LAUSR

Significance The COVID-19 pandemic went global in a few months, caused millions of deaths, and is destroying the livelihood of countless people. This paper tries to discover whether the pandemic is destroying our social fabric too. Most research has found that natural catastrophes result in an increase of trust and cooperativeness. But what about a catastrophe whose diffusion occurs by contact with other people? Contemporaneous accounts of previous pestilences describe them as damaging social relations. Yet, surprisingly, among the general population in Italy, interpersonal trust increased relative to prepandemic levels, and those who caught COVID-19 increased their trust in strangers. This effect seems ephemeral, however, as it declines as people become free of the infection.