RIGHT SPEAK: At the Pandemic’s Start, Americans Began Drinking More. They Still Are; Study finds Pandemic-era Increase in Alcohol Use Has Persisted, and other C-Virus related stories

At the Pandemic’s Start, Americans Began Drinking More. They Still Are:

Excessive drinking persisted in the years after Covid arrived, according to a new data.

Americans started drinking more as the Covid-19 pandemic got underway. They were stressed, isolated, uncertain — the world as they had known it had changed overnight.

Two years into the disaster, the trend had not abated, researchers reported on Monday.

The percentage of Americans who consumed alcohol, which had already risen from 2018 to 2020, inched up further in 2021 and 2022. And more people reported heavy or binge drinking,

“Early on in the pandemic, we were seeing an enormous surge of people coming in to the clinic and the hospital with alcohol-related problems,” said Dr. Brian P. Lee, a hepatologist at the University of Southern California and the principal investigator of the study, published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

“People assumed this was caused by acute stress, like what we saw with 9/11 and Katrina, and typically it goes back to normal after these stressful events are over,” he added. “But that’s not what we’re seeing.”

Alcohol can be addictive, “and we know that addiction doesn’t go away, even if the initial trigger that started it has gone away,” Dr. Lee said.

Rates of heavy drinking and of alcohol-related liver disease had been rising steadily for decades before the pandemic struck. But alcohol-related deaths surged in 2020, with one study reporting a 25 percent increase in a single year, said Christian Hendershot, director of clinical research at U.S.C.’s Institute for Addiction Science.

“We think that what happened during the pandemic was that there were a large number of people who were already in a high-risk zone, so to speak, and the pandemic pushed them over the brink into severe illness and death,” Dr. Hendershot said.

The surge in alcohol consumption was one of several lingering legacies of the pandemic, along with school absenteeism, lags in educational attainment, a rise in overdose deaths and a surge in mental health problems, especially among young people. --->READ MORE HERE

Study finds pandemic-era increase in alcohol use has persisted:

Alcohol use increased during the COVID-19 pandemic and remained elevated even after the pandemic ended, according to a large nationally representative Keck Medicine of USC study published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine.

From pre-pandemic (2018) to the height of the pandemic (2020), heavy alcohol use among Americans rose by 20%, and any alcohol use rose by 4%. In 2022, the increases were sustained.

The rise in drinking was seen across all age groups, genders, race, ethnicities and regions of the country, except for Native Americans and Asian Americans. Adults ages 40-49 had the highest increase in heavy alcohol use.

"These numbers reflect an alarming public health issue that could result in severe health consequences for far too many people," said Brian P. Lee, MD, MAS, a hepatologist and liver transplant specialist with Keck Medicine of USC and principal investigator of the study. "Our results suggest men and women under 50 are at special risk."

Excessive alcohol use is a leading preventable cause of illness and death in the United States, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Half of all liver-related deaths are caused by alcohol, and alcohol-related cirrhosis is now the leading cause of liver transplants, according to Lee.

To reach their conclusions, researchers studied data from the National Health Interview Survey, one of the largest and most comprehensive health surveys in the country. The survey collected alcohol use information as well as demographic and socioeconomic data for more than 24,000 adults age 18 or older. They compared 2018 with 2020 alcohol use numbers, then 2018 with 2022.

While the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services announced the official end of the pandemic in May 2023, the study defined the year 2022 as post-pandemic, as behaviors were beginning to return to normal. --->READ MORE HERE