According to a report published by Dr F. Perry Wilson from the Yale School of Medicine, many of our habits developed during the lockdown have had such harmful effects with us to these days, their impact can stay with us for the rest of our lives. If we don’t pay attention to this.
During the first year of the pandemic, alcohol sales increased 3%, the largest year-on-year increase in more than 50 years. There was also an increase in drunkenness across the board, though it was most pronounced in those who were already at risk from alcohol use disorder. Alcohol-associated deaths increased by around 10% during the first year of COVID isolation. Eventhough it is a small percentage of COVID-associated deaths, but we need to take into consideration and not to turn our head. As the pandemic waned and the society reopened, as we got back to work and reintegrated into our social circles and escaped the confines of our houses and apartments, our drinking habits did not go back to normal. As followed and noted by Dr Wilson, american’s relationship with alcohol has been a torrid one, as many graph showing gallons of ethanol consumed per capita over time. What presented via the statistics, we can see a steady increase in alcohol consumption from the end of prohibition in 1933 to its peak in the heady days of the early 1980s, followed by a steady decline until the mid-1990s. Since then, there has been another increase with a notable uptick during the early part of the COVID pandemic. Appearing in a research letter in the Annals of Internal Medicine, that compared alcohol consumption in the first year of the COVID pandemic with following years, it looks like not much has changed. This was a population-based survey study leveraging the National Health Interview Survey, including around 80,000 respondents from 2018, 2020, and 2022. They created two main categories of drinking: drinking any alcohol at all and heavy drinking. In 2018, 66% of Americans reported drinking any alcohol, that had risen to 69% by 2020, and it stayed at that level even after the lockdown had ended. Translating into absolute numbers, it suggests that we have added between 3,328,000 and 10,660,000 net additional drinkers to the population over this time period. This trend was seen across basically every demographic group, and marginally higher rates among people under age 30.
“Heavy drinking” is defined as five or more drinks in a day or 15 or more per week for men, and four or more in a day or eight per week for women. The rate of heavy drinking increased from 5.1% in 2018 to over 6% during the pandemic. While the survey does not explain the reasons or long-term health impacts, other research suggests it may contribute to chronic physical and mental health issues. Maybe more important is that it reminds us that habits are sticky. Once we become accustomed to that glass of wine or two with dinner, and before bed, it has a tendency to stay with us. There’s an upside to that phenomenon as well, of course; it means that we can train good habits too.
