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By Alex Guerrero

The last two years have not been easy for most people, and every aspect of our lives has changed.

According to Dr. Sumit Bhagra, site lead physician for Mayo Clinic Health System in Austin and Albert Lea, hospital capacity was initially over-utilized, faced staffing issues and had supply shortages.

“It is safe to say that the day-to-day functioning of the average health care worker was most stressful, particularly in the first year of the pandemic,” he said. “In the second year we kind of got used to managing things and knew things better.”

And he said that response was the same for the general public, as people didn’t initially know much about the disease or what to do. 

But as guidelines were clarified and vaccines became available, life started to return to some semblance of normal.

“The vaccine was a game-changer,” Bhagra said.

And the threat perception post-vaccination changed, meaning if you were vaccinated and later received a booster, you could start participating in life without a fear of dying.

“If you look at COVID-19, it affected most of the social aspects of being a human being,” he said. “We typically love to eat food together, sit down with our friends and family, and we work pretty hard.”

The pandemic caused a disruption to people’s social lives, and that was particularly true for older people and those with chronic disease.

“It’s almost as if they could not get themselves to enjoy their life fully because there was always a threat of [wonder], ‘Would I get infected if I were to go … meet my family for Thanksgiving,’” he said.

Because of an increase in stress, reduction in physical activity and greater access to food, people tended to gain more weight and chronic disease numbers — diabetes, high blood pressure and cholesterol — got worse the first year or so of the pandemic.

Dr. Sarah Scherger is site lead for community pediatric and adolescent medicine at Austin and Albert Lea for Mayo Clinic Health System.

“We have seen kind of two phenomena in regards to weight in kids and teenagers in particular,” she said. “We’ve seen a portion of them gain a substantial amount of weight because they aren’t getting their regular doses of activity because when they were doing distance-learning they were sitting at home and snacks were more readily available.

“And then we have seen eating disorders increase in things like anorexia and bulimia, and so there’s a subset of patients that we’ve seen lose substantial amounts of weight.” 

Scherger said the rapid rise in eating disorders among children and teenagers was particularly noticeable in the last year as schools began some form of in-person learning.

“Anxiety, in particular, plays [a role] into the development of eating disorders, and so as you see anxiety and depression rates increase, you’ll see eating disorders increase,” she said. 

The pandemic also caused a trend in delaying/deferring care.

“We saw people delay well-child care,” Scherger said, referring to children’s checkups and immunizations at different age markers.

She had several reasons why, including fear and difficulty in setting up appointments.

Bhagra said he was struck by how many people didn’t believe in the efficacy of simple measures in preventing disease transmission. And it was his desire to learn how people come to those conclusions that could ultimately help in understanding patients and getting them to make better decisions.

Scherger said she was surprised by how many times she’s been hit with false hope the pandemic could be waning

Not every change was bad, however.

According to Scherger, there were a lot fewer cases involving respiratory infections and secondary illnesses. She hypothesized the drop could have been because people weren’t socializing as much and wore masks.

Another change the pandemic has brought was the rise in remote work, and Bhagra believed that if workers could work from home during a health crisis, they could work from anywhere. And a mobile workforce could encourage some to change their line of work and still do business.

Telehealth could also be here to stay, something Scherger was happy with.

“[Some] adolescent mental health has been done via telehealth, and I think that will probably stay with us,” she said. “I think that’s good. It allows adolescents to get in more easily and feel less awkward … since they’re not in the office.” 

Bhagra also pointed to the rise in e-commerce.

“People [expect] convenient options any time they deal with any type of business,” Bhagra said.

COVID-19 also saw people come together, troubleshoot and collaborate solutions quickly in trying to solve the biggest health issues people face.

For example, the idea for outdoor swabbing tents in Austin and Albert Lea came about after first hearing about them popping up in southeast Asia and the West Coast. The hospital system was able to implement the change 10 to 15 days after it had initially heard about the idea.

Previously, an idea like that would, according to Bhagra, have taken weeks of planning.

And it’s that collaboration between public health, local leaders, health care systems and policy makers that could pay major dividends down the road.

“I was struck by the resiliency of people,” he said. “There was unprecedented health problems and death that we saw in the country

“And yet, as a collective community, we marched on and started looking for solutions.”

Make no mistake, COVID-19 is with us forever. But that doesn’t mean life can’t return to some semblance of what it was before COVID-19 appeared over two years ago.

“I think COVID is hopefully going to become an illness that we manage like the flu,” Scherger said.