Sunday, December 22

Tag: covid

What college students need to know about liability waivers for COVID-19
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EDUCATION, IN OTHER NEWS

What college students need to know about liability waivers for COVID-19

As college and university campuses across the United States reopen, administrators are faced with the task of protecting students while also protecting the interests of the institutions they lead. This includes reducing the risk of lawsuits. Some institutions have resorted to forcing students to sign liability waivers. What purpose do these serve and is this the best course of action? As a professor who researches higher education law, here are my answers to four questions related to these waivers. 1. Do liability waivers protect universities from lawsuits? Generally, no. A liability waiver is generally viewed in court as an assumption of risk on the part of the person who signs it. So in this case it would be the student. This means that the person acknowledges there are some naturally oc...
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Will the new 15-minute COVID-19 test solve US testing problems?
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COVID-19

Will the new 15-minute COVID-19 test solve US testing problems?

On Aug. 26, the Food and Drug Administration granted an Emergency Use Authorization to a new rapid antigen test for COVID-19 called the BinaxNOW test. I study public health policy to combat infectious disease epidemics. Testing is one of the most powerful tools available to fight the spread of COVID-19. The new test is inexpensive, rapid and easy to use. It will massively scale up access to testing, but hurdles remain in achieving widespread, frequent COVID-19 testing. The Abbott BinaxNOW rapid antigen test claims to give results in 15 minutes. Abbott What type of test is BinaxNOW? The credit-card-sized test is an antigen test that detects a specific viral protein from SARS-CoV-2. It costs US$5 and doesn’t require a lab or a machine for processing. Performing the test is simple. A health...
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US unemployment data fail to capture COVID-19’s full impact – here’s how to fix it fast
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BUSINESS

US unemployment data fail to capture COVID-19’s full impact – here’s how to fix it fast

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed dangerous weaknesses in America’s aging public data system. In one of the greatest jobs crises in the past 100 years, the labor force measures of employment and unemployment are too slow, not local and too often unreliable and irrelevant. The consequences are serious. Governments at all levels are trying to make decisions about how to reduce the cost of joblessness – including whether to provide supplemental unemployment benefits. And they are doing this without sufficient evidence. On Friday, Sept. 4, the latest federal labor force report will come out, and it will not portray the extent of job loss in the communities that desperately need government help. The current system is not designed to respond to such massive shocks, but there are ways to fill t...
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Herd immunity won’t solve America’s COVID-19 problem
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LIFESTYLE

Herd immunity won’t solve America’s COVID-19 problem

After months battling the COVID-19 pandemic, the idea of “herd immunity” is back in the news. This has been stoked by reports about the White House’s new pandemic advisor, Scott Altas, who has argued in favor of ending social isolation measures and simply allowing healthy people to get infected. The idea is that the virus wouldn’t spread as quickly once enough people became immune. But trying to reach herd immunity without a vaccine would be a disastrous pandemic response strategy. As mathematics and computer science professors, we think it is important to understand what herd immunity actually is, when it’s a viable strategy and why, without a vaccine, it cannot reduce deaths and illnesses from the current pandemic. What is herd immunity? Epidemiologists define the herd immunity thresho...
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COVID-19 lockdowns expose the digital have-nots in rural areas – here’s which policies can get them connected
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COVID-19, POLITICS

COVID-19 lockdowns expose the digital have-nots in rural areas – here’s which policies can get them connected

The current public health emergency has shown just how critical adequate and affordable broadband infrastructure is for communities and individuals trying to work, access health care and attempt to teach kids from home. Yet over one-fifth of rural Americans lack access to broadband, while some estimates suggest that figure could be much higher. The problem has spurred many state governments to take an active role in trying to connect more rural communities to high-speed internet, whether it’s by incentivizing providers to serve rural areas or creating dedicated offices aimed at helping more people get online. As part of our ongoing research on how broadband access affects economic development, we conducted a study that examined which of these state policies are actually working. Why bro...
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How chemicals like PFAS can increase your risk of severe COVID-19
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COVID-19

