The rise in remote work caused by the COVID-19 pandemic has substantially increased time spent alone and worsened workers’ mental health, according to a new study based on survey data from more than 500,000 Americans. In evaluating remote employees’ mental health, the analysis moves beyond the main consequence of remote work more typically evaluated in studies to date: worker productivity. The study’s results suggest that “the shift in work location to the home carries measurable costs at the population level,” Emma Zhang and Rourke O’Brien write in a related Perspective. After the pandemic led to many people working from home, the results of studies evaluating the mental health impacts on employees were mixed. To understand remote work’s effect on human well-being better, Natalia Emanuel and colleagues analyzed data from five nationally representative US-based surveys that together spanned more than a decade and included 568,000 respondents. They compared workers’ experiences before the pandemic (2011 to 2019) with experiences from the post-peak period (2022 to 2024), excluding the acute pandemic years of 2020 to 2021. The authors found that workers in jobs amenable to remote work experienced substantially larger post-pandemic increases in time spent alone, worsened mental well-being across multiple measures, and increases in the use of mental health services and prescriptions. These effects were particularly pronounced among individuals living alone. Noting a limitation of their study, the authors said, “Given that our data end in 2024, we cannot fully capture long- term adaptations among remotable workers.” If workers made changes, such as cultivating social networks outside of work, they may not yet have reaped the full benefits by the time of the study, they added. “Across a range of remote work arrangements, both individuals and organizations may want to prioritize making remote work less isolating by, for example, coordinating in-office days for hybrid workers or encouraging informal interaction, even online,” Emanuel et al. conclude.

Data is available for the creation of data visualization images. For more information, please contact Natalia Emanuel at natalia@nataliaemanuel.com

In a new study funded University of Delaware researchers from multiple disciplines assessed the challenges of the coordinated community response systems serving victims of domestic violence during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. Through interviews with domestic violence coalition leaders, they find that the pandemic uniquely disrupted the infrastructure for service coordination, the continuity of law enforcement and legal systems, the maintenance of evidence-based practices and more.

Persistently low rates of COVID-19 vaccination in Black and Hispanic children suggest that parents in these communities tend to be hesitant about the vaccine for their kids, even when they have received it themselves. Through interviews with parents of school-aged children, a new study sheds light on the factors influencing decisions about vaccination. Findings were published in the June issue of the Vaccine: X journal.

When a person coughs or sneezes, they expel a cloud of microscopic particles capable of carrying viruses and bacteria that act as vectors for respiratory diseases such as flu, COVID-19 or tuberculosis. Understanding how these aerosols disperse in the air is crucial for minimising the transmission of pathogens in indoor spaces, but their dynamics are complex and depend on many factors: the force of the exhalation, the morphology of the respiratory system, the characteristics of the space, etc. Now, a new study led by researchers from the Universitat Rovira i Virgili has shown that temperature also plays an important role.

Samuel Kruger, associate professor of finance; John Griffin, James A. Elkins Centennial Chair in Finance; and doctoral student Prateek Mahajan found that fraud in government-funded pandemic loans explained 22.5% of the average increase in housing prices during 2020 and 2021.

Study results could lead to new therapeutic solutions

A new Mass General Brigham-led study using AI to analyze electronic health records found that long COVID may be twice as common as current estimates, affecting more than 18 million Americans. The findings reveal major gaps in diagnostic coding-based surveillance, with more than 10 million cases likely uncounted and prevalence continuing to grow over time.

The risk of being hospitalized or dying from COVID-19 infection was lower among adults with better heart health scores. Adults without cardiovascular disease and with the best levels of heart health, as indexed by the American Heart Association’s Life’s Essential 8 heart health metric, were nearly half as likely to develop severe COVID-19 when compared to adults with the worst levels of heart health. Specifically, the Life’s Essential 8 components of better physical activity, body mass index, blood pressure and sleep were associated with most-reduced risk.

 U.S. prevalence of chronic fatigue syndrome (CFS), also known as myalgic encephalomyelitis (ME), a multisystem neurologic disease and debilitating chronic condition, averaged 1 million to 2.5 million before the COVID-19 pandemic. Incidence rates are now reported to be 15 times greater, related at least in part to long COVID. This retrospective chart review analyzed records of medications and supplements tried before specialty consultation from 571 adults with ME/CFS seen at a Mayo Clinic specialty clinic from 2018 to 2022.