Boston College researchers find sharp increase in anxiety, depression during pandemic | Boston Globe

“A certain level of anxiety and sadness is not surprising and perhaps to be expected,” given the social isolation, fear, economic distress, and disruption in routines caused by the pandemic, she said.

Coley said the question was whether the feelings would “dissipate quickly as things get back to normal” or propel “some people into a significant mental health crisis and longer-term mental health problems.”

The researchers noted that previous studies have also found the pandemic was harming the population’s mental health, but they said they were looking to gain “a far more expansive view” and break down trends by demographic groups.

“I think this is broadly consistent with existing research, that there has been a substantial increase in mood-anxiety disorders during COVID-19, and that there is a gap between service availability and need,” said Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health and senior author of a study published in September on the rise in depression symptoms during the pandemic.

“The magnitude of the increase in mental disorders here is higher than that shown in other work, but that may be difference in measurement, and we need more science to emerge to settle on the likeliest scope of the increased burden of poor mental health in the population,” Galea said in an e-mail.

Click here to read the full article.

Does The Pandemic Have Your Brain In A Fog? Doctors Say You're Not Alone | NPR

If you're struggling and feeling physically exhausted a year into this pandemic, you are far from alone. Mental health care providers say a lot of people are right there with you. They also say it's a normal reaction our bodies are having to very abnormal times. NPR's Rhitu Chatterjee reports.

Listen to the full podcast here.

The Shrinking of the Global Middle Class | Bloomberg Businessweek

Dr. Sandro Galea, Dean of Boston University School of Public Health, discusses the race to get people vaccinated before more Covid outbreaks occur. Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Joel Weber and Bloomberg News Senior Trade and Globalization Reporter Shawn Donnan talk about how millions have tumbled out of the global middle class. Bloomberg News Wall Street Reporter Sonali Basak shares the details of Jamie Dimon's annual letter to shareholders. And we Drive to the Close with Leo Kelly, CEO at Verdence Capital Advisors.

Listen to the full podcast here.

The Current | CBC Radio

Long-term care residents might have thought getting vaccinated would mean more freedom, but now they face lockdowns due to outbreaks among unvaccinated staff. We talk to epidemiologist Dr. Sandro Galea and his dad, Emidio, who has just spent the last 14 days in his room; and Susan Mintzberg, a PhD candidate studying the impact of loneliness on seniors in the School of Social Work at McGill University. 

Plus, many elders in the N.W.T. must move hundreds of kilometres to access care facilities as they age, cut off from their land and loved ones. We talk to elder and advocate Margaret Leishman in Kakisa, N.W.T., who wants more support for elders to age in place. Angela Grandjambe, housing manager for Fort Good Hope, tells us about a new facility that has just opened to allow seniors to stay close to their communities.

Listen to the full interview here.

School Closures Are A National Disgrace | Independent Women's Forum

“The science and data are clear that we can reopen schools safely and successfully,” Dr. Kim Newell Green, a pediatrician and professor at UC–San Francisco, recently told the New York Times. “However, media and the unions have fostered uncertainty and fear. We should all find a way to do right by our children with innovation and creativity, but above all, science.”

As Dr. Sandro Galea, the dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, wrote in Scientific American a few weeks ago, “Children have proven uniquely resilient to COVID-19, but many are already suffering lasting educational, mental and physical harms.”

Indeed, it’s not hyperbole to say that prolonged COVID school closures may rank among the worst and most destructive policy decisions in modern American history.

Read the full article here.

3 Graphics tell the story of mass shootings during the pandemic | ABC News

Despite rising numbers, mass shootings still make up a tiny sliver of America's gun violence problem.

"Mass shootings are 1%, maybe 2%, of people who die from gun violence in this country," said Dr. Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist and dean at the Boston University School of Public Health. "At the same time, mass shootings are horrific events that bring home the danger of gun violence."

As an emergency room physician, Wintemute is especially cognizant of the fact that most gun deaths don't fall into the category of mass shootings. On the other hand, both experts pointed out, while killings like in Boulder are less common than routine gun violence or firearm suicide, they tend to have a profound effect on the public and on policymakers.

