Artwork stating 'Education Destroys Barriers', 'We Demand Treatment', and 'I Need A Chance'

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  • How New York City Vaccinated 6 Million People in Less Than a Month

    When a smallpox outbreak was deemed to be a likelihood in New York City in 1947, the city’s health commissioner rapidly launched a vaccination campaign that leveraged internal collaboration, consistent and transparent communication, and contact tracing. The effort culminated in more than six million people receiving vaccination in under a month, and only 12 infections and two deaths total. While this "public health triumph" hold lessons for the current COVID-19 pandemic, experts caution, “It’s almost inconceivable that we’re going to be able to do something similar as rapidly and as effectively.”

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  • Refugees Hold the Line Against a Pandemic

    When the coronavirus pandemic threatened to spread to the Matamoros tent camp where thousands of asylum-seekers lived, local health officials and aid workers proactively launched a public health campaign to boost education around the virus and leveraged ongoing relationships to distribute tests. Although there was a notable resistance from some, the tent camp has "avoided the devastation predicted in the early days of the pandemic, with only a few dozen mild cases reported since June."

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  • How one school became a ‘COVID-19 Safety Zone' through innovative testing

    High school students at Somerset High School in San Antonio, Texas get tested every week for COVID-19. The method is called “assurance testing,” and is a way to target “silent spreaders,” people who have COVID who don’t show symptoms and spread the virus to the larger community. With assurance testing, silent spreaders are quickly identified, preventing them from spreading COVID. “Of the 70,000 tests Community Labs has run so far, 1,700 were identified as positive for COVID-19. Most of those positive test results came from people who were asymptomatic and had no idea they had the virus.”

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  • Plans Tweaked For Campus Return

    Five New Haven universities and colleges are taking different approaches to re-opening their campuses. Administration at the University of New Haven is ramping up Covid testing to test 20% of in-person students weekly, an increase from as little as 5% before, along with adding a 20-minute break between classes to decrease crowd densities during passing periods. Other campuses, like Yale, are skipping the spring break period and only allow around 75% of its student population to live on-campus.

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  • How a refugee-run factory is helping the Netherlands meet its need for face masks

    Rather than import masks from elsewhere, an organization in the Netherlands set up a face-mask factory, and then hired "people with a refugee background to make surgical face masks." According to the project spokesperson, "The project not only responded to the deficit of masks in Dutch healthcare, but also provides people with a refugee background with work experience and knowledge about the labour market in the Netherlands."

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  • Learning the hard way

    A failed response to the outbreak of Ebola in the Democratic Republic of Congo has helped prepare the country's government and health officials to respond more successfully to the coronavirus pandemic and other public health crises. Several lessons that have proved especially important include the development of a research unit, focusing attention on supporting the community members rather than suppressing the virus, and improving public health communication.

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  • There are worse viruses than Covid-19 out there. How do we avoid the next big one?

    Public health experts are strategizing for how to combat the next pandemic by learning from what failed to prevent the most recent coronavirus pandemic. From increasing surveillance of viruses to using diagnostic technologies to "screen for novel infections more systematically," there are a series of protocols that countries failed to utilize that can be enacted now as a preventative measure.

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  • How a Cyprus charity realigned its services to face the pandemic

    The humanitarian organization known as Refugee Support in Nicosia, Cyrpus has been using WhatsApp to provide useful information to refugee populations during the coronavirus pandemic in addition to delivering food to 200 people per week. Although the organization is limited in who they can offer help to due to financial feasibility, the group has still been able to ease the "tension, conflict, and frustration between migrants during the process of being quarantined."

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  • As cases rise, college students take COVID-19 prevention into their own hands

    From zoom workshops that teach people about the misconceptions of COVID 19, to Google docs, to Instagram profiles that shame people who are partying during the pandemic, university students are holding their communities accountable. Across the country a myriad of student-led efforts have sprung up in response to careless behavior by college students. “I just thought it would be a good idea to sort of hold each other accountable and then be safe.”

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  • Arizona team helps investigate and trace COVID cases

    A team of volunteers at the University of Arizona is helping to bolster contact tracing efforts during the pandemic by working in tandem with those who have been trained by the Arizona Department of Health Services. Although federal health privacy restrictions limit what the volunteers can ask and in what order they must do so, the volunteer team "has made about 9,000 case investigations calls and contacted over 1,000 people exposed to the virus."

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