Author: TheConversation

By Paul Shafer, Assistant Professor, Health Law, Policy, and Management, Boston University The United States is experiencing its steepest economic slide in modern history. Tens of millions of Americans have filed new unemployment claims as the coronavirus shutters businesses and forces companies to lay off staff. People need support to help them through the crisis in a few key ways – cash to meet immediate financial needs, health care to cover them should they become ill and housing even if they can’t make rent. Despite federal stimulus efforts north of US$2 trillion – so far – it is likely...

By Jeremy Németh, Associate Professor of Urban and Regional Planning, University of Colorado Denver; Sarah Rowan, Assistant Professor of Medicine-Infectious Disease, University of Colorado Denver Public health officials and urban planners have long known that one’s ZIP code is an especially reliable indicator of educational attainment, lifetime earnings and even life expectancy. ZIP code is also a great indicator of risk for disease transmission. Cities across the United States, lower-income communities of color are experiencing disproportionately high rates of COVID-19 infection, hospitalization and death. One set of explanations for these geographical disparities focuses on the individual circumstances of neighborhood...

By Joshua Aizenman, Professor of International Relations and Economics, University of Southern California – Dornsife College of Letters, Arts and Sciences If cities across the U.S. had moved just one week faster to shut down restaurants and businesses and order residents to stay home, they could have avoided over 35,000 coronavirus deaths by early May, new research suggests. If they had moved two weeks earlier, more than 50,000 people who died from the pandemic might still be alive. Those U.S. estimates, from a modeling study released May 20 by researchers at Columbia University, came to similar conclusions that I...

By Shelly M. Wagers, Assistant Professor of Criminology, University of South Florida As the COVID-19 epidemic continues to ravage the American public, an unsurprising story emerges: Poor communities are hot spots for COVID transmission. The death rate from COVID-19 appears to be staggeringly high among African Americans compared to whites. The Washington Post reports, for example, that while 14% of the Michigan population is black, 40% of COVID-19 deaths are among blacks. This is a familiar pattern to a social and infectious disease epidemiologist like myself. It is evidence of centuries of segregation and discrimination that have disproportionately placed...