Life after coronavirus: International survey provides comprehensive data

How do people around the world rate their situation in relation to finances, health, and education after the Covid-19 pandemic? This question is at the heart of the Pandemic Recovery Survey, the results of which have now been published. For the study, an international team of researchers questioned 621,000 people from 21 countries. Frauke Kreuter, Professor of Statistics and Data Science in the Social Sciences and Humanities at LMU Munich led the study together with partners from the University of Maryland (UMD), Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME) und Meta. The survey was conducted between March and May 2023 and participants were invited via Facebook.

Participants from Germany are mostly satisfied with their life circumstances

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The survey revealed that in Germany, more than half of respondents are either satisfied or very satisfied with their lives in general. Moreover, almost 64 percent said their health was good or very good. By contrast, the financial situation after the pandemic was a bigger concern for people: almost 22 percent of respondents in Germany complained of having lower household income than before the pandemic. Eleven percent indicated that they did not even always have enough to eat through lack of money. In Nigeria, South Africa, and Colombia, this was the case for more than half of respondents. The survey also showed that the majority of schoolchildren worldwide with below-average reading and arithmetic skills came from low-income households.

“We are just beginning to understand the pandemic’s impacts on society. Researchers and decision-makers can now use our study to develop targeted measures and projects,” says Dr. Wiebke Weber, the LMU based project manager of the study. An open-data visualization tool permits easy access to the data, facilitating comparisons among the different countries.

The Pandemic Recovery Survey is a joint project by LMU Munich, the University of Maryland, Meta, and the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation (IHME). The results of the Pandemic Recovery Survey and the visualization tool are available on the IHME website.