Epidemiology

Elderly man holding a cordless telephone

Virtual Senior Center Helps Older Adults in Detroit Connect While Social Distancing

Low-income older adults and those with serious health problems are particularly vulnerable to negative health and social impacts caused by social distancing during the coronavirus pandemic. Researchers from the University of Michigan and partner, Methodist Children’s Home Society, are piloting a virtual senior center that offers enrichment and educational programs via phone to help combat the isolation.

Illustration of people coming into contact with one another.

Contact Tracing: Use Volunteers or Paid Public Health Corps?

Q&A with Angela Beck

The House of Representative plans to introduce a bipartisan bill that would create a National Public Health Corps similar to AmeriCorps that would hire hundreds of workers to help conduct contact tracing as the US moves to reopen its economy. Angela Beck discusses the idea of such a workforce.

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Public Health Surveillance: Immunity, Testing, and Contact Tracing

Q&A with Abram Wagner

Long before we could sequence a virus’s genome in a matter of weeks, we used public health tactics like contact tracing to sort out the movement of a disease in a population. Contact tracing is one of the “traditional” tools of epidemiologists. Today, we have more public health surveillance tools at our disposal, and we’ll need both the old and the new to bring COVID-19 under control.

Boats and swimmers on Cass Lake, the largest and deepest lake in Oakland County. Cass Lake is in the northern Metro Detroit region of southeastern Michigan.

Social Distancing 2.0: A New Normal

Q&A with Abram Wagner

We’re all wondering when we can return to work, see friends and family, and get back to some sense of normal. Meanwhile, we might notice that a planned temporary hospital wasn’t built or that some data seems to show a reduction in the spread of coronavirus. What do we do with emerging shades of gray in a situation that seemed so black and white not too long ago?