A new study released findings that more Americans 65-years-old and under died from alcohol-related deaths than COVID-19 in the infamous year of 2020. The study was performed by researchers with the National Institute on Alcohol Abuse and Alcoholism and published in The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA) on Friday.

The National Institute is a division of the National Institutes of Health, or NIH. “Alcohol-related deaths, including from liver disease and accidents, increased to 99,017 in 2020, up from 78,927 the year prior”

While 74,408 Americans ages 16 to 64 died of alcohol-related causes, 74,075 individuals under 65 died of Covid-19, the study found. The rate of increase for alcohol-related deaths in 2020 (25 percent) was greater than the rate of increase of deaths from all causes (16.6 percent).

Lockdowns provide insight into why the largest increase in alcohol-related deaths in 2020 was among younger adults from ages 25 to 44. That age group recorded a whopping almost 40 percent rise over the previous year.

The increase was well above the average annual increase of 3.6 percent in alcohol-related deaths between 1999 and 2019, reports National Review.

The report’s first author, Aaron White, who is a senior scientific adviser at the alcohol abuse institute, told the New York Times that researchers believe there were “lots of people who were in recovery and had reduced access to support that spring and relapsed.” Much of the information came from death certificates. Researches included deaths in which alcohol was listed as an underlying or contributing cause.

“Stress is the primary factor in relapse, and there is no question there was a big increase in self-reported stress, and big increases in anxiety and depression, and planet-wide uncertainty about what was coming next,” he said. “That’s a lot of pressure on people who are trying to maintain recovery.”

John Kelly, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and the director of the Recovery Research Institute at Massachusetts General Hospital, told the Times that some people were unable or reluctant to seek care during lockdowns and times that hospitals were slammed with Covid-19 cases.