Americans Are Still Drinking Like It’s Summer 2020

Understandably, the covid-19 pandemic drove many people in the U.S. to drink more, and it looks like that trend hasn’t necessarily stopped—at least not yet. New research has found that Americans’ alcohol consumption has continued to be affected by it, and not for the better.

The start of the pandemic certainly changed our daily lives, and many people responded by drinking more, with alcohol consumption in the U.S. and elsewhere dramatically rising up through 2021. Thankfully, covid-19’s worst harms are now firmly behind us, but this new research suggests those first years has had an lingering effect on our drinking habits, which in turn has increased people’s risk of alcohol-related health problems like liver disease and cancer.

The researchers analyzed data from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS), a nationally representative survey conducted in person and over the phone of households across the country. They looked at responses related to alcohol use collected between 2018 to 2022. In 2018, slightly more than 66% of Americans drank alcohol; by 2020, that had increased to 69% of Americans—an almost 3% absolute increase. Similarly, in 2018, about 5% of Americans reported drinking heavily, while over 6% said the same in 2020. By 2022, both of these numbers had essentially stayed flat.

“Our results provide national data to draw further attention to the potential alcohol-related public health effects that may remain from the pandemic,” the researchers wrote in their paper, published Tuesday in the journal Annals of Internal Medicine.

While these increases may be small in absolute terms, Americans had a growing drinking problem even prior to the pandemic, and the effects of increased pandemic drinking on our collective health haven’t been negligible. Other research has shown a substantial rise in deaths and injuries directly and indirectly linked to alcohol during the early pandemic years. A study earlier this March, for instance, estimated that almost 180,000 annual deaths could be attributed to excessive alcohol use between 2020 and 2021 in the U.S.—well above the pre-pandemic baseline.

It’s possible that alcohol consumption in the U.S. has leveled off more recently with the stress of the pandemic further in the background (though there were fewer reported covid-19 deaths in 2022 compared to the first two years, there was a much sharper nose dive in 2023 and 2024). But even if it has, it’s likely that the impact of this increased drinking will have a long shadow, since it can take years for alcohol-related diseases like cancer and liver injury to become apparent. And the researchers say that doctors should be more proactive in finding and helping people at risk of unhealthy alcohol use.

“We encourage health care providers to offer more screenings for harmful drinking as well as interventions for at-risk populations,” said lead researcher Brian Lee, a hepatologist and liver transplant specialist at the University of Southern California, in a statement from the university.