mobility issues and health issues. And all of these resources will continue to be delivered. I know that in my university, at Bristol University, we're talking about what can we continue to deliver in an asynchronous way for our students? What do our students want and what can we continue to deliver in that way? And finally, the third thing, I think, that we've seen a massive change in is in the way that we communicate. We've seen so many more people coming online using resources like Zoom, using FaceTime on their phones when they've never used it before. So that level of communication, I think, has really changed for the positive. So some key changes across lots of domains of our life. And hopefully, for the better, did anyone else want to come in about how this panel might change us? Could I say something on this? Actually, I agree with Neela's very comprehensive response. I think, I mean, from an economist's perspective, it's what we call the sort of long shadow of the industrial revolution. It's quite amazing that even though we've come through the sort of the information age or we're still going through it and we've had these technological revolutions, a lot of our institutions have been sort of resistant to engaging in that sort of thing. So we still have central cities and this old idea of going at 9 o'clock in the morning, going to the factory, doing your work, and then leaving and going to the pub and then going home for dinner. I mean, that sort of thing has stuck with us even though we haven't really, I mean, for a lot of jobs, and particularly in developed countries like the UK, there's less and less need of that. And like Neela was saying, the pandemic sort of put that front and center. So the nature of work, the nature of education, I completely agree are very much likely to change. And they're driven by sort of this idea of how they're driven by behavior. So that for a lot of types of work, it's not that we need to constantly be monitored to be working, right? We need to have the boss sort of breathing down our necks for us to work. A lot of times it's the motivations intrinsic. It's we work because we enjoy it, we like it and so on. And so a lot of these changes are potentially here to stay, but it also depends on how likely big corporations and big institutions are willing to absorb these changes. That's right. We will see. Certainly I am here for the love of it guys. I'm not just here because I'm getting paid. I'd also like to say that I completely agree with Lidia as Sheha's comments. But I also was thinking that even within the work sectors there are different kinds of works of nature. So let's for example, let's take the arts and culture sectors where perhaps the online performance or the stream performance or the virtual museum tours may be a bit challenging for them to catch up with the sudden transition to online engagements. And there have been a lot of worries, concerns that people working in the arts and culture sectors are particularly being hardest, hardest during the pandemic. And so for me, I feel that for some sectors these changes may not be applicable to them. Yeah. Actually, sorry, Karen, you bring up a really good point. So I want to just jump in on one thing that you said, which I think I completely agree. I mean, it's sector wise. The changes can be quite dramatic. But one thing I will say is that a lot of times are thinking about, like for example in the education sector, are thinking about how we deliver education is sort of colored by our maybe slightly archaic models of what a university is actually about, right? What it's actually delivering. So what we've also learned with people's response to the online education and so on is that university is about certainly imparting knowledge and so on. But it's also about this interaction, this engagement, peers learning from each other, maybe even finding love on campuses, things like that, which are also part of this package. And so on the one hand, while it's provocative to say, well, we all would be working from home, this human interaction is something that we still very much will be craving. So I can't imagine virtual museum tours to be completely replacing physical tours, which is what made me think about that. So there's this push and pull. Yeah. Yeah, I think I'm not allowed to say and saying let's keep the best bits from before and let's add some of the extra good bits we worked at during the pandemic. But yeah, I cannot wait to be front row at a gig as soon as I have the vaccine and everybody else does too. So hopefully we have lots of in-person interactions in our future. I want to go to some of our questions from our viewers and the first one I'm going to direct to you, which is about vaccines. We've seen in Europe in particular there has been lower uptake of the AstraZeneca vaccine in some places and different regulations also regarding that vaccine. Why might people be hesitant about certain vaccines as opposed to others? I think this goes back to this issue of trust really. So a lot of times, I mean, broadly speaking, there's people who resist vaccines of all kinds and that very simply has been linked to trust in the authorities. At the same time, preferring one type of vaccine over the other signals trust in the sorts of institutions that are overseeing the development of one type of vaccine over the other. So for example, if there's resistance to, say, a vaccine developed in Russia, it's perhaps more so a comment on people's beliefs about how the Russian government manages or what safeguards they have for OKing these vaccines. Similarly with AstraZeneca as well. I think a lot