Shots – Health News : NPR

How mental health conditions can raise COVID risk : Shots – Health News : NPR

Last year, researchers analyzed data from five hospitals in the Yale New Haven Health System to see how people with a mental health diagnosis who were hospitalized with COVID-19 fared compared to others.

"What we found was we had a higher level of mortality for those that had a prior psychiatric history," says psychiatrist Dr. Luming Li, who was working on her Master's degree at Yale University at the time.

The risk of death from COVID-19 went up by 50% for those with a history of mental illness compared to those with no such history, says Li, who is now the Chief Medical Officer at the Harris Center for Mental Health and IDD in Texas.