Sunday, May 19

Tag: coronavirus

Coronavirus deaths and those of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery have something in common: Racism
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COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS

Coronavirus deaths and those of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery have something in common: Racism

The COVID-19 pandemic and the deaths of George Floyd and Ahmaud Arbery are two major catastrophes that shine a light on longstanding social inequities and injustices toward African Americans. Emerging research in the field of social genomics demonstrates how social stress, such as racism and discrimination, can shift the body’s biological resources toward a state that increases risk for disease. For example, our research group has found that racial discrimination may be impacting the way genes are expressed, leading to increased levels of dangerous stress hormones. These differences were found even when social determinant factors such as poverty and other forms of stress were accounted for. Hence, racial discrimination experiences may also explain why African Americans continue to remain...
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Low-wage essential workers get less protection against coronavirus – and less information about how it spreads
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COVID-19, WORK

Low-wage essential workers get less protection against coronavirus – and less information about how it spreads

Low-wage essential workers are more likely to face dangerous working conditions and food insecurity than high-wage workers, even more so during the COVID-19 pandemic. Our research provides some of the first data on the safety of essential workers during the pandemic. Our findings suggest that COVID-19 is not the “great equalizer,” as Andrew Cuomo once called it. In fact, inequality is getting worse. We found that across income levels, roughly two-thirds of essential workers were unable to practice social distancing. Low-wage essential workers include grocery clerks, home health aides and delivery drivers, while high-wage workers include nurses, doctors and managers. However, low-wage workers were two to three times more likely than high-wage workers – workers earning over US$40/hour – ...
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Coronavirus-related debt will live in digital profiles for years – hurting Americans’ ability to get jobs, apartments and credit
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COVID-19

Coronavirus-related debt will live in digital profiles for years – hurting Americans’ ability to get jobs, apartments and credit

Long after the COVID-19 health emergency ends, many Americans will still suffer from the long tail of the pandemic’s economic devastation. For people on the country’s economic fringes, the proliferation of data analytics tools to monitor consumer life – driven by companies that profit from gathering personal data – will magnify today’s financial hardship. These companies scrape data from your public records, social media interactions, purchase history and smartphone location tracking. Using powerful technologies, they fuse your data into digital profiles that landlords, employers, lenders and other gatekeepers to life’s necessities use to sort and screen people. As a clinical law professor who represents low-income people in consumer cases, I’m concerned that the pandemic’s economic fall...
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The coronavirus pandemic moved life online – a surge in website defacing followed
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COVID-19, TECHNOLOGY

The coronavirus pandemic moved life online – a surge in website defacing followed

One consequence of the public’s compliance with social distancing and quarantines during the COVID-19 pandemic is a sharp decline in most types of crime. It looks like people staying home made communities less conducive to crime. Unfortunately, the news isn’t as good as those numbers alone suggest. Other settings are seeing an increase in crime following the stay-at-home orders. One is the household, where domestic violence is likely to have increased in the past two months. As researchers who study cybercrime, we’re finding that criminal activity seems to be on the rise in the online world, as well. At the same time, many people are relying more heavily than before on online services for work, entertainment and shopping. This makes them more likely to become the targets of different typ...
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Clap all you like now, but workers with meaningful jobs deserve to be valued in a post-coronavirus economy too
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COVID-19, HEALTH & WELLNESS

Clap all you like now, but workers with meaningful jobs deserve to be valued in a post-coronavirus economy too

The coronavirus recession has laid bare how illogically the U.S. labor market values work that matters. In the United States, as elsewhere, citizens have been extolling the role of essential workers – such as nurses, grocery suppliers and delivery drivers – by, for example, rewarding them with nightly claps. Yet many of these employees receive low pay and few protections, suggesting a different appreciation of their worth in the market. But in highlighting this disconnect, perhaps the crisis has also provided an opportunity to reimagine an economy that values jobs for something more than just wealth creation: meaningfulness. A moral market? Meaningfulness has to do with how much one’s work matters in a moral sense, which is not always signified by how much money a job pays. It often rela...
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Memorial Day: Why veterans are particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus pandemic
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COVID-19, IN OTHER NEWS

