5 lessons 5 years after the coronavirus crisis

It’s now been five years since the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a global pandemic on March 11, 2020.

At first we were “all in this together” to “flatten the curve”; pretty quickly things went sideways.

Below, we look at the interesting, surprising and, in some cases, downright depressing learnings from our not-so-distant past.

Lesson 1: This too shall pass. At first there was hope that the pandemic would last a few weeks, maybe a few months, tops.

That didn’t happen.

As things unraveled, the initial hope was replaced by the feeling that with every new variant and return to social distancing, perhaps the pandemic would never end.

When coronavirus concern was first added to Ipsos’ What Worries the World monthly poll in April 2020 it rightly loomed much larger than any other issue with 61% (on average across 28 countries) saying it was a top issue for their country.

COVID-19 remained the top worry in the world for two very long years until inflation (more on that later) took over the top spot in April 2022 and now sits at a mere 3%. It’s worth reminding ourselves that the WHO didn’t declare the global public health emergency over until May 5, 2023.

In the intervening years people quit jobs, moved to the country, bought spinning bikes, as if life would stay so scary forever. Of course, it didn’t and now many of those bikes are now covered in dust as people have moved back to the city and returned to the office at least some of the time.

A crisis can push us to make needed changes to our lives, but the pandemic taught us all it’s important to look beyond the end of one’s nose before making choices that can be hard to undo.

Lesson 2: Trauma has a long tail. The fear we all initially felt for our physical health five years ago is now well in the past, but the emotional aftershocks appear to still be reverberating.

Mental health moved from the fringe to the centre of many conversations during the pandemic and it has stayed there. COVID-19 was considered the top health concern by 72% on average globally in 2020 but had dropped to just 11% by 2024 as worry about emotional stability steadily climbed. By 2023, mental health had emerged as the top health issue in the world and this has been the case for two years in a row.

The pandemic was hard on everyone, but appears to have been toughest on younger people. Everything from Zoom school to loneliness to fights about masking in class came as Generation Zers (born 1996-2012) were at a crucial stage of their emotional development. Many Gen Z females, in particular, are now seriously struggling.

Growing up has always been hard to do, but growing up during a once-in-a-century crisis likely hasn’t helped.

And as more of this cohort go from campuses to offices, employers are increasingly having to grapple with the fact that in 2024 over half (54% on average across 31 countries) of Gen Zers said they’ve felt stressed to the point that they could not go to work in the past twelve months.

Lesson 3: Workers want flexibility, bosses want compliance. The pandemic has tested the resilience of both employees and employers.

One day white-collar workers were schlepping to the office, the next day they were shuffling to the couch.

And our polling across 29 countries from May-July 2021 of the unplanned working-from-home (WFH) experiment found employees got a taste of flexibility and freedom and were eager to keep it that way post-pandemic.

It turns out bosses were a lot less eager.

Employers went from offering snacks and yoga classes as part of their RTO (return to office) plans to bluntly saying return to pre-pandemic work modes or be fired. U.S. President Donald Trump has emerged as one of the most vocal and forceful voices of the RTO movement.

Long-term tracking data by Ipsos in the U.S. “shows that there is continued room to support the needs of workers and the organization by offering the flexibility some need and want, but also allowing for those who want to be in the office to do so,” says Ipsos’ What the Future Editor Matt Carmichael.

Employees who want to keep the flexibility they gained are now getting schooled in the fact that it’s ultimately up to the employer if WFH will become just another pandemic-era experience that fades away.

Lesson 4: Humans really like to travel. In the very early days of 2020 when everyone was enthusiastically embracing trends like baking sourdough bread and adopting pandemic puppies the thought of venturing beyond one’s neighborhood ever again seemed farfetched.

Images of gigantic cruise ships being quarantined and passengers arguing over pandemic protocols mid-flight didn’t make the prospect look very appealing.

But by 2022 vaccines had been rolled out and excitement about travelling has been steadily rising since, even in the face of soaring prices for everything from airline tickets to car rentals to hotel rooms. And Australians, who endured some of the harshest lockdowns on the planet, were the most enthusiastic (82%) about travel in 2024.

Some assumed the pandemic marked the end of travel, but many have happily left the sourdough starter at home and got back out in the world … no matter the price.

Lesson 5: We are a world of haves and have-nots. High prices, even more than masks and vaccines, have come to define the 2020s so far.

This inflationary era started with extortionate prices for toilet paper and hand sanitizer. Then, once hard lockdowns ended the cost of everything from groceries to concerts to those long-anticipated trips seemed to just go up and up and up.

To make matters worse many aspiring homeowners were put in a double bind in the first half of this decade: rents in many cities rose more making it harder to save for a down payment at the same time home prices were skyrocketing.

While the days of lines outside open houses and heated bidding wars are thankfully over, the dream of home ownership is still feeling more like a pipedream than a realistic goal for some.

The Ipsos Housing Monitor 2025 finds 56% (on average across 29 countries) of renters don’t think they’ll ever be able to afford to buy a home.

The harshest lesson of the pandemic, and everything else experienced over the last five years, may be the one society never quite recovers from: the punishing cost of living has cost some people hope that better days will come.

The pandemic didn’t cause income inequality, but it doesn’t appear to have helped.

The latest wave of the Ipsos Cost of Living Monitor reveals 33% (on average across 32 countries) think they’re better off now than they were in early 2020 right before the pandemic while 37% think they’re worse off. And in late 2024, just 10% describe themselves as “living comfortably” while 61% said they are either just about getting by/finding it difficult to manage financially.

The global health emergency was also a global economic emergency. Consumer confidence in one’s own personal money situation and the financial situation of one’s country took a nosedive as the world went into isolation and those with in-person jobs, such as restaurant servers, hairdressers and cab drivers, lost their ability to earn an income overnight.

It was a destabilising time; many still seem unnerved. While the national economies of several places recovered quite well from the initial shock of shutdowns, people aren’t feeling that. The proportion saying the economic situation in their country is good is lower in six of the G7 countries in February 2025 versus February 2020. Italy is the exception, though only 31% now say their economy is good vs. 20% who said the same five years ago.

By last year, the simmering rage at both the cruelty and frailty of life that started bubbling during the pandemic boiled over in the form of angry voters putting incumbents on notice around the globe.

Now, with the pandemic firmly in the rear view mirror, the world is facing down a possible global trade war. Will we apply the lessons we’ve learned from one crisis to the next? Or just repeat our mistakes?

Time will tell.

Melissa Dunne is a senior data journalist with Ipsos and is based in Canada.