Lockdown lowered the spread of COVID-19 in New York City by 70 percent, according to a forthcoming study.

For the study, scientists at Columbia University Mailman School of Public Health and the New York City Department of Health and Mental Hygiene looked at how successful public health interventions — such as school closures, stay-at-home orders and face masks — were on the widespread COVID-19 transmission rates happening in the city from March until its “reopening” in June. The scientists found that these measures were highly effective at reducing coronavirus infection rates.

In fact, the success rate of New York City’s lockdown was even higher than what was seen in Wuhan, China. According to the Columbia University press release, “the new study is in line with previous modeling studies estimating that lockdowns reduced COVID-19 transmission by 58 percent in Wuhan, China, 45 percent in Italy, and 77 in France.”

Original Source

Parents and children surveyed about the COVID-19 pandemic in late April and early May of 2020 – when most schools and day care providers closed their doors – said they had become more stressed out.

In response to our questions about their feelings and thoughts, these 183 parents in Western states who were between the ages of 18 and 55 years old replied that their mental and physical health and interactions with others have deteriorated. Most of the families who participated were white (66.7%), 21.3% were Latino, 7.1% identified as mixed race or “other” and 4.9% were Black.

Parents who had lost their jobs and other sources of income, were unable to see family or friends, struggled to oversee their children’s schoolwork or had many anxiety and depressive symptoms were more likely to feel stressed, as indicated by responses to 10 items each on a scale of 0-4. They were also more likely to be at risk for abusive parenting.

At the same time, parents said they were finding ways to alleviate stress and its consequences. For example, parents who perceived that they had more control over their lives during the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic and who felt like they had enough people who they could rely on for comfort, support and encouragement were less likely to feel stressed out or exhibit signs that they were at risk of abusive parenting.

Original Source

Women leaders around the world have had considerably more success in slowing the spread of the COVID-19 pandemic and its general outcomes, and two economists can now explain why.

Only 19 countries around the world are currently led by women, and throughout the first few months of the pandemic, most of them had in common a relative success in fighting the virus. From Bangladesh to Norway to Iceland, a study reveals that some characteristics that are typical to women in leadership positions were instrumental in the success of these countries: “It required big thinking, empathy, and good communication skills,” Dr. Uma Kambhampati, Professor of Economics at the University of Reading and co-author of the study, told Forbes.

After seeing memes trending on social media of successful leaders dealing with COVID-19 being women, Dr. Kambhampati and her colleague, Supriya Garikipati, Associate Professor in Development Economics at the University of Liverpool, decided to look at whether this statement was accurate or not.

To do so, they matched each female-led country with another “neighbor” country led by a male, that is similar in terms of population, age, GDP per capita, health expenditure etc. For example, New Zealand was paired with Ireland and Germany with the United Kingdom. The results were clear, even when the researchers tried dropping countries with outstanding results (good and bad) and matching with other countries. “What we were surprised [by] is how systematic and robust it was,” Dr. Kambhampati said. For example, they tried looking at the data without New Zealand, Germany, and the United States, and the results still overwhelmingly showed that women leaders were doing better.

Original Source

New study by the University of New Mexico looks at shifts in community behaviors

Gabe Sanchez, professor of political science and director of the University of New Mexico’s (UNM’s) Center for Social Policy, is part of an interdisciplinary research team looking at how the pandemic is impacting behaviors of the US population as a result of the pandemic.

“Because we were able to move quickly, we are one of the few teams have data from early on in the pandemic,” Sanchez explained. “We’ve been able to get information from thousands of respondents across the country to look at variation in behavior based on where people live, as states have responded in different ways and entered different phases of quarantine.”

The National Panel Study of COVID-19 began in March and focuses on how different ethnicities and political party affiliations have influenced behavior patterns during the pandemic. This new study launched at the early onset of the COVID-19 pandemic has unique data reveals behavioral pattern changes within communities.

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.