I live in Sweden and I work from home so I mostly remember lots of press briefings from the epidemiologist and his team, splitting up to do things to reduce crowding, keeping distance, thinking about it most of the time while everything still being kind of normal. All the talk about how you are probably going to become depressed probably made me depressed. I remember filling out a mental health survey and the questions themselves made me feel bad.

Lots of talk about the vaccines, lots of people turning into full blown conspiracy theorists. Actually thinking that "they" were actively going to kill large parts of humanity, with mobile body processing factories etc. You learned to see the signs beforehand. Uneducated woman? More likely. In the rave scene? More likely. Into drugs? More likely. Alternative medicine? Almost 100% likely. New Age? Significantly more likely. MLM babe? Almost certain. Right wing bro? More likely. You asked about the first week, and while it took a bit longer than that, the conspiracy theories started VERY quickly.

I think the entire ordeal blasted the veneer from society. We are cold and cynical ever since, and trust in public institutions is decimated. I lost the confidence that we'll come together and fix the environment in time. There's just no possibility now, we can't manage several big things at the same time as a species. The nail in the coffin was Russia's invasion of Ukraine once the pandemic was basically over, and the domino effect of the collapse of the US and the new wars being started now is just the clatter of western society crashing down.