A study by Rice University, the University of Notre Dame and the Environmental Defense Fund shows the economic and mental health consequences on victims of Hurricane Harvey and COVID-19 were cumulative. The results appear in Environmental Research.

The result springs from separate surveys on the impact of Harvey and COVID-19, led by Katherine Ensor, the Noah G. Harding Professor of Statistics at Rice; Marie Lynn Miranda, director of the Children’s Environmental Health Initiative at Notre Dame and former Rice provost; and Elena Craft, senior director for climate and health at the Environmental Defense Fund.

The study originated with 2018’s Texas Flood Registry (TFR), a first-of-its-kind registry to track the short and long-term health and housing impacts of a hurricane through online survey data. As COVID-19 came into play, the researchers realized the tools that support the TFR could be used to track the impact of the pandemic and assess whether multiple exposures magnify preexisting harms.

“We’ve already looked at how prior exposure to Hurricane Harvey and other flooding events affect economic and mental health outcomes,” said Rashida Callender, a research associate at Rice and lead author on the project. “We know prior exposure to natural disasters of short duration such as a flood can reduce resilience, but there’s never been a study that looked at prior flooding exposure and how that affects outcomes during a longer-term, nonweather-related disaster such as a pandemic.”

The new study built upon technical infrastructure from the existing TFR to launch the national COVID-19 Registry in April 2020. Its purpose is to track experiences during the pandemic, including health, behavior and economic changes.

The analysis incorporates answers from approximately 3,000 participants returned questionnaires to both the TFR and COVID-19 registries.

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