The COVID-19 pandemic was responsible for a nationwide healthcare and economic slowdown. Surprisingly, even during months of quarantine and isolation as masks and face coverings became the norm, people continued to spend money on products to enhance their attractiveness and to seek out cosmetic procedures. “During the lockdown, doctor-patient interactions slowly resumed largely in the...
Health
Covid Gets Airborne
In May 2021, the Centers for Disease Control officially recognized that SARS-CoV-2—the virus that causes COVID-19—is airborne, meaning it is highly transmissible through the air. Now University of California San Diego Professor and Endowed Chair of Chemistry and Biochemistry Rommie Amaro, along with partners across the U.S. and around the world, has modeled the delta...
Covid Tech Took a Toll on Work-From-Home Moms
It’s no secret that being a work-from-home mom during the dawn of the COVID-19 pandemic was a drag. And those tech tools – video meetings and texting – designed to make remote work easier? They just added to the stress and exacerbated the mental health toll on burnt out moms trying to hold everything together....
Stimulus Designed to Help Restaurant Workers Led to More Covid Cases
A new paper in The Economic Journal indicates that a large-scale government subsidy aimed at encouraging people to eat out in restaurants in the wake of the first 2020 COVID-19 wave in the United Kingdom accelerated a second COVID19 wave. The COVID19 pandemic caused by the novel coronavirus hurt economies around the world. The hospitality sector was...
Shadow Loss: Young Adults Cope with Missing Out During Pandemic
A new paper featuring college students’ experiences with loss during the COVID-19 pandemic shows that although few directly experienced a close death, everyone lost something that impacted their lives. Researchers collected the stories as part of class assignments where students reflected on their earliest and most significant losses regarding COVID-19. The new paper, titled “Young...
Africa Tries to End Vaccine Inequity by Replicating Its Own
In a pair of Cape Town warehouses converted into a maze of airlocked sterile rooms, young scientists are assembling and calibrating the equipment needed to reverse engineer a coronavirus vaccine that has yet to reach South Africa and most of the world’s poorest people. The energy in the gleaming labs matches the urgency of their...
Scientists Search for Cause of Mysterious Covid-Related Inflammation in Children
Like most other kids with covid, Dante and Michael DeMaino seemed to have no serious symptoms. Infected in mid-February, both lost their senses of taste and smell. Dante, 9, had a low-grade fever for a day or so. Michael, 13, had a “tickle in his throat,” said their mother, Michele DeMaino, of Danvers, Massachusetts. At...
Women Left Behind: Gender Gap Emerges in Africa’s Vaccines
The health outreach workers who drove past Lama Mballow’s village with a megaphone handed out T-shirts emblazoned with the words: “I GOT MY COVID-19 VACCINE!” By then, the women in Sare Gibel already had heard the rumors on social media: The vaccines could make your blood stop or cause you to miscarry. Women who took...
Donation Experiment: Covid-19 Only Slightly Displaces Other Concerns
The Covid-19 pandemic and its solution has only partially displaced other social and political concerns – and not persistently, despite the pandemic’s high and constant media presence. This is shown by an international team of researchers led by the economist Esther Blanco from the University of Innsbruck. The results were recently published in the journal...
Sharp Flu Rebound Expected After Lifting of Covid Distancing Measures
New research warns that the United States could experience a severe influenza outbreak after public health measures like face masks and social distancing are lifted. These measures have protected people from COVID-19 and influenza—incidence of influenza declined 60 percent during the first ten weeks following the implementation of the measures—but is also leading to greater...