Blog

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How To Manage Your COVID-19 Risk

Now that the weather is getting nicer and states like Michigan are beginning to loosen their restrictions on gatherings, retail shopping, and more, how do we assess our own personal risk—and the risks to friends and family—as we head out of our homes to reconnect and return to public spaces? Michigan Public Health research scientist Ryan Malosh, a survivor of leukemia and a bone marrow transplant, shares his recommendations for managing your individual infection risk, and explains how swiss cheese can help us all think about reducing infectious disease transmission.

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Courage and Commitment: Staffing for Crisis Care

What's it like to manage health care systems and personnel during a global pandemic? And how can you mobilize and redeploy thousands of workers and set up hundreds of surge facilities across the nation in just a few weeks? For an inside view of how we are managing surge staffing during the COVID-19 pandemic, we connected with alum Kelly Rakowski, a national staffing solutions leader. She and her team are working across the country with organizations and with “hand raisers”—retired or out-of-work health care workers stepping forward to help fight the outbreak.

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Returning to Work Safely in Michigan and across the US

With his expertise in occupational health, we asked Rick Neitzel, Associate Professor of Environmental Health Sciences, how businesses of all shapes and sizes, across all sectors, can reopen while keeping workers and customers safe and secure.

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Homelessness in the time of Coronavirus

In this episode, we talked with Barbara Brush, a Professor of Health Behavior and Health Education at the School of Public Health and an expert on homelessness and health about the hardships people experiencing homelessness encounter daily during this pandemic. We also spoke with Linda Little, President and CEO of the Neighborhood Service Organization which provides shelter and support to thousands of people in Metro Detroit each year about how coronavirus has impacted how they provide care to the people who need it.

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Coronavirus and Food Access: How the Pandemic Impacts Food Insecurity

There are nearly 40 million Americans, including 11 million children, who are food insecure. That means, they don't have reliable, consistent access to the nutritious, quality food they need to lead healthy lives. With growing pressure on the food supply chain, and tens of millions of Americans now out of work, the coronavirus pandemic could cause that 40 million to climb. Cindy Leung and Susan Aaronson, Nutritional Sciences faculty at the University of Michigan School of Public Health, talk about the ways COVID-19 is impacting those experiencing food insecurity, and how community and government organizations are adapting to serve those in need.

illustration of the COVID-19 coronavirus

Public Health Surveillance: Immunity, Testing, and Contact Tracing

Long before we could sequence a virus’s genome in a matter of weeks, we used public health tactics like contact tracing to sort out the movement of a disease in a population. Contact tracing is one of the “traditional” tools of epidemiologists—an epidemiologist calls up dozens or even hundreds of people who might have had contact with an infected person. By tracking these interactions, they can understand how a disease is making its way through a population. Today, we have more public health surveillance tools at our disposal, but we still have a lot of work to do before we fully understand how this new coronavirus behaves and what it means to have immunity to it. Abram Wagner is research assistant professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan School of Public Health. We asked him to cover some basics of how we monitor a disease outbreak—from how we test for it to how long we might have immunity to it after an infection.