How chemicals like PFAS can increase your risk of severe COVID-19

Nearly a year before the novel coronavirus emerged, Dr. Leonardo Trasande published “Sicker, Fatter, Poorer,” a book about connections between environmental pollutants and many of the most common chronic illnesses. The book describes decades of scientific research showing how endocrine-disrupting chemicals, present in our daily lives and now found in nearly all people, interfere with natural hormones in our bodies. The title sums up the consequences: Chemicals in the environment are making people sicker, fatter and poorer. As we learn more about the novel coronavirus and COVID-19, research is revealing ugly realities about social and environmental effects on health – including how the same chronic illnesses associated with exposure to endocrine-disrupting compounds also increase your risk...
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History tells us trying to stop diseases like COVID-19 at the border is a failed strategy
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COVID-19, VIDEO REELS

History tells us trying to stop diseases like COVID-19 at the border is a failed strategy

To explain why the coronavirus pandemic is much worse in the U.S. than anywhere else in the world, commentators have blamed the federal government’s mismanaged response and the lack of leadership from the Trump White House. Others have pointed to our culture of individualism, the decentralized nature of our public health, and our polarized politics. All valid explanations, but there’s another reason, much older, for the failed response: our approach to fighting infectious disease, inherited from the 19th century, has become overly focused on keeping disease out of the country through border controls. As a professor of medical sociology, I’ve studied the response to infectious disease and public health policy. In my new book, “Diseased States,” I examine how the early experience of outbr...
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Hurricanes and wildfires are colliding with the COVID-19 pandemic – and compounding the risks
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ENVIRONMENT

Hurricanes and wildfires are colliding with the COVID-19 pandemic – and compounding the risks

With a major hurricane hitting Louisiana and Texas and wildfires menacing the western U.S., millions of Americans are facing the complex risks of a natural disaster striking in the middle of a pandemic. The steps people normally take to prepare for a severe storm or to evacuate can contradict the public health recommendations for protecting themselves and others from COVID-19. That’s what millions of people were facing as Hurricane Laura intensified to a dangerous Category 4 storm on Aug. 26. More than half a million were under evacuation orders, including the cities Galveston, Beaumont and Port Arthur, Texas. My urban resilience lab at Texas A&M University has been examining interactions between urban infrastructure, systems and people in disasters. At the onset of the COVID-19 pand...
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Reopening elementary schools carries less COVID-19 risk than high schools – but that doesn’t guarantee safety
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LIFESTYLE

Reopening elementary schools carries less COVID-19 risk than high schools – but that doesn’t guarantee safety

While only a fraction of the country’s 50 million public school kids headed back to school in-person this month, many have already found themselves back at home. Within two weeks of opening, multiple states reported school-based COVID-19 outbreaks, and thousands of students and school staff have been quarantined following possible exposure to SARS-CoV-2, the coronavirus that causes COVID-19. Many of these districts are in areas with high community spread of COVID-19, and some didn’t enforce social distancing or require face masks. Our team of infectious disease epidemiologists collected data in the San Francisco Bay Area and ran computer simulations to examine how school closures and reopenings can affect the spread of COVID-19. What we learned points to three key strategies for minimi...
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While the US is reeling from COVID-19, the Trump administration is trying to take away health care
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HEALTH & WELLNESS

While the US is reeling from COVID-19, the Trump administration is trying to take away health care

The death toll from COVID-19 keeps rising, creating grief, fear, loss and confusion. Unfortunately for us all, the pain only begins there. Other important health policy news that would ordinarily make headlines is buried under the crushing weight of the coronavirus. Many have not had time to notice or understand the Trump administration’s efforts to wreck health care coverage. We are both professors at Boston University School of Public Health who study health insurance, one using economics and statistics and the other focusing on law and policy. We have researched the big picture of COVID-19’s impact on the safety net and the details of how our federalist system, with states having considerable control over policy, has made a coordinated response to the pandemic more difficult. Here, w...
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