Debunking ‘1 in 5 COVID-19 Patients Develop Mental Illness’
Alarmist press coverage is linked directly to a campaign in which authors exaggerate the clinical and public significance of their findings.
Published in
10 min readNov 14, 2020
A media campaign orchestrated by the Science Media Centre of London spread a disturbing claim based on American electronic health records (EHRs) — that 1 in 5 COVID-19 patients would develop mental illness within 3 months of diagnosis.
Should we buy it?
We still have much to learn about the COVID-19 virus and its effects on the body and the mind.
There is a need to understand how we can best deploy scarce resources to deal with the long-term consequences of the virus and to rebuild health systems devastated by the pandemic.
We will see how misrepresentations of the significance of a study published in Lancet Psychiatry could lead to putting scarce mental health resources in the wrong places during the COVID-19 crisis and in its aftermath.
