In response to the pandemic, The University of Kansas Health System launched a secure, HIPAA-compliant telehealth platform

Technology has served as crucial weapon in the global fight against the coronavirus. It’s helped bring people together in a time when it’s safer to remain apart. More specifically, telehealth has emerged as a digital bridge, allowing enterprises such as education, research and patient care to advance, even under the paralyzing grip of COVID-19.

While some institutions and organizations are just now fully embracing telehealth, the University of Kansas Medical Center is nearly 30 years into the journey, and the institution is helping its partner, The University of Kansas Health System, and others across Kansas, harness the innovation’s power and possibilities.

Also, in response to the pandemic, the university, through its University of Kansas Center for Telemedicine and Telehealth (KUCTT), hosted two webinars that drew more than 400 Kansas providers interested in how to develop and launch a telehealth plan in the wake of the crisis.

“It’s not just us doing for us, but us trying to do for the whole state,” said Ryan Spaulding, Ph.D., vice chancellor for community engagement, who oversees the University of Kansas Center for Telemedicine and Telehealth and the university’s telehealth outreach and programming.

Sociologists at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and at Bowling Green State University highlight differences in structure, resilience, and shared resources in proposing new policies and guidelines to help families weather the COVID-19 pandemic

Families are central to our experience of COVID-19, and they can serve as a mechanism that either exacerbates or reduces the health and economic inequalities our society is currently facing.

Mieke Beth Thomeer, Ph.D., associate professor in the College of Arts and Sciences’ Department of Sociology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham, and Jenjira Yahirun, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology at Bowling Green State University, say as sociologists who study health and families, this is nothing new.

Decades of studies demonstrate that families matter for health; but being single, having kids or caring for a parent feels especially consequential during this time. This is reflected in several proposed policies and recommendations, say Thomeer and Yahirun.

Auburn University research to give voice to rural communities in pandemic

Researchers in Auburn University’s College of Agriculture hope to give rural areas of the Deep South a voice to the hardships they have endured during the crisis.

“While there has been some media attention on the impact of the pandemic on rural communities, particularly in light of the impact to the meat processing section, few have focused exclusively on rural areas and even fewer on the Deep South more broadly,” said Ryan Thomson, assistant professor in the Department of Agricultural Economics and Rural Sociology.

“There are many questions about the impacts to these areas, which too often are considered an afterthought despite their important and vibrant communities,” Thomson said.

This “grand omission,” as Thomson calls it, became the genesis of a research project including himself, Professor Michelle Worosz and graduate research assistant KC Vick titled “Rural Responses to the COVID-19 Pandemic: Analysis of Big Data from Southern Rural Communities.”

Economic shutdown to fight coronavirus provides researchers from Caltech and the Chinese Academy of Sciences unique opportunity to study impact of reduced emissions and the complex interplay that produces “hazy” days in northern China

The viral before-and-after images of improved air quality around the world resulting from the COVID-19 lockdown may not hold true for all parts of the world. According to a new study published on June 17 in the journal Science, although there was a dramatic reduction in pollution emission during the lockdown, other factors involving complex atmospheric chemistry and meteorological variations actually led to a deterioration in air quality in northern China during the COVID-19 lockdown.

Researchers from Caltech and the Chinese Academy of Sciences reviewed satellite and ground-based observations of the region and conducted state-of-the-science atmospheric model simulations. They focused on the roughly three weeks between January 23 to February 13 when China locked down its cities in an effort to slow the spread of infection.

“The halted human activities during the COVID-19 pandemic in China provided us a unique experiment to assess the efficiency of air-pollution mitigation,” says Yuan Wang, a research scientist at Caltech and the corresponding author of the Science paper.

“There is an urgent need to understand the evidence that would support how students could safely return to school.” – The Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security

Most elementary schools, middle schools, and high schools across the United States have been closed since March in an effort to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Schools that are able to do so have replaced classroom education with remote learning, using a range of tools and approaches. As of the publication of this report, governors from most US states have recommended or ordered that schools remain closed for the remainder of this academic year, affecting more than 50 million public school students. While a few schools may reopen before the end of the current school year, most schools, students, and their families in the United States are now facing uncertainty about whether or how schools will resume for in-class learning in the fall.

A host of guidance documents related to COVID-19 mitigation strategies for schools have recently been issued by various government and nongovernment organizations at the national and international levels. And a number of countries in Europe and Asia are now implementing a variety of approaches for returning K-12 schoolchildren to school. This report includes a summary and detailed Appendix on a selection of country approaches to school reopening. It is important to track these efforts and the implementation of the various guidances closely. Still, it will be difficult to tease out lessons learned absent rigorous study, since many adults will be returning to work, and physical distancing restrictions will be eased contemporaneously with schools reopening.

Researchers at Rutgers University find Spanish autocompletes are more likely to yield harmful, negative results

“Little attention has been paid to the ways computer search algorithms present unequal access to health information across languages,” according to lead author Vivek Singh, an assistant professor at Rutgers-New Brunswick’s School of Communication and Information.

His team found that online autocomplete results for coronavirus related information are more likely to yield misleading results if the user types in Spanish than in English.

This difference may harm Spanish speakers by connecting them with misinformation about basic precautions or the disease itself.

 “The autocomplete function, while convenient, may contribute to bias that has the potential to lead to health inequality experienced by marginalized and racial minority groups by providing different results for similar inquiries,” said Pamela Valera, an assistant professor at the Rutgers School of Public Health and affiliated faculty member at School of Social Work.

Researchers at the University of Arkansas track  behaviors in the age of COVID-19

To learn from the COVID-19 pandemic, Azat Sadyrov, a research assistant at the Behavioral Business Research Lab within the Sam M. Walton College of Business, is teaming up with Samantha Robinson,teaching assistant professor in the Department of Mathematical Sciences within the J. William Fulbright College of Arts and Sciences, to study the behavior of people and how the coronavirus has altered that behavior.

“The fight against the spread of the virus is not only intended to reduce the total number of cases,but also to slow down their rate of increase,” said Sadyrov, a junior majoring in economics at Fulbright College. “Individual behavior is critical to controlling the spread of the virus. How much people listen to recommendations is just as important as actions by governments, if not more.”