Coronavirus | Penn Today

students walking around campus wearing masks and sitting outside eating food

Campus public health measures help mitigate the spread of COVID-19

Alongside regular saliva-based COVID-19 testing, other tools such as contact tracing, quarantine and isolation facilities, and health and well-being monitoring platforms are critical for protecting and supporting the campus community.

‘This is something that we weren’t taught’: How a brand-new nurse learned to treat an unknown disease

Linda Aiken of the School of Nursing said short staffing in hospitals has been exacerbated by the pandemic. “Chronic understaffing in hospitals and chaotic and inefficient work environments put nurses in a very poor position to be able to respond to the COVID surge because they were already reaching deep inside themselves in the normal context of care,” she said.

As a new vaccine becomes available, CDC chief warns against rolling back safeguards

PIK Professor Ezekiel Emanuel said lifting restrictions on indoor dining and other COVID-19 precautions is premature, in spite of the new vaccines. “The peak was just six weeks ago. We have been in this heightened state of public health alert for the last six, seven weeks,” he said. “We should not just rush out and reverse all of the advances we have had, especially with these new variants.”

The vaccine leads the march to ending the COVID-19 pandemic

James Alwine of the Perelman School of Medicine co-authored an op-ed about how mass vaccination and continued vigilance can help bring an end to the pandemic.

Reminders to stay cautious aren’t the biggest reasons for COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy

Melanie Kornides of the School of Nursing said cautious messaging around the COVID-19 vaccine isn’t a major factor in vaccine hesitancy. “We’ve been seeing all along, even before the vaccine came out, that they’re worried about long term safety, that they’re worried that the process was rushed, and that there are political motivations for not wanting to be vaccinated,” she said. “Those continue to be the large majority of the concerns.”

We still don’t know how well COVID vaccines stop transmission

Scott Halpern of the Perelman School of Medicine weighed in on two new studies, neither of which have been peer reviewed yet, that claim the COVID-19 vaccine can suppress transmission rates. “Once you’ve been bombarded with bad news long enough, any glimmer of good news is something we just emotionally latch onto,” said Halpern. “That’s just human nature.”

FDA review confirms safety and efficacy of single-shot Johnson & Johnson coronavirus vaccine, especially against severe cases

E. John Wherry of the Perelman School of Medicine said people should disregard detractors and take whichever approved COVID-19 vaccine they can get. “We have a really important job to do on how we message this,” he said. “The day that an individual has a choice on which vaccine to get—that’s a great day, but probably won’t be until summer.”

COVID-19 vaccine makers consider adapting vaccines, booster shots against resistant variants

Drew Weissman of the Perelman School of Medicine spoke about adapting COVID-19 vaccines for new variants, which would not require new clinical trials. “We’ve been doing this with flu for many years,” he said. “The variants aren’t that different.”

A masked doctor examines brain scans of an elderly masked patient seated in the background.

Looking out for speech disturbance may be the most important stroke sign

With COVID-19 protocols, fewer in-person doctor visits and ubiquitous face masks make tell-tale signs of stroke like facial drooping and arm weakness harder to detect.

Race versus time: Targeting vaccine to the most vulnerable is no speedy task

Harald Schmidt of the Perelman School of Medicine said that the U.S. has an opportunity to prove that it’s invested in repairing longstanding health disparities through the COVID-19 vaccine rollout process. “The longer-term implication of how we dealt with social justice will be very powerful—so we do have to get this right,” he said.

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