PANDEMIC PROTECTION PROTOCOLS

IN 2009 I HELPED DEVELOP THE EDMONTON PUBLIC SCHOOL BOARD PANDEMIC PROTOCOLS FOR CUSTODIAL AND FOR CLEANING/DISINFECTION AS WELL AS LEADING THE TRAINING OF OVER 900 CUSTODIANS, SUPPORT, FOOD AND SCIENCE STAFF  IN DEALING WITH THE H1N1 OUTBREAK

      BEFORE PANDEMIC TRAINING


IN LIGHT OF COVID-19 OUTBREAK REVIEW THESE PROCEDURES HERE WHICH EVOLVED OUT OF H1N1. THEY WERE BUILT ON THE RESULTS OF THE EARLIER SARS OUTBREAK WE EXPERIENCED.

IN DEVELOPING THE EPSB STANDARD WHICH HAS A HIGH EFFICACY WE RESEARCHED WORLD WIDE TO FIND PROCEDURES USED.

WE CAN THINK OF H1N1 AS THE PRACTICE RUN FOR THIS PANDEMIC

          AFTER PANDEMIC TRAINING

Pandemic H1N1 Resources | IPAC Canada
https://ipac-canada.org › pandemic-h1n1-resources
Laboratory testing has found the Pandemic (H1N1) 2009 virus to be resistant to amantadine and rimantidine and susceptible to the prescription antiviral drugs oseltamivir and zanamivir, although isolated cases of resistance have occurred.


The Impact of the H1N1 Pandemic on Canadian Hospitals - CIHI
https://secure.cihi.ca › free_products › H1N1_AIB_final_EN
protect against the pandemic H1N1, and there was no vaccine available at ... included clear data-sharing protocols among levels of government, development.

pandemic influenza a (h1n1) - World Health Organization
www.who.int › resources › publications › swineflu › h1n1_donor_032011
Mar 1, 2011 - Rapid containment of pandemic influenza: strategy and protocol. The purpose of ... of WHO treatment guidelines for pandemic H1N1 influenza.

2009 H1N1 Pandemic (H1N1pdm09 virus) | Pandemic ... - CDC
https://www.cdc.gov › flu › pandemic-resources › 2009-h1n1-pandemic
Jun 11, 2019 - In the spring of 2009, a novel influenza A (H1N1) virus emerged. It was detected first in the United States and spread quickly across the United ...

Pandemic Influenza - OSHA
https://www.osha.gov › Publications › OSHA_pandemic_health
19. Engineering Controls for Aerosol-Generating. Procedures for Patients with Pandemic. Influenza. 19 ... Surveillance and Protocols. 40 ... Lippincott-Raven, New York. pp. 1397-445. ... that their facilities had clear policies and protocols,.

Prevention and Control of Influenza during a Pandemic for All ...
https://www.canada.ca › phac-aspc › cpip-pclcpi › assets › pdf › ann-f-eng
by F Annex - ‎Related articlesThese guidelines have been endorsed by the Public Health Network Council. 9. ... Annex F. 19 i. The novel pandemic influenza strain and first human cases of influenza caused by the ... Philadelphia: Lippincott-Raven; 1998. p. 299-324. 86.

Canadian Pandemic Influenza Preparedness ... - Canada.ca
https://www.canada.ca › public-health › services › flu-influenza › preventi...
by M Vearncombe - ‎Related articlesDec 5, 2017 - Prevention and control for health care settings: Canadian Pandemic Influenza Preparedness: Planning ... These guidelines have been endorsed by the Public Health Network Council. ... with symptoms and an epidemiological link to a laboratory-confirmed case. ... Philadelphia: Lippincott-Raven; 1998.

Transcript for the CDC Telebriefing Update on COVID-19 ...
https://www.cdc.gov › media › releases › t0225-cdc-telebriefing-covid-19
3 days ago - This document is called Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza United States 2017. It draws from the findings of ...

Pandemic Preparedness Resources - CDC
https://www.cdc.gov › coronavirus › 2019-ncov › php › pandemic-prepar...
Feb 15, 2020 - Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19) ... 52 pages] · Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic Influenza — United States, 2017 ...
Community Mitigation Guidance for COVID-19 ... - CDC
https://www.cdc.gov › 2019-ncov › preparing-individuals-communities
2 days ago - During an outbreak in your community, CDC recommends the ... is available in: Community Mitigation Guidelines to Prevent Pandemic ...

Huge Study Details How The Pandemic Fundamentally Changed People's Personalities


Over the course of the COVID-19 pandemic, personality-typing giant Truity collected anonymous data for a two-year-long study that would make bold assertions about the pandemic's impacts on users' psychology and personalities.


