The Pandemic Isn't Over

Across the U.S., women are particularly likely to report having suffered a decline in their mental health since the pandemic. They're also more likely to be suffering from long Covid.

ALSO IN THIS POST:

• The American hero the federal government doesn’t want you to know

What were you doing five years ago?

I remember exactly what I was doing. Late on the evening of March 13, 2020, I landed at New York’s J.F.K airport—baby in tow—eager to start a new life in the U.S. having spent the previous near-decade in London.

What I didn’t know at that time—indeed, what no one knew—was that I was arriving into the epicenter of the burgeoning Covid-19 pandemic, a global health crisis that would, mere days later, send us into months of lockdown and force me and my family to explore our new neighborhood masked-up and socially-distanced.

Half a decade on, and from my position of relative privilege (I’m healthy, have stable work and a place to live) it’s not hard to think about those first two or three years of the pandemic as a tragic relic of the past. Something that’s now part of history. But it’s not. The pandemic isn’t over: the effects of it linger in the form of a sweeping mental health crisis that’s disproportionally burdening young women. And they linger in the millions of individuals who are living with the symptoms of long Covid every day.

What got me dwelling on this over the past two weeks, was some fresh research done by Gallup to mark the five-year anniversary of the World Health Organization declaring Covid-19 a pandemic. Gallup found that Americans’ perception of their own physical and mental health has declined consistently over the past few years—and especially since the pandemic—with young women particularly suffering.

The researchers found that just 15% of women aged 18-29 polled from 2020 to 2024 said that they considered their mental health to be “excellent.” That marks a staggering 33-percentage point decline from the 48% of women within this age group who said the same thing between 2010 and 2014. This significantly exceeds the 20-point decline for men aged 18-29 during the same time frame. Their scores declined from 53% between 2010 and 2014 to 33% between 2020 and 2024.

So why do women seem to be suffering so much more than men?

There are several theories. Even before the pandemic, women were more likely than men to report mental health disorders, including serious mental illness. Of course it’s hard to establish exactly how much of this gender gap can be chalked up to a gender difference in willingness to talk about mental health, but an extensive body of research suggests than women are, because of a slew of reasons ranging from hormonal changes to unequal power dynamics, more likely to suffer from depression than men.

Women were also more likely than men to pick up extra unpaid labor as a result of the pandemic—childcare, for example, as daycare centers and schools were forced to shut. One study conducted about a year into the pandemic found that over half of mothers with school age children had found that the stress and worry of the pandemic was affecting their mental health, with one in five characterizing the impact as “major.”

Looking at the responses across all demographics and age groups, Gallup identified some other interesting trends: Black adults saw a particularly sizable deterioration in their perception of their own mental health, as did college graduates, those with a household income of above $30,000, and respondents who did not indicate a religious affiliation.

To be sure, Gallup also noted that there could be more to the shift in how people perceive their mental health than might meet the eye. It could certainly be symptomatic of heightened anxiety brought on by the Covid-19 crisis, but it might also reflect heightened public and medical attention to mental health during this period, or a lessening of the stigma around admitting mental health challenges. In other words, mental health might not be getting worse (or at least not quite by the magnitude that the data indicate) it might just be becoming less of a taboo to talk about mental health challenges now than it has been in the past.

And then of course, there’s long Covid, a condition that can be debilitating and that’s forced millions around the world to upend their lives entirely. It is devastating on any number of levels. But what’s often forgotten is that long Covid is an economic issue, as well as being a personal health issue. In fact, the two are in many ways one and the same.

Research published in the journal Nature Medicine last summer estimated that over 400 million people worldwide have developed long Covid at some point, resulting in an annual global economic cost of $1 trillion. And yes, women are at a higher risk of developing long Covid than men. Specifically, they’re 1.31 times more likely to have long Covid than their male counterparts.

A recent Yale-led study, for example, found that up to 14% of 3,500 long Covid patients surveyed across the U.S. had not returned to work three months after first getting sick. That same research also found that almost one in 10 long Covid patients suffered from five or more symptoms. And these participants—which included young, previously healthy individuals—were twice as likely to be unable to return to work within three months compared to those without all of those symptoms.