of times the source matters and trust in the source tends to matter. Yeah, what we've seen, I'm based in France and what we've seen here in Germany is because there was not the data for the over 65s, it was recommended that people didn't take it and even though that advice has now changed, the hesitancy from hearing that earlier message about the vaccine seems to have trickled down as well. That's it. Yeah, precisely. Yeah, we have very high levels of vaccine hesitancy here anyway, so it sort of adds to it a little bit. So our next question is about young people who have very often been cast as the villains in this pandemic. And sorry, I'm just finding it now. For young people in particular, the personal risk is perceived as low. So the issue is how much they care about the risk who are more vulnerable. Is that a fair characterization, Karen? What does your research say about young people in the family? So our study actually shows that younger people, so between the age of 18 to 29, they're actually more worried about family and friends. Are they living with them or living outside of their household compared to other age groups? And in fact, in the first week of the pandemic, our report shows that the most reported stress factors were family or friends living outside, and particularly younger people are much more likely to report having this stress. So I think that for young people, I feel that while they might be less worried about themselves getting infected because of the risk of getting seriously ill, and they're not too worried too much about themselves, but they're more worried about people in family and friends who might be more risk than them. Yeah, I think a lot of young people are reporting the best feeling of this pandemic so far as when their parents get the vaccine, which is so exciting, but rather than themselves, I think that's true. We have a question now about dating and how that's been affected by the pandemic. Neil, if you want to take this on, how has the pandemic changed dating behavior and how have we managed these lockdown rules and still tried to, as Shariah was saying before, find love somewhere? We've seen a huge increase in the uptake of dating apps, the development of them and the numbers reported on them. So clearly people are looking for love. It hasn't changed that need for us to be connected to people, especially when people are living alone as well. It's a really terrifying thing. We often think about people living alone as being more prepared for lockdown because they're used to living on their own or for introverts to have that. But actually all of us feel this in very different ways. And when people are looking for love, these dating apps are great starters for starting that conversation, finding people. And we've seen online that one of the things people are adding to their dating profiles now is I've been vaccinated. That's an additional bonus that you can get with somebody without really considering perhaps that even if you've been vaccinated, perhaps you're still asymptomatic and you can carry some virus over. So just be careful with that if anyone is looking at these dating profiles. It's a real need that we have, though, going back to it seriously just to feel that connection, to feel that love and to feel a sense of belonging. It's our most basic human need. What we see is some people are breaking the rules and that can create conflict because it's this sense of this attribution bias what Shahria was saying earlier about, we don't see that big risk when it's ourselves, when we're breaking the rules, because I'll look around and I think, I haven't been out, I work from home, I haven't been out for days and days, I get my shopping delivered, so actually I think I'm quite safe. So I will then go and break the rules to see somebody else who's also saying, well, I haven't been out as well. But we always have these little moments of connection that maybe I did go for a walk and I walked past them and we don't know the level of risk that we actually carry, but we always underestimate our own level of risk. So there's that to be considered when people are dating. And then there's the Bridgerton effect, the Bridgerton effect, this kind of really going back to Jane Austen style courting, sending messages and having a prolonged period of courting and enjoy that. We might never be in this position again. And I've spoken to some people who did have that online connection for a long time during the first lockdown. And then when the regulations were lifted and they were able to meet their people, they said, oh, actually if it's that, it wasn't worth the effort. And so we are seeing all kinds of really fascinating relationship outcomes. And keep safe, look after yourselves and enjoy what you can. Have a little conversation and see where it takes. It would be my advice. I think that's very wise advice indeed. And then I'm actually going to put this next question to you as well, Nino, because it's also in this kind of how we behave now. This is a concern that I have personally as well. So please someone's asked this. What is this pandemic going to do to ability to talk to each other? Is small talk like a muscle that's going to atrophy when we haven't been practicing it? And I would just say I love small talk and I have very little occasion for it these days. So am I still going to be able to do it when this is over? It will be a case of what am I going to talk about in the first instance. We will, our conversations will be dominated by the pandemic, about what we did and our fears coming back, what we're expecting. So I don't think there'll be any shortage