Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has resulted in negative impacts on the economy, population health, and health-related quality-of-life (HRQoL).
Objective: To assess the impact of COVID-19 on US population HRQoL using the EQ-5D-5L.
Design: We surveyed respondents on physical and mental health, demographics, socioeconomics, brief medical history, current COVID-19 status, sleep, dietary, financial, and spending changes. Results were compared to online and face-to-face US population norms. Predictors of EQ-5D-5L utility were analyzed using both standard and post-lasso OLS regressions. Robustness of regression coefficients against unmeasured confounding was analyzed using the E-Value sensitivity analysis.
Subjects: Amazon MTurk workers (n=2776) in the USA.
Main measures: EQ-5D-5L utility and VAS scores by age group.
Key results: We received n=2746 responses. Subjects 18-24 years reported lower mean (SD) health utility (0.752 (0.281)) compared with both online (0.844 (0.184), p=0.001) and face-to-face norms (0.919 (0.127), p<0.001). Among ages 25-34, utility was worse compared to face-to-face norms only (0.825 (0.235) vs. 0.911 (0.111), p<0.001). For ages 35-64, utility was better during pandemic compared to online norms (0.845 (0.195) vs. 0.794 (0.247), p<0.001). At age 65+, utility values (0.827 (0.213)) were similar across all samples. VAS scores were worse for all age groups (p<0.005) except ages 45-54. Increasing age and income were correlated with increased utility, while being Asian, American Indian or Alaska Native, Hispanic, married, living alone, having history of chronic illness or self-reported depression, experiencing COVID-19-like symptoms, having a family member diagnosed with COVID-19, fear of COVID-19, being underweight, and living in California were associated with worse utility scores. Results were robust to unmeasured confounding.
Conclusions: HRQoL decreased during the pandemic compared to US population norms, especially for ages 18-24. The mental health impact of COVID-19 is significant and falls primarily on younger adults whose health outcomes may have been overlooked based on policy initiatives to date.