At the Pandemic’s Start, Americans Began Drinking More. They Still Are.
The New York Times
Excessive drinking persisted in the years after Covid arrived, according to 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.
The unidentified patient had recently returned from Africa, where the virus has caused a deadly epidemic, health officials said.
The event produces some of the year’s fastest meteors, although the nearly full moon may make them challenging to spot.
Mr. Musk dug into his companies’ budgets, preferring to cut too much rather than too little and to deal with the fallout later. Under Donald Trump, he is set to apply those tactics to the U.S. government.
Behind the scenes at a Chicago zoo, chimpanzees who spent years entertaining humans are learning to befriend their own kind.
The agency’s top medical official was responding to rumors that Suni Williams had lost an unusual amount of weight during an extended stay in orbit.
Artificial intelligence has become a subject for people in the art and theater worlds who are worried about being replaced by it.
President-elect Trump says tariffs will help American businesses, but many in the wine industry foresee few benefits and a lot of pain for all involved.
Ball pythons were long assumed to be solitary, but scientists discovered the snakes in captivity prefer each others’ company when given the chance to live socially.
The Justice Department and four Democratic state attorneys general argued that United’s takeover would limit competition and harm consumers needing home or hospice care.
It took nearly 25 years for biologists to discover that a swimming and glowing organism in the ocean’s midnight zone was actually a sea slug.
When asked about whether President-elect Donald Trump would prevent a TikTok ban in the United States, a spokeswoman told The New York Times: “He will deliver.”