Opinion: Even when the pandemic fades, the depression it has wrought will linger

The masks are mostly off, group events have become almost normal, and many people believe — or at least hope — that the pandemic is waning. So it’s not surprising that Americans also want to move on from talking about Covid-19’s mental health impact. But walking away from the losses of the past two years will be harder than ditching our KN95s.
As part of the Covid States Project , since the beginning of the pandemic we and our colleagues at four U.S. universities have been surveying about 20,000 adults in all 50 states and the District of Columbia every six weeks about topics ranging from mask wearing and vaccines to politics and mental health. In our latest survey , published Wednesday, 4 in 10 respondents said they knew at least one person who had died of Covid-19; 1 in 7 said they’d lost a family member. Read the rest…