"Events like this shooting are changing the character of American public life," Wintemute said.

Read the full piece here.

Covid-19 Makes Racial And Class Status Longevity Gaps Worse | Forbes

Everyone knows the poor die sooner than the rich. Some humans can live past 90, but many don’t have access to the health and wealth that lets humans live a normal human life span. What fewer people appreciate is that the longevity gap is growing. As Boston University researchers Jacob Bor, Gregory Cohen and Sandro Galea found, income and education gaps in life expectancy have widened in recent decades. Since 2001, middle- and high-income Americans gained more than 2 years in life expectancy while the poorest 5% gained essentially nothing.

The race gap in longevity was also getting worse before the pandemic. In 1950, age-65 life expectancy for Black and white men was equal—each could expect to live about 12.8 more years if they had reached 65. Now there is a 2-year difference (moreover, 81% of white men make it to 65 compared to just 70% of Black men). The only wrinkle in the class-based story was that Latinos had an advantage, even though they were low income. Foreign-born Hispanic men can expect to live 3.2 years longer than their U.S.-born counterparts.

Read the full piece here.

The Pandemic Changed You. It Also Changed Your Brain | Elemental

Sandro Galea, MD, is a physician and epidemiologist who knows trauma: He has studied people’s mental health in the aftermath of, among other earth-shattering events, 9/11, hurricanes, and civil unrest. In March and April 2020, the Boston University School of Public Health dean conducted one of the first mental health surveys of Americans during the Covid-19 pandemic. Galea found that in those early months, depression rates in the United States had more than tripled compared to the years prior, up from 8.5% to 27.8%.

“We were anticipating to find elevated rates, because we know that [depression increases in prevalence] from other large-scale events, but the threefold increase was surprising,” Galea says. “Typically, in general populations after these events, you’d expect about a doubling, so the threefold increase was surprising, no question.”

Read the full piece here.

Rebuilding Trust In Public Health Will Take Long-Term Investment, Expert Says | WGBH

Rebuilding the nation's public health infrastructure will take committed effort long after the pandemic has passed, especially in communities of color, Dr. Sandro Galea said Wednesday on GBH's Greater Boston. "We should have dealt with this five years ago," said Galea, who teaches at Boston University's School of Public Health. "Or at least if we're going to tackle it now, we should make sure it doesn't remain a problem five years from now. We have a system where we have under-invested in looking after people who are marginalized, looking after people of color, looking after people who have low incomes."

Read the full article here.

Coronavirus Pandemic, 1 Year Later: 9 Things We Hope Will Prevail | Patch

ACROSS AMERICA — A year ago Thursday, everything changed.

The World Health Organization declared the global coronavirus outbreak a pandemic on March 11, 2020. Restaurants and bars shuttered, companies and government agencies sent the employees home to work, and the U.S. economy went into a free fall as millions of people lost their jobs, temporarily or permanently, and small businesses quietly died along with more than 528,000 Americans.

It's been a terrible, heart shattering, destabilizing 12 months.

But not everything has been awful.

We're hard-wired to respond to emergencies and disasters with compassion and empathy, said Sandro Galea, the dean of Boston University's School of Public Health.

"Most people behave in a pro-social way after disasters and emergencies," Galea said in an email to Patch. "People do try to be compassionate when they can, after taking care to achieve basic self-preservation."

But this disaster has a wrinkle, and it's political.

"The first step is self-preservation. Then comes action to protect others," Galea said. "In some ways, that is not surprising and probably biologically programmed. The question is what is considered to be 'self-preservation.'

Read the full piece here.

‘Then the world caved in’: 10 experts describe the day they realized Covid-19 was here to stay | STAT News

Given my work in public health, the possibility of an outbreak like Covid-19 happening has never been far from my mind. In many ways, the pandemic was deeply predictable. We did not know when such an outbreak would occur but we could reasonably assume that one would emerge sooner or later.

In public talks on epidemiology, I have often used Ebola and SARS as examples of the interconnectedness of health, reflecting how contagion spreads in the modern world. So when the first signs of trouble emerged in Wuhan, like many in my field I watched with concern. With the rapid global spread in February 2020, it was apparent we faced a serious problem, as I wrote at the time.

