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1. Mental health during the COVID-19 pandemic: Impacts of disease, social isolation, and financial stressors

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0277562  

   Kraut, Robert E.; Li, Han; Zhu, Haiyi (November 2022, PLOS ONE)

   Nabi, Mohammad Hayatun (Ed.)

   BackgroundAlthough research shows that the Covid-19 pandemic has led to declines in mental health, the existing research has not identified the pathways through which this decline happens. AimsThe current study identifies the distinct pathways through which COVID-induced stressors (i.e., social distancing, disease risk, and financial stressors) trigger mental distress and examines the causal impact of these stressors on mental distress. MethodsWe combined evidence of objective pandemic-related stressors collected at the county level (e.g., lack of social contact, infection rates, and unemployment rates) with self-reported survey data from over 11.5 million adult respondents in the United States collected daily for eight months. We used mediation analysis to examine the extent to which the objective stressors influenced mental health by influencing individual respondents’ behavior and fears. ResultsCounty-level, day-to-day social distancing predicted significantly greater mental distress, both directly and indirectly through its effects on individual social contacts, worries about getting ill, and concerns about finances. Economic hardships were indirectly linked to increased mental distress by elevating people’s concerns about their household’s finances. Disease threats were both directly linked to mental distress and indirectly through its effects on individual worries about getting ill. Although one might expect that social distancing from people outside the home would have a greater influence on people who live alone, sub-analyses based on household composition do not support this expectation. ConclusionThis research provides evidence consistent with the thesis that the COVID-19 pandemic harmed the mental well-being of adults in the United States and identifies specific stressors associated with the pandemic that are responsible for increasing mental distress. 

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2. Risk perceptions and behaviors concerning rural tourism and economic-political drivers of COVID-19 policy in 2020

   https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0299841  

   Lieberthal, Brandon; Jackson, Sarah; de_Urioste-Stone, Sandra (April 2024, PLOS ONE)

   Alam, Mumtaz (Ed.)

   When COVID-19 was first introduced to the United States, state and local governments enacted a variety of policies intended to mitigate the virulence of the epidemic. At the time, the most effective measures to prevent the spread of COVID-19 included stay-at-home orders, closing of nonessential businesses, and mask mandates. Although it was well known that regions with high population density and cold climates were at the highest risk for disease spread, rural counties that are economically reliant on tourism were incentivized to enact fewer precautions against COVID-19. The uncertainty of the COVID-19 pandemic, the multiple policies to reduce transmission, and the changes in outdoor recreation behavior had a significant impact on rural tourism destinations and management of protected spaces. We utilize fine-scale incidence and demographic data to study the relationship between local economic and political concerns, COVID-19 mitigation measures, and the subsequent severity of outbreaks throughout the continental United States. We also present results from an online survey that measured travel behavior, health risk perceptions, knowledge and experience with COVID-19, and evaluation of destination attributes by 407 out-of-state visitors who traveled to Maine from 2020 to 2021. We synthesize this research to present a narrative on how perceptions of COVID-19 risk and public perceptions of rural tourism put certain communities at greater risk of illness throughout 2020. This research could inform future rural destination management and public health policies to help reduce negative socioeconomic, health and environmental impacts of pandemic-derived changes in travel and outdoor recreation behavior. 

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3. Temporal Analysis of Epidemiology indicators and Air Travel Data for Covid-19

   Purohit, Sumit; Shelobolin, Filipp; Holder, Lawrence; Chin, George (July 2021, SIAM Conference on Applied and Computational Discrete Algorithms)

   Coronavirus Disease 2019 (Covid-19) is an ongoing outbreak and the latest threat to global health. It is imperative to understand the implications of social interaction on Covid-19 indicators in order to help formulate policies and guidelines by governments and local authorities. We present a case-study of curating state-level Covid-19 indicators such as Active Cases, Deaths, Hospitalization Rate, etc. for the United States. We also curate open source domestic US air travel data and present its impact on Covid-19 indicators. We perform a time-series analysis of the dataset using Independent Temporal Motif (ITeM) to find weekly trends in the data. We publish the dataset and the results for further exploration by the research community. 

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4. The Impact of COVID-19 on Access to Mental Health Care Services

   https://doi.org/10.1257/pandp.20231058  

   Harrell, Benjamin; Fumarco, Luca; Button, Patrick; Schwegman, David J.; Denwood, Kyla (May 2023, AEA Papers and Proceedings)

   The COVID-19 pandemic increased the rate of mental health disorders, as well as demand for mental health services. It remains unclear, however, the extent to which it impacted access to mental health care. Using data from an audit field experiment, which ran from January to May 2020 and overlapped with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, we examine the impact of COVID-19 on access to mental health care appointments in the United States. We find that increased intensity of COVID-19–measured by daily cases, daily fatalities, and weekly excess deaths–is associated with decreased access to mental health care appointments. 

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5. REJECTING SCIENCE WITH SCIENCE: BOUNDARY-WORK IN ANTI-MASK TWITTER REPLY THREADS DURING COVID-19

   https://doi.org/10.5210/spir.v2021i0.12143  

   Beers, Andrew; Nguyễn, Sarah; S. Spiro, Emma; Starbird, Kate (September 2021, AoIR Selected Papers of Internet Research)

   The COVID-19 pandemic has been marked by a controversy in the United States over the public health benefits of mask-wearing, especially on social media. Many have contested the scientific consensus that masks are an effective method to prevent and slow the spread of COVID-19 infections, often along explicitly political lines. Here, we investigate specifically how Twitter users engaging in arguments about mask-wearing invoke scientific principles to argue against masks. We further analyze the sources that these users cite to support their claims. Using a qualitative approach drawing from constructivist grounded theory, we show how these users work to defend the legitimacy of their claims and their external sources by selectively exploiting rhetorical values of scientific endeavour. We analogize their work to the process of scientific boundary-work, in which actors consciously manipulate the boundary between science and not-science for personal and political gain. 

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