Sleep Disruption During the Pandemic

 

How has the COVID pandemic impacted sleep?  Not simply the sleep of people who have contracted COVID-19, but also those that did not but whose sleep was impacted by lockdowns, the stress, etc? 

This is a significant public health issue.  And a new meta-analysis on this topic has just been published.  A sample of the findings:

The current systematic review and meta-analysis of 250 studies comprising about half-million participants revealed that during the COVID-19 pandemic, the pooled estimated prevalence of sleep disturbances (including poor sleep quality and insomnia), independent of any covariate, was 40%. ....Patients infected with COVID-19 appeared the most affected by sleep disturbances, with an overall pooled rate of 52%. Children and adolescents were the second most affected group, with an overall rate of sleep disturbances of approximately 46%. Healthcare workers, university students, and special populations had a similar magnitude of the problem, with an overall rate of approximately 41%. The general population appeared the least affected by the pandemic, with an overall prevalence of sleep disturbances of about 36%. Poor sleep quality appeared as the main problem and explained 52% of the variance in the data.

Cheers, Colin

Public Health Priorities

Our sense of public policy priorities is shaped, to a large extent, by what we hear in the media and from the political platforms of our elected representatives.  This has great societal significance as it determines what does, and does not, receive public funding in terms of basic scientific research.

While death does not exhaust the potential indicators/measures of how severe different public health risks are, it is a good starting place for comparing the magnitude of public health predicaments when we cannot solve all these problems at the same time and when resources are limited.  

Below is an intellectual exercise.  I leave it to the reader to discern for herself what the lesson to be learned from this exercise is.  

Here is list of 5 serious public health threats that are responsible for non-trivial numbers of human deaths every single day in the world.  On this list is one cause of death that will be responsible for the majority of the deaths of those who will ever read this post.  And yet this same cause of death is also the only one that you will likely not have heard mentioned in any news or social media post you have read in the past year.  

(1) Death from cancer.

(2) Death from climate change.

(3) Death from COVID-19.

(4) Death from violence/war.

(5) Death from senescence.

Cheers, 

Colin

Experiential Learning in 2022

The 20 undergraduate students I saw in-class today had not been in a classroom with me since March 2020. At that time I was teaching my Marx lectures in the large second year course, before the campus closed due to COVID. This term they are enrolled in my 4th year seminar “The Politics of Pandemics and Epidemics”, the first half of which we did online covering public health ethics, vaccinations, malaria, HIV/AIDS, and Ebola. Today for our first in-person class it just so happened that we started our first of two sessions on COVID-19 (then we cover obesity, drug use and gun violence). While not the kind of “experiential learning” I envisioned when I agreed to design this new seminar course last year, it has certainly proven to be a somewhat surreal teaching experience this term. We went the full 3 hours of class discussing the relationship between democracy and scientific advisory committees, the ethics of quarantine, the stigma around contracting COVID, amongst other topics.

Cheers,

Colin