Media Coverage

Two months after Gov. Ron DeSantis boasted about proving the experts wrong by flattening the curve and getting COVID-19 under control, Florida has become the state that other states don’t want to become. Even with an emergency order reversing the reopening of bars and nightclubs, Florida has witnessed unprecedented, record-breaking growth in the daily number of cases and deaths reported for the last two weeks.

As COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations rise across North Carolina, key parts of the state’s science and data remain inaccessible to the public. “North Carolina is relying on the data and the science to lift restrictions responsibly, and right now our increasing numbers show we need to hit the pause button while we work to stabilize our trends,” Gov. Roy Cooper said June 24 when he announced the modified Phase Two restrictions.

Research shows women are shouldering the burden of the coronavirus pandemic far more than men when it comes to distance learning, childcare and household labor. Dr. Ruomeng Cui from Emory University, along with researchers from Harvard University, studied a large database where scholars submit papers they are working on and found productivity among male researchers increased 35 percent during the lockdown, while productivity for female researchers stayed flat or dropped. 

If there’s one state in the U.S. where you don’t want a pandemic, it’s Florida. Florida is an international crossroads, a magnet for tourists and retirees, and its population is older, sicker and more likely to be exposed to COVID-19 on the job than the country as a whole. When the coronavirus struck, the conditions there made it a perfect storm.

University administrators are spending their summers planning for how to hold classes safely in the fall. A new study co-authored by Yale SOM’s Edward Kaplan seeks to aid such decision making by using a computer model to estimate the likely effects of different approaches to testing and isolating infected students in a residential college setting. It finds that weekly testing will keep outbreaks under control under relatively optimistic scenarios, but that testing every three days would be more reliable.