Coronavirus Has Killed the Power of Touch. How Do We Reconnect?

In intensive care units, doctors and nurses hold the hands of those very ill or dying—alone and frightened—of coronavirus. Nothing more piercingly conveys the power of touch. In the outside world, we are told to not touch, to keep apart from each other for fear of transmitting or contracting the virus. Touch has become a physical and cultural minefield, and Professor Tiffany M. Field, director of the Touch Research Institute at the University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, is surveying just how fraught this minefield has become. 

In the era of COVID-19 and social distancing, when there is a prohibition on us being within six feet of each other in public, when touching a stranger appears the worst idea, Professor Field—through the “Covid-19 Lockdown Activities Survey”—wants to know if you are in a relationship or family situation where you are able to touch and receive touch from loved ones. Maybe a pet is your significant touch-other.

Or are you alone, relishing the thought of touch, missing taken for granted social touching (fist bumps, hugs, kisses on the cheek) or the more intimate touching of sex? Are you having lockdown hook-ups? Or are you quite content not being touched at all, thank you very much; to be in—as academics put it—“touch isolation”?

Professor Field told The Daily Beast that she and a team of research students are beginning to study the responses flowing into the survey—running at least through the end of April—that asks not only how respondents feel about touch but also about a range of their quarantine emotions. 

Field said, “We’re asking things like, ‘Are you touching more than you were before; how are you touching; what exercise are you doing; how lonely do you feel; how depressed are you?’” The survey is aimed at all ages, the single, coupled, and families; it also looks at sex, sleep, anxiety, and the issue of whether COVID-19 has also triggered any post-traumatic stress disorder linked to past events.

Other lockdown inner-echoes are not as dark, but still profound. For one fiftysomething New Yorker who requested anonymity, technology means he is in heartening touch with friends. “But the one thing that can’t be replicated is touch. I miss it,” he told The Daily Beast. “When I had a dog who loved to cuddle, I had a temp, a stand-in who filled the skin-to-skin gap in my life. But right now it’s hugging a friend, the occasional accidental bumping of shoulders or brushing hands that I miss, as well—and maybe just as much—as intimate touch: a hand on a cheek, or two hands massaging my shoulders. 

“I’m someone whose pattern was to often freeze or run away when genuine intimacy was offered—and I’m not talking just sex, because that can be intimate without being truly intimate. Maybe one of the resets in my own life that this experience seems to do for me is making me realize how much I miss intimacy—and how much I’ve missed it for many years when it was potentially possible. The lockdown has made me appreciate physical human connection in a way I never had before.”

Victoria Abraira, an assistant professor at Rutgers University specializing in the study of touch, told The Daily Beast that a positive upshot of COVID-19 and its quarantines, prohibitions around contact, and isolation is that it has focused attention on touch itself: its importance, science, and meaning. 

“This pandemic shows why touch should be studied in the same rigorous way as the other senses,” Abraira said. “For every 100 papers on vision, there is only one on touch. We need more scientists to study it, even if this is a nightmare experiment to have to go through. What I hope will come out of it is a sense of appreciation for touch, and the recognition that in studying it as a sense we can tap into the regions of the brain and how the brain rewires itself to be healthier and better socialized within humanity.”

Professor Field said the new Miami COVID-19 study followed another, cut short by the pandemic, that her team was undertaking in airports to study the manner of touching at departure gates. The answer, she laughed, was very little. Around 98 percent of those observed were glued to their cellphones, scrolling and texting. “There was not much touch going on,” said Field, “so I’m not sure if people will be feeling deprived of touch that much. Americans were never that touchy-feely.”

Field and her students had also studied French and American adolescents in McDonald’s. “The French students were all over each other. The Miami kids were flipping their hair and cracking their knuckles.”

People are complicated, and having touch of any sort requires navigation, and I think that can be rewarding and I miss it.
Americans now seem to be missing the power of touch. As one friend said to me, drily: “People are complicated, and having touch of any sort requires navigation, and I think that can be rewarding and I miss it. I want to squeeze my friends and go on bad dates. Touch is always complicated to me, so everything around COVID-19 will just get thrown on to the anxiety list. And the relief and joy will be added to the happy list. It has been a relief to find out in this time how much I enjoy human company.”

Hans-Jöerg Renner, a New York City massage therapist, stopped work nearly four weeks ago, when the city’s barbers and hair and nail salons were ordered closed.

“It’s very scary,” Renner told The Daily Beast. “People may begin to go back to work slowly, but not me. The nature of my business is touching human bodies, and I don’t want to catch the virus or transmit it to others. A lot of my clients are over 65, with underlying conditions. I don’t want to be the one who harms them. There is so much uncertainty over everything—the disease itself, and the time frame.”

