United States: Recent expert reports suggest that Americans indulged in drinking more when the Covid-19 pandemic got underway.
The experts cite reasons as stress, isolation, and uncertainty being major ones, as the world they had been living in had changed overnight.
However, the report suggested on Monday that that trend has not been curbed two years after the disaster.
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The percentage of Americans consuming alcohol has risen during the 2018 to 2020 phase and inched up further in 2021 and 2022.
Furthermore, more people are now reported of heavy or binge drinking.
According to 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, “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,” the New York Times reported.
Moreover, “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 noted.
“But that’s not what we’re seeing,” he continued.
According to Dr. Lee, alcohol can be addictive, “and we know that addiction doesn’t go away, even if the initial trigger that started it has gone away.”
Associated problems
Both rates of heavy drinking and alcohol-related liver disease had been increasing for decades before the pandemic began.
But then alcohol-related deaths skyrocketed in 2020, increasing by a reported 25 percent in one year, according to Christian Hendershot, director of clinical research at U.S.C.’s Institute for Addiction Science.
According to Dr. Hendershot, “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.”
Many unfavorable effects of the pandemic remained after restrictions were lifted, including increased alcohol consumption, truancy, and learning loss, increased overdose rates, and more adolescent mental health issues, the New York Times reported.
The current study was performed on the data gathered from the National Center for Health Statistics National Health Interview Survey, which was conducted from January 2022 to December of that year.
There were 26,806 respondents aged 18 and above who were questioned about their drinking profile in the last year.