I've felt alone in a group my whole life which has been significantly longer than covid/vaccine time period.
Yes, always feeling apart / alien from others has had an effect, but it's chicken/egg with me.
Because of childhood trauma, my brain wired differently. I've always been conscious that how I think / feel / react to things is very different from the vast amount of people I encounter daily. To me, they are going through ingrained societal motions almost like auto bots: school, university, job, buy car, buy house, get engaged, get married, pop some kids out, go on package holidays and retire / die. Though I'm not in their heads, most of them seem entirely happy with this lifestyle, these goals and utilising them as some sort of measure of success. I think of it like have a list of quests in a video game then ching, milestone achieved, on to the next.
But I never really got there. I have a bunch of partially complete abandoned quests that largely seem either pointless or unachievable to me. It's like my only real goal in life was to love and be loved in a safe and mutually reciprocal way, just to be happy/content, but the torturous overlords kept giving me glimpses of experiencing that - feeling hope - then sadistically ripped it away or fucked it all up.
Like if you play the game the Sims: lots of players seem to find it funny to brick their sim up in the basement til they starve, set them on fire or drown them (least in the social media groups).
If we are a simulation, then whoever's playing is a grade a psychopathic dick. Maybe the "happy" people are the NPCs cause nobody interferes with their base programming.
(Also been binge watching Supernatural of late and their take on this is that God is the controller but he keeps getting bored and creating multiple new universes with similar characters playing out different scenarios largely geared towards whatever outcomes he finds most entertaining
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