Is Covid Affecting Alcohol Consumption?

This is a fairly small and speculative item, but it seems worthy of attention. A recent paper suggests that hangovers are worse for people with long Covid. This is the small part:

“The patients highlighted in this report, despite varying demographics and health backgrounds, share a new-onset sensitivity to alcohol post-COVID-19 infection, triggering unprecedented symptoms at similar or lower alcohol consumption levels.”

The study only looked at four people and it’s just a review of their cases. Statistically, not much there. But now to the speculative bit. I had Covid in 2022, but it was a very mild case. Nevertheless, I noticed that alcohol seemed to give me a pretty bad hangover even when I drank just one beer. At the time I wasn’t sure it even was a hangover. I mean, I had Covid and felt crummy. But now it gets me thinking—maybe there is a relationship, and maybe it’s part of what’s dragging down the beer industry.

A lot of people have contracted Covid in the past four years, and most of us had at least some symptoms. It’s a bit harder to assess long Covid—estimates vary from single digit percentages of the population to hefty chucks of it. Even in my mild case, the post-active phase was way longer than the symptomatic phase. It took a month before I was able to go for a bike ride and not get immediately winded and dizzy. So I’d guess that there’s a very large gray area about what even constitutes “long” Covid.

All of which is to ask—what portion of the dip in alcohol consumption and the rise in N/A may be due to people just feeling super crappy when they drink? We’ve had four years of young people coming into their drinking years. If their experiences were mostly negative—especially because drinking’s social component was dulled or absent—might they just have abandoned alcohol before developing the usual youthful infatuation with it?

In the paper, the researchers did note that this isn’t the first time they’ve seen a viral infection lead to bad hangovers—but there’s basically no research on the issue. Trying to figure out the cause is even more challenging. They observe:

“Orthostatic intolerance (OI) and autonomic dysfunction, neuroinflammation, gut microbiome changes, mitochondrial dysfunction (related to acetate metabolism), and others have all been proposed and investigated as possible mechanisms.”

So we don’t really know. Alcohol consumption fluctuates over time, and it’s not down that far right now, so it’s pretty hard to isolate the factors driving this change. It is at least plausible, however, that Covid is playing a role.