worried

Leah M. Lessard, University of Connecticut When the COVID-19 pandemic started, many U.S. teens were more worried about the disruption to their education than the possibility of getting sick. A May 2020 survey of high school students found that they reported academics and work habits to be among their biggest challenges, ahead of mental and physical health. Nearly three-quarters (72%) indicated they were “very much” concerned with how COVID-19 would impact their school year. As a researcher who studies adolescent development, I was interested in whether and how teens’ school stress changed as the pandemic dragged on. So during the fall of 2020, my colleague and I surveyed adolescents about their academic concerns and the changes they noticed in school social dynamics. Our study, publishe...

The spread of the new coronavirus, which has infected over 80,000 people worldwide and resulted in the death of more than 3,000, has raised alarms around the world. At the same time, the seasonal influenza, known as the flu, causes severe illness in between 3 million and 5 million people, with hundreds of thousands of deaths every year worldwide. With so many fewer cases than the flu, what explains the dramatic response to COVID-19 and worry around the globe? And how would a person know whether seasonal influenza-like symptoms are COVID-19? As an epidemiologist, here’s how I look at these questions. Difficult to distinguish The first thing to realize is that the emergence of the novel coronavirus isn’t a rare “black swan” event. Rather, this is a product of evolution; there have been ab...

Tag: worried

Feeling Worried, Unmotivated, The Pandemic Has Teens Disconnected From School

Why public health officials sound more worried about the coronavirus than the seasonal flu