California mom Megan Bacigalupi has had enough. She wants her kindergartner and second grader back in their Oakland classrooms. But the coronavirus is spreading too quickly to open schools in Alameda County, based on the current state standards. And the local teachers union hasn’t agreed to go back — even after teachers have been vaccinated....
Kaitlyn Romoser first caught covid-19 in March, likely on a trip to Denmark and Sweden, just as the scope of the pandemic was becoming clear. Romoser, who is 23 and a laboratory researcher in College Station, Texas, tested positive and had a few days of mild, coldlike symptoms. In the weeks that followed, she bounced...
For 11 months, Cheryl Garfield, a community health worker in West Philadelphia, has been a navigator of pandemic loss and hardship. She makes calls to people who are isolated in their homes, people who are sick and afraid and people who can’t afford their rent or can’t get an appointment with a doctor. The conversations...
Multidisciplinary team of international experts suggests participants should receive a “substantial” amount, be paid ethically Healthy people volunteering to be infected with SARS-CoV-2, in order to help scientists better understand how to tackle the virus, should receive payment – if it is determined that these studies are otherwise ethical to proceed. Those are the findings...
Global greenhouse gas emissions over the last century have made southern China a hotspot for bat-borne coronaviruses, by driving growth of forest habitat favoured by bats. A new study published today in the journal Science of the Total Environment provides the first evidence of a mechanism by which climate change could have played a direct role in...
A vegan diet is more effective for weight loss than a Mediterranean diet, according to a groundbreaking new study that compared the diets head to head. The randomized crossover trial, which was published in the Journal of the American College of Nutrition, found that a low-fat vegan diet has better outcomes for weight, body composition, insulin sensitivity,...
The COVID-19 pandemic is having a detrimental impact on substance use, mental health, and weight-related health behaviors among people with obesity, according to a new study by researchers at UT Southwestern and the UTHealth School of Public Health. The study, published in the journal Clinical Obesity, surveyed 589 patients with obesity who are enrolled in the UT Southwestern Weight...
Medical histories of patients collected and stored in electronic health records (EHR) can be rapidly leveraged to predict the probability of death from COVID-19, information that could prove valuable in managing limited therapeutic and preventive resources to combat the devastating virus, researchers from Massachusetts General Hospital (MGH) have found. In a study published in npj Digital...
– Liisa Ecola, Hui Lu, Charlene Rohr, RAND Corporation Months into the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic, Americans’ online shopping habits are continuing to shift. We documented changes in online shopping habits at the beginning of the pandemic, comparing patterns from January and February (before the pandemic) with patterns from mid-March and April (when lockdowns...
In Lily Tomlin’s classic SNL comedy sketch, her telephone operator “Ernestine” famously delivers the punchline, “We don’t care. We don’t have to. We’re the Phone Company.” But new research finds that satisfied customers mean increased profits even for public utilities that don’t face competition. Little is known about effect of customer satisfaction at utilities. As...
