Longitudinal study of health outcomes and mitigating factors in the aftermath of the COVID pandemic

ABSTRACT The global pandemic caused by SARS-CoV-2 has already claimed over 2 million lives and caused economic and social disruption on an unprecedented scale. There is growing concern about long-term consequences of the pandemic on physical and mental health outcomes of children, stemming from both the illness and from associated disruptions in the economic, social, and healthcare domains. Our overall goal is to study trajectories of child/adolescent mental health and primary healthcare utilization including immunization, in the aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic. Our project, located in India, will test key hypotheses about the pandemic's impact on health outcomes, vulnerability to future shocks, and sources of heterogeneity in these relationships. A strategic innovation is to create a new health panel dataset - called the SurvEy of HeAlth Trends (SEHAT), which means "health" in Hindi - by leveraging the world's largest household panel data on consumption and economic outcomes in India. The SEHAT data will be a new health module spanning 9 waves from September 2021 - August 2024 to generate timely evidence on the pandemic's impact on trajectories of health outcomes. Our project on three COVID-related stressors: (1) disruptions in economic circumstances, (2) disruptions in the social environment, or (3) exposure to severe COVID illness within family networks. We estimate the association between these stressors and (a) mental health, and (b) rates of immunization and primary healthcare utilization. Our second aim is to examine impact of COVID-related stressors on vulnerability to future shocks. Using 9 waves of panel data over a three-year period, we will examine new economic shocks, such as job or income losses in the household, and their cumulative effects on child health outcomes. Our main hypothesis is that the negative impact of future shocks on child health outcomes will be greater in magnitude among children in households that experienced higher levels of COVID-related stressors compared with children from households with lower levels of these stressors. We will also leverage the large amount of data to examine sources of heterogeneity in COVID impacts on child health outcomes, by factors such as gender, caste, or household composition. Our third aim is to make SEHAT panel dataset publicly available to facilitate research and inform policy. Our study aims to collect health data that can be transformative for research and evidence-based policy. We plan to release descriptive statistics on key indicators immediately after every wave, with accompanying policy briefs. After completion of SEHAT data collection in August 2024, we will publicly release microdata by August 2026, prior to end of the grant period. We will also publish detailed documentation to facilitate analysis using the SEHAT data.