Greg Richter

Scientists have now made substantial progress in predicting the path that COVID-19 will take in patients, finding sets of biological features that are associated with the course and severity of COVID-19. The findings were recently published in Cell Reports Medicine by researchers from Drexel University’s College of Medicine, Boston Children’s Hospital, Yale, and other institutions nationwide.

Although families with immigrant mothers experienced higher rates of food insecurity and inability to pay rent during the pandemic than other groups, they reported less participation in economic impact payments (EIP) in the form of stimulus checks and the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program (SNAP) – two programs designed to provide stopgap financial support, according to a new study in JAMA Health Forum from researchers at the Dornsife School of Public Health and Children’s HealthWatch.

Although the mRNA COVID-19 vaccines from Pfizer-BioNTech and Moderna are safe and effective at preventing severe illness in adults and children, including immunocompromised individuals, researchers have noticed that these shots continue to be the most efficient and effective in younger individuals than in older adults.

Proactive policing, such as pedestrian and traffic stops, is a crime prevention tactic that relies on police officer discretion to stop and search individuals they consider suspicious. A recently published study in the journal of the American Public Health Association, looking at proactive policing and preterm birth rates in New Orleans, shows that Black residents living in neighborhoods experiencing high levels of proactive policing were about three times as likely to give birth preterm (before 37 weeks) as their white neighbors.