Lockdowns, closures, and fear of COVID-19 caused many harms, including a significant increase in alcohol consumption. Study after study shows that was the case during the pandemic.
The National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism, part of the National Institutes of Health, earlier this year issued its “surveillance report” on per capita alcohol consumption.
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Here was the main stat:
“Per capita consumption of ethanol from all alcoholic beverages combined in 2021 was 2.51 gallons, representing a 2.9 percent increase from 2.44 gallons in 2020 and a 5.5 percent increase from 2.38 gallons in 2019. This was the largest two-year increase since 1969, when there was a 5.9 percent increase (2.37 gallons in 1967 to 2.51 gallons in 1969).”
The rise seemed to come almost entirely in the form of hard liquor.
It’s not merely drinking that increased during the pandemic — it’s at-home drinking, including solitary drinking. That’s bad news.
“Several studies have now shown that solitary drinking increased as a result of the pandemic,” Carnegie Mellon University researcher Kasey Creswell said a year ago.
This is a problem because at-home drinking, and in particular solitary at-home drinking, is probably correlated with greater problems than drinking at pubs or restaurants.
One recent large recent study concluded, “In general, on-premises contexts such as restaurants and bars/pubs were not associated with as many problems as off-premises contexts such as drinking at home or at friends’ and relatives’ homes.”
“Home drinking contributes appreciably to alcohol-related harm,” one recent Australian study said.
Other studies have shown that moderate social drinking actually has positive effects.
This is tricky because bars were likely a large source of COVID-19 spread, especially among the young, because people get loud, get close, and lose inhibitions in bars. But this research shows that closing down bars was also a cause of other harms.
But it wasn’t merely closed bars that led to drinking at home alone. It was closed sports leagues, remote schooling — I knew many parents who took to day drinking to handle the stress of fake-home schooling — bans on large gatherings, closed gyms, closed shopping malls, and closed workplaces.
Our public health authorities tended to care only about reducing COVID-19 spread and ignored other harms. Our politicians tended to balance COVID mitigation only against economic harms, and so they thought that legalizing take-home drinks and subsidizing locked-down businesses could make up for the closures.
But isolated people engage in less healthy behaviors, and that includes heavy drinking and solo drinking.
The Washington Post has a story on this phenomenon today, and it includes this anecdote: “[Frank] Gazerro, a podcaster and consultant, his drinking escalated in his 30s and got worse during the boredom of pandemic shutdowns. There was a liquor store a few blocks from his apartment.”
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For Gazerro’s wife, the Washington Post said, the trigger for overdrinking was “the stress of continuing to report to work as an emergency veterinarian technician, even as the coronavirus spread.”
In the latest NIH data, there's no obvious correlation between the more locked-down states and the increase in drinking over 2019-2021 — or even between the increase in drinking from 2019-2020 and the increase from 2020-21. There’s also no obvious correlation between the severity of the virus’s spread and the increase in alcohol consumption, which makes it difficult to talk confidently about causes — and certainly harder to talk about solutions.