A COVID-related meme shows Edward Hopper’s famous painting Nighthawks with none of the characters in the coffeeshop. 
The joke being its isolated now even in the most isolated places, of which Edward Hopper’s scenes are the epitome. A few years ago, I traveled across the USA asking people if they felt their countrymen (and women) were as isolated as Hopper’s characters. Well, we all are now.
What I learned over many miles, interviews, and experiences boiled down to three things. (1) People felt isolated from the larger communities, but everyone had a core of friends (and sometimes family) that they did not feel isolated from. (2) The Internet allows people to be more isolated by only going to sites with like-minded people, but also gives them the opportunity to find new sites with different people and be less isolated. (3) People often said they felt that the country’s politicians were too isolated form the mass of population that had to live under their policies.
If you look at your social media and information sources, you can see these themes coming into sharp focus during this coronavirus “stay-at-home” era. You see people reconnecting with their groups of friends. They are more isolated from people they might have encountered if not isolating: coworkers, strangers in restaurants or art venues, etc. But they are overcoming isolation by becoming aware of other people: the delivery people and other “essential workers” who are keeping them supplied, the medically vulnerable who they have to isolate for, and the medical workers they may have been healthy enough to take for granted but who are now frontline soldiers defending our society. And, all along the political spectrum, people are unhappy with the politicians’ response: either too little or too much, but always too isolated from what the mass of population needs.
When the coronavirus lockdowns started, my wife and I were traveling on a previously arranged self-planned Europe tour supposed to last until June. We managed to get on what our flight attendant said was the last flight let out of Paris back to the USA. We just came from two COVID “hot spots,” Spain and France. Though not symptomatic, we have been self-quarantined for one week and will be for another so as not to infect others and put more strain on the essential workers, the medical workers, and the medically vulnerable. I am learning again about isolation. Sometimes, it’s a way of showing we’re all connected. 
Hunting Nighthawks: On the Road with Edward Hopper can be found at https://hopperguy.com/creativewriting/HuntingNighthawks/
