Covid Time: How Quarantine Affects Feelings of Elapsed Time

Abstract

The lockdowns imposed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic abruptly upended people’s lives and daily structure. In this survey of 1,506 Americans conducted in June 2020, we test how quarantine affects feelings of elapsed time (the subjective temporal distance from an event). We find that feelings of elapsed time are determined either by how people spent their time in quarantine or by how much time since an event was spent in quarantine, depending on whether people are still in quarantine at the time of evaluation. Specifically, whether people quarantined alone and the extent to which they maintained a temporal structure affect feelings of elapsed time while people are in quarantine; once people leave quarantine, feelings of elapsed time depend on how much of the time following an event was spent in quarantine, rather than on how they spent their time in it.