Memorial Day: Why veterans are particularly vulnerable to the coronavirus pandemic

As the nation takes a day to memorialize its military dead, those who are living are facing a deadly risk that has nothing to do with war or conflict: the coronavirus. Different groups face different degrees of danger from the pandemic, from the elderly who are experiencing deadly outbreaks in nursing homes to communities of color with higher infection and death rates. Veterans are among the most hard-hit, with heightened health and economic threats from the pandemic. These veterans face homelessness, lack of health care, delays in receiving financial support and even death. I have spent the past four years studying veterans with substance use and mental health disorders who are in the criminal justice system. This work revealed gaps in health care and financial support for veterans, eve...
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Coronavirus A New Era Of Looming Unknowns And New Normals
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COVID-19

Coronavirus A New Era Of Looming Unknowns And New Normals

As the United States loosens coronavirus-related restrictions, some of us are beginning to look up from where we are, to look ahead. We have undoubtedly entered a new era of looming unknowns and new normals, from record unemployment to face masks—an era to be further shaped by our youngest generation. As such, we’d be wise to consider what today’s children can tell us about the future. I’m a Gen Xer with a 7-year-old. Since March, I’ve been a stay-at-home-working-mum-home-schooler and have spent unprecedented time with my (occasional) bundle of joy. Accordingly, I’ve learned that I’m a terrible math teacher, I should lock the door when I’m on a Zoom call, and I should have appreciated the precious alone time on my morning commutes. This pandemic re-emphasizes the ways in which global trag...
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Rapid home-based coronavirus tests are coming together in research labs — we’re working on analyzing spit using advanced CRISPR gene editing techniques
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COVID-19

Rapid home-based coronavirus tests are coming together in research labs — we’re working on analyzing spit using advanced CRISPR gene editing techniques

A desperately needed tool to curb the COVID-19 pandemic is an inexpensive home-based rapid testing kit that can detect the coronavirus without needing to go to the hospital. The Food and Drug Administration has approved a few home sample collection kits but a number of researchers, including myself, are using the gene-editing technique known as CRISPR to make home tests. If they work, these tests could be very accurate and give people an answer in about an hour. I am a biomolecular scientist with training in pharmaceutical sciences and biomedical engineering and my lab focuses on developing next-generation of technologies for detecting and treating cancer, genetic and infectious diseases. The COVID-19 disease is caused by a coronavirus named severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus...
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What the coronavirus crisis reveals about vulnerable populations behind bars and on the streets
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COVID-19

What the coronavirus crisis reveals about vulnerable populations behind bars and on the streets

The notion that COVID-19 is an equal opportunity killer has crumbled. The health and economic fallout from the crisis has disproportionately hit lower-income areas and communities of color. Nowhere is this discrepancy more evident than in prisons, jails and homeless shelters – made up disproportionately of poorer, black and Latino men and women. Here, COVID-19 cases have mushroomed due to dormitory-style living conditions and the inability of people, often with underlying health issues, to practice social distancing. As the virus rages on, comprehensive COVID-19 testing for these populations remains elusive. As experts on jails, health disparities and how to help former prisoners reintegrate into society, we believe that missteps in how we transition incarcerated individuals back to the ...
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AI tool searches thousands of scientific papers to guide researchers to coronavirus insights
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COVID-19, SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY

AI tool searches thousands of scientific papers to guide researchers to coronavirus insights

The big idea The scientific community worldwide has mobilized with unprecedented speed to tackle the COVID-19 pandemic, and the emerging research output is staggering. Every day, hundreds of scientific papers about COVID-19 come out, in both traditional journals and non-peer-reviewed preprints. There’s already far more than any human could possibly keep up with, and more research is constantly emerging. And it’s not just new research. We estimate that there are as many as 500,000 papers relevant to COVID-19 that were published before the outbreak, including papers related to the outbreaks of SARS in 2002 and MERS in 2012. Any one of these might contain the key information that leads to effective treatment or a vaccine for COVID-19. Traditional methods of searching through the research li...
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