While loneliness is a real and important problem, there's good reason to be skeptical about it being an "epidemic". The Cigna study is incredibly flawed:

http://andrewgelman.com/2018/05/09/43-loneliest-number-youll...

Journalists (like David Brooks in the New York Times) are getting it very wrong as well:

http://andrewgelman.com/2018/05/16/no-no-epidemic-loneliness...