People are losing their mind over the pandemic.
People are losing their minds over the pandemic.
The second one undoubtedly is grammatically correct, but is the first one correct as well? If so, then why?
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Sign up to join this communityThe English pronoun "they" can be either plural or singular, similarly to "you". So either are grammatically correct.
In this case the second one doesn't seem incorrect per se, but it doesn't feel 100% natural, which I think is just because "people" is really a dummy for an indefinite pronoun.
You raised a good example with "disabled people fear losing their job"; here "jobs" would imply there's some sort of mass lay-off going on as opposed to an individual one that they all happen to share, and "disabled people" is just a noun rather than a dummy pronoun.
The first example is not correct because "people" is plural and therefore you need to use the plural "minds" along with it.
A "person" can lose their mind but a group of "people" lose their minds.