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USA Today reports: What does the recent drop in life expectancy in the U.S. tell us?

Head shot of Jennifer Karas Montez

During the pandemic in 2020, life expectancy in the U.S. suffered the biggest drop since World War II, declining by 1.5 years with Black and Hispanic populations seeing even larger drops. According to former post-doc fellow Jennifer Karas Montez who is interviewed by USA Today, the downward trend in U.S. life expectancy and the increasing social and economic inequalities that were taking place before the pandemic hit must be addressed.…

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Mass vaccination campaign in India may have contributed to spike in cases

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Professor S (Subu) V Subramanian, PhD, has authored a comment in The Lancet Global Health in which he cautions that the mass vaccination campaign in India may have contributed to the recent increase in COVID-19 cases there. He urges leadership in India to rethink its vaccination strategy to reduce virus spread by preventing overcrowding and enforcing non-pharmaceutical interventions, such as masking and social distancing, at vaccination centers. On IndiaToday.com, Subu…

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Sung S. Park in NYT “Family Caregivers Feel the Pandemic’s Weight”

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Harvard Sloan Fellow on Aging and Work, Sung S. Park, PhD, shares findings of her study published in The Journals of Gerontology on the differences in mental and physical health among non-caregivers, short-term caregivers, and long-term caregivers during the COVID-19 pandemic in this New York Times piece.

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“In India, anything and everything is a super-spreader event”

Headshot of Professor Subramanian

Harvard Pop Center faculty member S (Subu) V Subramanian, PhD, tells The Harvard Gazette that “in India, anything and everything is a super-spreader event.” A visualization dashboard of COVID-19 vaccine distribution in India by Subramanian’s Geographic Insights Lab was also cited by The New York Times in an article describing the recent and devastating surge of infections in the county.

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How are changes in working status due to COVID-19 impacting the mental health of those Americans close to retirement age?

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Harvard Pop Center’s Sloan Fellow on Aging and Work Leah Abrams, PhD, and recent Harvard Bell Fellow Lindsay Kobayashi, PhD, along with a colleague, have published their findings which reveal that workers who lost their jobs (more commonly associated with those who were under age 65 and those with less than a college degree), were furloughed, or experienced a reduction in hours suffered from increased loneliness and depressive symptoms, whereas…

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Combatting mental distress by shoring up resilience during COVID-19 pandemic

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A study published in the Journal of Affective Disorders by our recent Bell Fellow Leslie Adams, PhD, and her colleagues takes a longitudinal look (with baseline and nine waves of follow-up data from March through August, 2020) at the relationship between resilience and mental distress in 6,008 participants in the Understanding America Study. “Adults living below the poverty line were less likely to report high resilience . . . participants…

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Why is the proportion of deaths from COVID-19 in nursing homes far less in Japan than in U.S.?

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Ichiro Kawachi, MBChB, PhD, and his colleague Kazuhiro Abe, MD, PhD have written an op-ed in JAMA Health Forum that suggests that differences in standards of care and financing may be partially responsible for what appears to be differing infection rates between nursing homes in Japan and the U.S.

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Finally, a look at COVID-19 mortality rates by race/ethnicity AND EDUCATIONAL LEVEL

Graphs showing COVID-19 mortality rate in U.S. by race/ethnicity and age

“Intersectional inequities in COVID-19 mortality by race/ethnicity and education in the United States, January 1, 2020–January 31, 2021,” is the latest Harvard Pop Center working paper by Jarvis Chen, Christian Testa, Pamela Waterman, and Nancy Krieger. On February 2, the US National Center for Health Statistics published data relating to COVID-19 deaths that had been missing from the government health statistics for the first year of the pandemic under the…

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