The Touch Starvation Pandemic
Touch is becoming as unprocurable as toilet paper
COVID-19 has had an immense impact on all of our senses. For those who have experienced symptoms of the virus, limited smell or taste. For all of us practicing social distancing, limited sight, sound, and touch. We only see the vacant grocery store shelves and watch the curve incessantly grow. We only hear the sound of sirens and voices speaking tragic news.
Refraining from touching surfaces and our faces requires intensive restraint. But exercising strict physical abstinence while attempting to maintain closeness has become one of the most exhaustive efforts of the pandemic. Touch is becoming as unprocurable as toilet paper.
The importance of touch is profoundly underestimated. It plays a principal role in our development and is fundamental to human connection and health. We are more trusting, more generous, and more likely to cooperate after an affirmative touch. Our perception of the world is governed by our intricate array of receptors, informing our brains of diverse sensations. We simply could not thrive without touch.
And yet, the current state of the world requires us to live without it. We are fortunate to be alive, but it is hard to feel human without the love that pervades us from touch. Touch deprivation is a sentient experience in itself; our skin aches for reassurance through the means of human contact.
Touch appears to play a role in susceptibility to illness, which is a concerning statistic in the midst of a global pandemic. A 2014 study found that touch boosted the immunity of people exposed to the common cold. Over a two week span, researchers asked 400 adults to detail their social interactions and how many hugs they received each day. The subjects were then quarantined and exposed to a cold virus. The virus was highly productive as it infected seventy-eight percent of subjects, however, the susceptibility of participants was not equivalent. Those who had greater involvement in social interactions effectively combated the virus and experienced suppressed symptoms. Interestingly, physical touch accounted for a thirty-two percent reduction in susceptibility.
The evidence for the effectiveness of touch is informative, but troubling. If touch is a language through which we can communicate compassion and promote well-being, how can we continue to exercise its dialect as COVID-19 continues to spread?
The anxiety and distress incited by COVID-19 has permeated our thinking. It stings to not be able to provide reassurance and hope through a hug or a kiss or a touch. We have limited touch but we have words, which in the opinion of Albus Dumbledore, are our “most inexhaustible source of magic, capable of both inflicting injury and remedying it”.
The pandemic has deprived us of one of our senses, but maybe we can enrich the others. We can use our words to hearten those who need heartening, and remedy those who have lost hope. The touch we do have, the ability to type an email or dial a phone, can be used as a medium to communicate: to check in with our loved ones and stay in touch. We can still connect without physical contact.