Read the full piece here.

COVID-19 has exacerbated a troubling U.S. health trend: premature deaths | Science News

“This is a public health crisis that isn’t getting better, and in some ways is getting worse,” Kathleen Mullan Harris, a sociologist at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and chair of the committee, said during a March 2 webinar to discuss the report.

The report shows that declining life expectancy among racial minorities and working-class white people before the pandemic “set the stage for the challenges we saw during COVID-19,” says epidemiologist Sandro Galea, dean of Boston University School of Public Health. Galea assisted in the peer review of the committee’s analysis.

People with underlying health conditions — often the very conditions driving the trend of premature deaths — have been especially vulnerable during the pandemic. For instance, studies have found that obesity creates a substantial risk for hospitalization and death following a coronavirus infection (SN: 4/22/20). And federal data cited in the report reinforce that the virus has not affected all groups equally. From January 1, 2020, to January 9, 2021, 4.3 percent of all deaths among working-age white residents involved COVID-19. That figure reached 10 percent for Black residents, 21.4 percent for Hispanics, 14.2 percent for Native American groups, 13 percent for Asians and 16.1 percent for Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders.

Read the full article here.

COVID-19 has exacerbated a troubling US health trend: premature deaths | Brainerd Dispatch

The report shows that declining life expectancy among racial minorities and working-class white people before the pandemic “set the stage for the challenges we saw during COVID-19,” says epidemiologist Sandro Galea, dean of Boston University School of Public Health. Galea assisted in the peer review of the committee’s analysis.

People with underlying health conditions — often the very conditions driving the trend of premature deaths — have been especially vulnerable during the pandemic. For instance, studies have found that obesity creates a substantial risk for hospitalization and death following a coronavirus infection. And federal data cited in the report reinforce that the virus has not affected all groups equally. From Jan. 1, 2020, to Jan. 9, 2021, 4.3% of all deaths among working-age white residents involved COVID-19. That figure reached 10% for Black residents, 21.4% for Hispanics, 14.2% for Native American groups, 13% for Asians and 16.1% for Hawaiians and other Pacific Islanders.

Read the full piece here.

Environment and mental health — intimately connected, much to learn | National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences

Evidence that the environment matters falls into three areas, according to keynote speaker Sandro Galea, M.D., Dr.P.H., from the Boston University School of Public Health.
     

• Among the best known environmental contaminants and pathogens is the connection between childhood blood lead and psychopathology later in life. Other examples include pesticides and fine particulate matter air pollution

• Environmental disruptions such as earthquakes, hurricanes, and the September 11 attacks usher in post-traumatic stress disorder, depression, and other outcomes, which may linger long after infrastructure and homes are repaired. The COVID-19 pandemic is wreaking effects on income, social relationships, and culture.

• “Environmental form fundamentally influences mental health,” Galea said, referring to green space, tree canopy, and open space. Segregation and the redlining that enforced it are another aspect of this concept. “Form … does not just happen. Form is constructed from policies followed over time.”

Read the article here.

Engine Explosion Spurring Boeing 777 Groundings | Bloomberg Businessweek

 Dr. Sandro Galea, Dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, provides a coronavirus and vaccine update. Bloomberg Businessweek Editor Joel Weber and Bloomberg Businessweek Features Writer Ashlee Vance talk about a 27-year-old who became a Covid-19 data superstar. Bloomberg New Economy Editorial Director Andy Browne walks through his column “America Needs A China Sputnik Moment.” Bloomberg News Aerospace Reporter Julie Johnsson shares her insight on an engine explosion spurring Boeing 777 groundings in the U.S. and Asia. And we Drive to the Close with James Cakmak, Partner and Technology Analyst at Clockwise Capital.

Hosts: Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec. Producer: Doni Holloway.

Listen to the full interview here.

Study Estimates Excess Deaths in US from COVID-19 Pandemic Unemployment | Mirage News

Depending on the assumptions they put into their model, the number of deaths could be much higher or lower. If they assumed the April 2020 unemployment rate was just 10 percent, and that unemployment was half as harmful as has been seen in past recessions, their estimate fell to 8,315.

