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Assessing the Impacts of COVID-19 and Social Isolation on Mental Health in the United States of America

Fulk, A.; Saenz-Escarcega, R.; Kobayashi, H.; Maposa, I.; Agusto, F.

2022-09-14 public and global health
10.1101/2022.09.09.22277383 medRxiv
Show abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has had a devastating impact on the world at large with over 500 million cases and over 6 million deaths reported thus far. Of those, over 85 million cases and 1 million deaths have occurred in the United States of America. The mental health of the general population has been impacted by several aspects of the pandemic including lockdowns, media sensationalism, social isolation, and spread of the disease. In this paper, we examine the effect that social isolation and COVID-19 infection and related death had on the prevalence of anxiety and depression in the general population of the USA in a state-by-state multiple time-series analysis. Vector Error Correction Models are estimated and we subsequently evaluated the coefficients of the estimated models and calculated their impulse response functions for further interpretation. We found that variables related to COVID-19 overall led to increase in both anxiety and depression across the studied period, while variables related to social isolation had a varied effect depending on the state being considered.

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