Coronavirus

Jennifer Pinto-Martin of the School of Nursing said the U.S. should expect at least one additional wave of the coronavirus and that a vaccine won’t be available “anytime soon.”

Nwamaka Eneanya of the Perelman School of Medicine spoke about hospitals stretching resources to meet demand. “Physicians are having to be creative in these circumstances and other types of dialysis machines require specifically trained dialysis nurses which are hard to find,” he said.

Marion Leary of the School of Nursing spoke about the demand for personal protection equipment for health care workers. “We have not seen a decline in the requests, or in the urgency or requests. I personally am getting messages on social media asking for supplies of PPE, especially N95 masks,” Leary said.

Jenna Ficci, an officer in Penn’s Police Department, has sewn more than 500 homemade masks for health care workers and first responders. “I think the real heroes are the medical workers, the nurses, the doctors,” Ficci said. “They’re the ones on the front line of this whole thing. I’m just doing what I can to help.”

Jennifer Pinto-Martin of the School of Nursing said states need to be able to test more of the population in order to lift stay-at-home orders. "The only way to successfully contain is with really systematic and aggressive testing and isolation and contact tracing. And the states don't have the capacity to do that on their own," she said.

Ira Harkavy of the Netter Center for Community Partnerships contributed to an article about the role of universities in establishing a post-COVID-19 world. “Higher education can add momentum by renewing our commitment to our core values of academic freedom, institutional autonomy, and engagement by students, faculty, and staff, and re-emphasising the role of higher education institutions as societal actors for the public good,” Harkavy and his co-authors wrote.