The most worrisome drinking behavior, as before the pandemic, appears to be among women, who have also borne more of the child-care burden created by school closures. A study published in October in The Journal of Addiction Medicine found that between February and April 2020, women had a greater increase in excessive drinking than men did. Respondents who are Black reported greater increases, too. A November study in the journal Addictive Behaviors, based on an April survey that asked about people's drinking during the previous month, found that women drank more than men in response to pandemic stress, to the point that their intake levels were roughly equal. "I left that study with more questions than answers," says Lindsey Rodriguez, the paper's lead author and a psychologist at the University of South Florida. "Is it because of home-schooling? Uncertainty about the future? High pressure in more domains of life? Women were disproportionately affected by all things Covid-19. This is another way of showing the effects of that."

Previous disasters, including the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the 2003 SARS outbreak and Hurricane Katrina, have been followed by increases in alcohol abuse among those who experienced them and their aftermath. But researchers have never studied the impact on drinking behavior of a catastrophe that lasted as long and was as pervasive as the current pandemic. Nor did those earlier events increase social isolation while also initiating widespread changes in the availability of alcohol through takeout and delivery, as Covid-19 has. There has been more drinking at home, which is associated with domestic violence and child neglect, Carolina Barbosa, a behavioral health scientist at RTI International, a nonprofit research organization, points out. "So it's not just the health of the person who is drinking that we are concerned with," says Barbosa, the lead author of the Addiction Medicine study, "but it's also the social impact on the family and society in general."

譯文由可可原創，僅供學習交流使用，未經許可請勿轉載。