But if they assumed that unemployment reached 26.5 percent, which would be the highest estimate using a different definition of who was participating in the labor force, and also that the effects of losing a job in the pandemic were three times as deadly, their estimate rose to 201,968.

The researchers emphasized that some excess deaths are preventable if the proper policies are put in place.

“We urgently need policies that protect workers and lessen the harms of unemployment, particularly policies that are crafted to support those experiencing the unjust double burden of both COVID-19 and unemployment,” Matthay said.

Authors: Matthay was joined in the study by Kate A. Duchowny, PhD, MPH; and Alicia R. Riley, PhD, MPH, both of UCSF’s Department of Epidemiology and Biostatistics; and Sandro Galea, MD, DrPh, of the Boston University School of Public Health.

Read the full article here.

Who has died from Covid-19 in the US | VOX

We found that while Covid-19 spared no group, it impacted certain populations more than others. Throughout the pandemic, people of color have consistently been disproportionately sickened and killed by the virus. They also died young: Of Covid-19 deaths in people under the age of 45, more than 40 percent were Hispanic and about a quarter were Black.

But what started as a health emergency concentrated in travelers, urban minority communities, and other crowded places (such as nursing homes and prisons) fanned out into rural areas of the country, leading to a surge in deaths among white people, too. 

Read the full piece here.

University of Iowa health experts worry about psychological effects of the pandemic | The Daily Iowan

“People might be more irritable or more likely to fight because their brain is in a trauma response,” Farley said. “Because they can’t run away, then they might be inclined to go into a freeze response where they shut down — they are depressed and lack motivation. That’s a response that the brain has triggered because they feel threatened by what’s happening.”

According to Sandro Galea of Boston University School of Public Health, depression has risen by a factor of three, meaning the number of people who experience depression is almost three times what it was before the pandemic.

Another study done by UCLA found that loneliness among young adults has increased as a result of social distancing.

Once the pandemic is over, one of the hardest things people will have to do is adapt to normal life, Farley said.

Read the full piece here.

Is It Safe to Attend A. Bubble Concert? Eh.. Maybe Not | Fodors

The infectious disease epidemiologist and infection preventionist explained why it’s not a good idea. “There is definitely a concern for the ‘bubble concert’ as while the theory is to create your own personal bubble, the exit from the bubble poses a problem—how is the bubble deflated? Where does the air go? What is the process for disinfection? The concern is that if you have an infectious person inside a bubble, they could be creating just a bubble of droplets and aerosols and that could pose risk to others for deflation and any outwards emissions.”

Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, told The New York Times that the risk of transmission can be reduced with protective barriers and good air circulation, but he would still be hesitant to attend a bubble concert until it’s further assessed.

On the other hand, Joshua Barocas, assistant professor of medicine at Boston University, told Business Insider, that these concerts may inspire hope, “I think this is an innovative way of allowing people to participate in a normal activity—concert-going—while also doing it in the safest way possible.”

Read the full piece here.

We May Never Eliminate COVID-19. But We Can Learn to Live With It | TIME

Even assuming the U.S. picks up the pace on vaccinations, there will still be gaps in protection. The two COVID-19 vaccines currently authorized in the U.S., made by Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna, are both about 95% effective at preventing disease, but there is a small subset of people for whom they will not work. It’s also unclear whether being vaccinated means you cannot transmit the virus to others. And there will always be people who choose not to or are unable to get vaccinated. Plus, children younger than 16 are not currently eligible for vaccination, which means the virus may keep spreading among young people until vaccinemakers complete studies on children, hopefully sometime this year.

All that means the U.S. is unlikely to eliminate COVID-19 in the near future, says Saskia Popescu, an assistant professor of biodefense at George Mason University. A country like New Zealand–an island nation with about 5 million residents–will have an easier time stamping out a virus than a global travel hub with 330 million citizens living across more than 50 states and territories. But even if elimination is far off, “I think we’ll enter a phase of low-level prevalence,” says Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health. “Yes, there [will be] a disease among us, but there are many diseases among us.”

Read the full article here.