Have young people been affected by Covid less severely than we thought?

Did young people suffer long-term effects from the Covid-19 pandemic and the associated lockdowns? After all, they were forced to keep their distance from others or stay indoors at the peak of their social lives.

Special needs teacher and researcher Naomi Koning questions the prevailing view that young people have been hit hard by the pandemic. Studies on mental health contradict each other: some identify an impact, while others do not. She followed 263 young people in the first year of the pandemic and found no increase in mental problems among them.

Social obligations
Next week, King will receive her doctorate from the University of Amsterdam with a thesis on the consequences of lockdowns on the mental health of young people between the ages of 16 and 24. "When I started this research, I also expected such a drastic event to impact them more, but I did not find that in my research," she told the university magazine Folia.

Some young people did worse indeed, but others did better. They suddenly had a good reason to skip social obligations and therefore suffered less from social anxiety.

Koning also refutes the idea that young people broke the coronavirus rules en masse during the pandemic. The vast majority of young people in her study had empathy for the vulnerable members of society and abided by the rules.

Corona fatigue
However, this study is not the definitive answer about how much mental damage Covid has left behind. Although Koning intensively monitored that group of young people in the first year of the pandemic, she has no data about the years that followed. International research into this question does not provide a definitive answer, either.

It is quite possible that young people started suffering from Covid fatigue later in the pandemic, especially considering the ever-changing measures in the Netherlands, Koning writes.