Coronavirus | Penn Today

America’s largest beer company will buy the country a round if it hits Biden’s July 4 vaccination goal

Alison Buttenheim of the School of Nursing said Anheuser-Busch’s campaign to incentive COVID-19 vaccination with free beer will not be enough on its own to help the U.S. meet its immunization goals. Still, she said, the campaign’s message hits “all the right notes for trying to make this a collective goal we all work for.”

On the COVID front lines, when not getting belly rubs

Cynthia Otto of the School of Veterinary Medicine said better research is needed to determine how effectively dogs can detect COVID by scent. Until then, using dogs to screen people could allow some cases to go undetected. “I don’t want to miss those, then everyone thinks they’re safe,” she said.

a close-up of a dictionary page with definitions for the words epidemic, disease, and viral

Vaccines, variants, and the evolving lexicon of COVID-19

Penn Today shares the third update to the pandemic glossary, providing insights into the jargon becoming an everyday part of conversations and news headlines about the ongoing public health crisis.

Marquee outside the Theatre of Living Arts that reads PENN MEDICINE COVID-19 VACCINES NO WALKUPS with masked people standing on sidewalk outside.

Pennsylvania Hospital’s unusual venue brings the celebration to vaccination

When Pennsylvania Hospital leadership began looking for a neighborhood site where they could set up a COVID-19 vaccine clinic, they found an enthusiastic partner at the Theatre of Living Arts.

A young person wearing a mask and polka dot t-shirt leaning against a faux wooden wall.

A mental health checkup for children and adolescents, a year into COVID

As a whole, this group experienced a significant short-term psychological toll. Though the long-term consequences aren’t yet known, particularly given how the year disproportionately exacerbated adverse childhood experiences, Penn experts remain cautiously optimistic.

a person wearing a mask with a QR code on their phone scanning their ticket in an airport

The potential role of vaccine certificates in the next phase of the pandemic

Public health law expert Eric Feldman and medical ethicist Emily Largent discuss the legal and ethical implications of companies and organizations requiring proof of vaccination to reengage with different sectors of the economy.

Immunity to the coronavirus may persist for years, scientists find

Scott Hensley of the Perelman School of Medicine commented on new research that suggests COVID-19 immunity lasts for at least a year. However, he warned, viruses change significantly every few years: “The reason we get infected with common coronaviruses repetitively throughout life might have much more to do with variation of these viruses rather than immunity.”

The science behind vaccine incentives

Katy Milkman of the Wharton School was interviewed about using incentives to motivate people to get vaccinated. “The focus is not on the adamant folks who are absolutely against it; it's rather on everyone else,” she said.

Nursing home hallway with an empty wheelchair parked outside an open door.

Nursing home staffing during the pandemic

While the pandemic hit nursing homes especially hard, one area it did not suffer is in staffing. A new study finds that staffing levels in nursing homes did not decrease during the pandemic.

This is the wrong way to distribute badly needed vaccines

PIK Professor Ezekiel Emanuel and a University of Denver colleague wrote an opinion piece critiquing Covax’s population-based global vaccine distribution formula. “Distributing vaccines purely on the basis of population means some vaccines will fail to reach those whose actual current risk is highest,” they wrote.

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