of topics for small talk. It's that kind of where do we go from here after you've started doing that? We'll be fine with the small talk. It's just getting used to seeing people again and having those conversations because actually we haven't been used to seeing people for a long time. And so that our bodies and our brains will just be a little bit shocked at this ongoing assault on us, on our system where we're thinking this is really exhausting for me having to have a conversation. It'll be so exciting in the first instance where we go and see everyone again and then suddenly we'll just sit down and think that's really tiring. I've had a conversation and now what do I do? Did I really miss this? Oh my goodness. So we'll have all of that going through our head again but we're fabulously adaptable creatures. We'll be fine. That's great. That gives me hope. So we're very nearly out of time. This last question I want to put to everybody and it's a very relatable question. How do we remain positive and optimistic day by day in this long third lockdown? We are nearly there. Just give me sort of your top tips for that and then Karen, I'm going to start with you. Yeah, sure. So we actually have a written research paper looking particularly at time use activities in door because we know that during the lockdown how we spend the time inside our house is very important to our mental well-being. So there are a couple of findings that we have found. The first one is that maybe try to prevent watching too much negative news about COVID and also try to avoid misinformation. We found that gardening and exercising are a very strong predictor in reducing depression and anxiety levels and also improving your life satisfaction. Trying to get a hobby, for example, arts engagement, painting, watching some streamed performance or virtual museums and also maybe engaging some volunteering online because these have been shown to improve our mental well-being either before and also during the lockdown. And finally, trying to keep a routine. So don't overwork because I know that the working and resting can be a bit blurred when you're working from home. So try to keep a routine and if you feel very down do not hesitate to access to social support services which has been increased dramatically during the pandemic and it is very normal and it's fine to feel a bit upset or a bit down during the epidemic. Nilo, do you want to give us your... I know you've given us a lot of tips already but we're thirsty for more. Karen's just given me such a fabulously comprehensive list. It's fantastic. So everything that Karen has said what I will add to that is something that I remind people of going back to the fabulous Captain Tom Moore a year before we went into the pandemic or just before we went into the pandemic. This was a 99-year-old man who was much loved, had a fabulous life, lots of achievements but yet and still some of his best adventures were to come. He met the queen, he recorded an album, he raised lots of money. So if you're feeling like this last year has been a real drill, it's taken up and you've wasted a year of your life. Honestly, you haven't. There are so many opportunities for so many great things to come to look forward to. We just don't know what's around the corner. Oh, that's fantastic. And finally, Shiharia, what do you think for keeping positive? Well, Gino, it's funny. So at the beginning of the first lockdown I wrote a small... it's a short e-book called Good Decisions for Strain Situations which actually it's just a small three-chapter thing but it was just a reflection of behavioral economists' reflections of how to engage with the pandemic. And in that, I basically wrote down a few rules which, by the way, I'm really happy to hear that Karen has kind of summarized here as well, right? So we're thinking about very similar things. And one of the things that I feel is pretty critical is that there's a hesitancy to get to know yourself. So lots of times, for a lot of us, we sort of try not to... we try to avoid through engaging with other people and things like that, try to avoid figuring out who we actually are. And I think this is an opportunity to sort of reflect on that, get comfortable in your own skin. And I think once you start to kind of recognize who you are, how you deal with adversity, how you deal with things, you'll have a very positive mindset of the outset and the outset. So I think one of the things that I would focus on is just getting to know yourself. Who are you? Ask yourself that and get comfortable with it. Oh, that's absolutely fantastic. I really want to thank you guys. I sort of started this webinar going, oh my God, a year of this pandemic. And I feel very positive now. So my advice to everybody would be to hold a webinar and it will improve your mood in lockdown. If you can't do that, you can follow the advice of Karen, Shihariah and Milu. I hope you all enjoyed this as much as I did. I had a great time. I really want to thank our panelists for their time, for their fascinating insights into this important range of topics. Thank you very much, Karen, Milu and Shihariah. Thank you also to the viewers who joined us today and who sent in questions. I hope we got you some answers. We will be bringing you more live discussions on coronavirus and other topics in 2021. So do subscribe to our newsletter. You can do that at theconversation.com to make sure you're in the loop and to keep up with all the latest news and research brought to you by trusted experts like the ones who joined us today every single day. Thank you again for joining us and until next time, goodbye.