“It’s a myth to assume this data reflects issues limited to unvaccinated individuals, retiring adults, or people with pre-existing medical conditions,” Arjun Venkatesh, MD, a professor of emergency medicine at Yale School of Medicine and the primary author of the study commented at the time. “Our cohort tends to be younger and highly vaccinated, yet the reality is that they continue to have prolonged symptoms after an acute Covid infection, which significantly affects their ability to work.”

So yes, the pandemic is not only ongoing, but it’s an issue for women’s health, for women’s wellbeing, for women’s economic empowerment and for women’s independence. And it almost certainly will be for many years to come.

So as we mark the end of yet another women’s history month—a month of talking about equal pay day and the gender pay gap and all of those often-overly simplistic ways of summing up systemic, deep-rooted injustice—let’s remember that it’s not just the shadow or the memory of the pandemic that still looms large.

A True American Hero

Elsewhere last week, I was thrilled to have an essay published by Ms. Magazine, a publication I’ve long admired for it’s willingness to hold power to account.

Regular readers of this newsletter will be familiar with Pauli Murray and the extent to which she’s one of my personal heroes. It was therefore with utter disgust that I learned a few weeks ago that Murray’s biography had been deleted from the federal government’s website. Rosita Stevens-Holsey, one of Murray’s nieces, emailed me to let me know.

She pointed me to a statement published by the Pauli Murray Center for History and Social Justice in Durham, N.C. “Members of the LGBTQIA+ community have always been a part of the rich fabric of our society,” the statement reads. “Reverend Dr. Murray exists in a lineage of LGBTQIA+ Southerners who have advanced social justice work on a national scale, and whose contributions have gone on to shape history,” it adds. And then: “Erasing this truth at the federal level censures American history, and compromises the work of transgender and queer activists who stand in Murray’s wake today.”

Here’s an excerpt from my essay that I wrote about this cowardly attempt at erasure:

Like millions of others around the world, I have spent the last few weeks oscillating between fear, anger and sadness as I’ve watched the new U.S. administration neglect the core values of democracy and wreak havoc with the systems that have propped up this country for centuries.

“Like millions of others around the world, I have spent the last few weeks oscillating between fear, anger and sadness as I’ve watched the new U.S. administration neglect the core values of democracy and wreak havoc with the systems that have propped up this country for centuries.

“So very much of what we’ve seen so far has been hard to process, but the decisions I’ve found myself having the most visceral reactions to, are those that seem to serve no other purpose than to assert authority and to belittle those who don’t think like, don’t live like and don’t look like the president. These are decisions that are petty—their only point might be to bolster one man’s fragile ego or to reinforce the hierarchy of power in an already achingly unequal nation.

“These moments of hysterical desperation and aggression are so far removed from anything that could possibly be construed as civil service; so far removed from anything that could possibly be interpreted as responsible leadership. And I’d count the decision to try and erase Pauli Murray’s legacy among them.

“With no way of changing the mind of a morally bankrupt megalomaniac, I’m concentrating on what I can do. Since I’ve learned of her remarkable life, I’ve loved telling people about Murray; about the unlikely against-all-odds battles she faced head-on—public wars she waged while simultaneously grappling with her own often-debilitating private troubles.

“As we continue to witness the tragic reversal of so much progress, I will be doing much more of this. I will be recommending books by Murray: Song in a Weary Throat and Proud Shoes: An African American Family, which taught me so much about the complex racial and social dynamics that shaped the country I’ve chosen to call home. I’ll be recommending books about Murray, like The Firebrand and the First Lady which chronicles Murray’s extraordinary friendship with Eleanor Roosevelt.

“If the federal government chooses to ignore those upon whose shoulders we all stand, those of us who recognize the indignity of this will simply have to make up for it by telling their stories loudly, telling their stories often and then repeating them over and over and over again. It is, after all, what Pauli Murray would do.”

You can read the full essay and learn more about Pauli Murray’s life here.

That’s all from me for this week. I’ll be back in your inboxes April 14. If you’ve enjoyed reading this newsletter for free, I’d urge you to consider upgrading to a paid subscription.

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Josie

Ps: If you’ve read WOMEN MONEY POWER, the book, or listened to the audiobook, I would hugely appreciate it if you could take thirty seconds to post a review or rate it on Amazon using this link. If Goodreads is your jam, that’s just as great, and you can leave a review or rating here. A million thanks for your support!