“Right now, people are afraid. They may be sick, out of a job, they don’t know how to pay bills. They are health care workers, policemen, firefighters, all under a tremendous amount of stress. When you and your body are under such a prolonged period of stress, it can weaken your immune system. Unfortunately, at a time when touch is so needed, we can’t have it—not through massage, or even a hug between friends.”

Researchers have studied the many physical and psychological benefits of touch. It has been shown to bolster the immune system, to help with sleep and digestion, and ward off colds and infection, and to lower blood pressure.

Abraira told The Daily Beast that she and her colleagues had been studying the effects of “touch isolation” before COVID-19 hit; the presence of the disease has made the research more timely and urgent. A lack of touch, as experienced by people over a sustained period of time, can lead to “severe psychiatric issues,” said Abraira.

She cited the example of the range of conditions suffered by the horribly neglected children from Romanian orphanages as they grew into adults. “There’s something innately essential about the development and maintenance of the social brain that requires the sense of touch,” Abraira said. “Those in isolation in jails suffer because their social brains are rewired. We have evolved as a species to be social, and the sense of touch is key to uncovering our social brain and allowing it to develop.”

In the first wave of coronavirus publicity, elbow bumps were the thing, “and people seemed to like them,” noted Field, even if that innocent time seems like an eon ago. “Now it’s elbow bumps done at a distance, thumbs-up, and waves,” said Field. “We are OK making eye contact but not physical contact. I think we will be social distancing for a while, especially if the prognostic indicators of a second wave are true.”

Like many, Abraira herself said she felt a little “touch deprived” right now and a “little bit depressed” as a result. How we respond to a lack of touch may depend on age, she said, and if we have a predisposition to depression or a medical condition that makes us even warier of touch now. We should use Zoom meetings and other technology to remain connected, Abraira said. “It’s not the same as touching, but it can substitute for now. The longer this goes on, the longer the return to normal, will be detrimental and have effects on us all.”


Even though we are faced with social isolation, we are equipped to come out of it—and I am hopeful that we will.

Abraira said she is fortunate to have a partner and 3-year-old daughter at home. She knows, through her own study of mice “who go crazy after a couple of weeks of isolation, that someone living in total isolation for a period of time “can also go crazy.” Enforced isolation is one of the most severe punishments a human can endure, Abraira said.

Abraira recommends giving your skin whatever luxury makes it feel its best: baths, lotions, whatever sensory experience makes it come alive. “The big difference between humans and mice is that we have a large cortex,” Abraira said. “We are really good at adapting. Even though we are faced with social isolation, we are equipped to come out of it—and I am hopeful that we will.”

Those within families and relationships will not be touch-deprived in the immediate future, said Field. To those who are single or are deprived of touch, she recommended doing exercise or anything, including showering and washing of hands, that stimulates the pressure receptors under the skin, “which puts the nervous system in a relaxed state. Your heart rate and blood pressure go down if the stress hormones are reduced. Anything that moves the skin is helpful.”

Our brain will adapt to whatever the situation it is in, said Abraira, and it will adapt to quarantine. But the giving and receiving of things like hugs, massage, and sexual intimacy releases oxytocin, the “love hormone,” which releases stress and make us feel good. (Abraira would be fascinated to see a study of those not being touched in this era and what has happened to their oxytocin levels.) This could lead to increases in levels of stress, said Abraira, “which is why people with pets are also fortunate, as stroking them and being with them is similarly de-stressing.”

Or, as a single friend with a dog put it: “Having a pet is such a wonderful, simple connection—you just love and love t

If our present experience of touch is complex, one can say the same of its history.

Constance Classen, author of The Deepest Sense: A Cultural History of Touch, told The Daily Beast: “Although in earlier centuries people did not know how diseases were transmitted, and many thought it must be by smell, it was obvious in cases of epidemics that close contact with infected individuals increased one’s risk.  

In our age of social media, it sometimes seems that visual representations matter more than physical experiences.
“This concern over touch as a medium of disease went hand in hand with the new sense of individualism that developed in Western cultures in modernity, and which also required a greater restriction of tactile contact in order to safeguard one’s newly important private space and promote one’s sense of importance as an individual—and not just as a member of a group. This is the greatest shift in Western tactile history, but it took place slowly over a long time and it was not the result of any one traumatic epidemic.”

The modern decline in the social importance of touch, said Classen, “was accompanied by a rise in the social importance of sight. A key factor here was the development of new technologies for exploring the visual world and recording previously fleeting images... In our age of social media, it sometimes seems that visual representations matter more than physical experiences.”

This immersion in a visual-dominated online world has intensified for people at home under the coronavirus lockdown, said Classen, “teaching us a sensory language in which sight dazzles and touch shrinks.”