Category: Psychological and Sociological Impact
Teen Depression Rose Sharply During the Pandemic, but Treatment Didn’t Follow
NYT Approximately 20 percent of adolescents had symptoms of major depressive disorder in 2021 — the first full calendar year of the pandemic — but less than half who needed treatment received it, according to a new study. The research, published in JAMA Pediatrics, found that treatment was most lacking for minority adolescents, particularly those who […]
Oct 11, 2023
Kids’ Mental Health Spending Soared 26% During Pandemic
Forbes Anxiety, adjustment disorders and ADHD are largely to blame for a sharp 26% rise in mental healthcare costs for children in the two-and-a-half years following the start of the Covid-19 pandemic, a new study out Tuesday found—the latest evidence of the pandemic’s dire impact on both kids’ and adults’ mental health. Researchers with the RAND Corporation, […]
Oct 4, 2023
Psychiatric Symptoms and Fatigue in COVID-19 Survivors
Cureus Introduction: Psychiatric symptoms and fatigue are common after the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) illness. The cause of these symptoms is direct neuronal injury and indirect injury with immune-mediated inflammation. In addition, social factors also affect mental health. Objective: We aim to compare psychiatric symptoms and fatigue between COVID-19 survivors and healthy controls. Material and […]
Sep 27, 2023
The Pandemic Was a Time Machine
NYT Recently I came across perhaps the most mind-bending chart about the pandemic I’d seen over three-plus years. Originally published two years ago in The British Medical Journal, it shows how Covid affected age-standardized mortality in England and Wales — a statistic that controls for demographic change in measuring death rates, so that a country doesn’t look […]
Sep 19, 2023
New Jersey Failed Veterans at Pandemic-Ravaged Nursing Homes, U.S. Says
NYT A scathing Justice Department report found that care at the state facilities was so poor that it violated residents’ constitutional rights and led to a rash of deaths. The care given to military veterans at two state-run nursing homes in New Jersey ravaged by the coronavirus was so poor that it violated residents’ constitutional […]
Sep 19, 2023
Meet the Man Who Named Covid’s New Variants
WSJ Pirola, Eris, Kraken: T. Ryan Gregory finds inspiration in mythology and the stars. Pirola. Eris. Kraken. Covid-19 subvariants’ viral nicknames lead back to one man: evolutionary biologist T. Ryan Gregory. Gregory, 48 years old, a professor at the University of Guelph in Ontario, Canada, works with a band of unofficial Covid-19 trackers on social media to […]
Sep 19, 2023
Do they mask? Are they eating out? How covid experts are living now.
Washington Post In the past year, many Americans have stopped thinking about covid-19, ditched their masks, skipped the latest coronavirus boosters and returned to living more normal lives. While cases of covid-related severe illness and hospitalization remain low, infection counts are spiking again, new variants are emerging, and flu and respiratory syncytial virus (RSV) loom as winter approaches. There’s […]
Sep 12, 2023
The Gerontologist Adopting preventive behaviors is crucial to avoiding COVID-19 infection, and perceived anxiousness may influence such behaviors among older adults and their caregivers. This study investigated the relationships between perceived anxiousness about COVID-19 and preventive behaviors in older adult-caregiver dyads. A cross-sectional study was conducted using 1565 older adult-caregiver dyads from the 2020 NHATS/NSOC […]
Sep 5, 2023
Pandemics Don’t Really End—They Echo
Time Magazine The public health emergency related to the COVID-19 pandemic officially ended on May 11, 2023. It was a purely administrative step. Viruses do not answer to government decrees. Reported numbers were declining, but then started coming up again during the summer. By August, hospital admissions climbed to more than 10,000 a week. This was nowhere […]
Aug 29, 2023
COVID-19 School Closures Harmed Children’s Mental Health
Psychology Today There has been much conjecture about possible detrimental long-term consequences of school closures on young children and adolescents, but now a new study published in the journal Scientific Reports provides convincing evidence that the mental health of school children was impaired by school closures during the pandemic. The study surveyed 907 adolescents and their parents […]
Aug 22, 2023