A crowd with masks on© blvdone/Shutterstock

Truity's CEO Molly Owens, a personality researcher who has previously spoken to The List about the Enneagram personality typing system, reflected on the study's findings and what they might mean for our post-pandemic personalities. "Thanks to what we believe to be the largest dataset of Big Five scores ever collected," Owens shared, "we were able to identify some fascinating shifts in personality measures over the course of the pandemic."

Owens understands the mass trauma of a global pandemic as influential on a deeper level, moreso than everyday interactions or social influences. "Although we typically understand personality as something that is relatively fixed for any given person, research also indicates that environmental forces can shift our behaviors and beliefs."

The study ultimately gave experts answers to what traits the sampled population -- which included 2.8 million users -- exhibited in increased or decreased increments in direct proportion to the pandemic's worsening or improving death toll and hospitalization numbers, available via the COVID-19 Tracking Project.

Oddly enough, the classic answers to "How has the pandemic changed you?" aren't necessarily backed up by the study's findings. Truity's CMO Abby Lunardini summed up that, "Contrary to popular anecdotal feedback about people becoming more Introverted during the pandemic, the relationship between extraversion and pandemic trends were in general found to be statistically insignificant." So, what did this study find?

Some Personality Changes Can Be Linked To Burnout


A tired nurse© Supamotion/Shutterstock

The study's measured personality traits included conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness, which its collaborators provided definitions for in order to nail down just what had changed in participants' personalities and approaches to their lives. The full study can be found on PsyArXiv, and its author Cameron Berg has given The List their perspective on its findings.

"The COVID-19 pandemic has exhibited significant psychological and behavioral impacts, but a precise account of the way that the pandemic has altered human personality is still uncertain," the researcher began. "We saw striking correlations between pandemic data and personality traits -- including the fact that individuals have steadily grown less conscientious and more neurotic over time since the beginning of the pandemic."

The study's definition for conscientiousness is as follows: "Conscientiousness is associated with achievement-striving and industrious behavior," via Abby Lunardini, Truity CMO. The study's results concluded that a mass decrease in this trait supports the case that burnout is, indeed, a looming risk in times of increased stress and over-work.

Researchers also found an increase in neuroticism that had a positive correlation to worsening pandemic factors, such as rising hospitalizations and death tolls. The study defined neuroticism as "a person's sensitivity to negative emotions, including fear, sadness and anxiety," per Truity. The source continued, "Neuroticism scores increased most strongly in response to longer-term, cumulative worsening of the pandemic (e.g. cumulative COVID deaths). The finding provides empirical support for widespread reports of the emotional exhaustion and long-term stress that many associate with the pandemic, particularly with respect to health-related risk-taking."

Creativity Took A Hit During The Worst Of The Pandemic


A man in a mask on the computer© illpaxphotomatic/Shutterstock

The study also measured levels of agreeableness in participants, which were sourced anonymously from Truity. The definition used by the platform was as follows: "Agreeableness roughly describes the extent to which a person prioritizes the needs of others over their own," via Abby Lunardini, Truity CMO.

This trait was seen to increase most during shorter-term worsened pandemic conditions. That included hospitalization spikes, which the study characterized as a transient factor, or one that could change quickly. An increase might have manifested in more community-based efforts, such as supporting healthcare workers or sourcing equipment or funding, which Truity deems the "we're-all-in-this-together mentality" that requires agreeableness to function.

Openness is the last reported measure of personality change in the study. "Openness roughly describes a person's motivation to think abstractly and pursue beauty in things like art, music and culture," our source from Truity shared. "During these same challenging periods, people appear to have been significantly less motivated to be creative, exploratory and beauty-seeking."

Though we've heard stories of incredible artistic accomplishments during the pandemic -- Taylor Swift releasing her surprise album, "Folklore," in August 2020, for example -- for the most part, the study reflected a resistance to openness, or the "cerebral" quality necessary for artistic exploration and experimentation. But in moments when the pandemic improved, there was a measurable increase in openness, supporting the theory that a fight-or-flight pandemic response wasn't conducive to creativity or artistic thinking.

Our Post-Pandemic Challenges Aren't All In Our Heads


Multiple heads© Black Salmon/Shutterstock

Ultimately, our source from Truity shared that data from this study, in conjunction with COVID-19 data, has far-reaching applications in measuring the psychological changes we have experienced during the pandemic. "Machine learning regression models indicate that metrics of the COVID-19 pandemic can be used to explain roughly half of the personality changes exhibited over the course of the pandemic," Truity's Abby Lunardini shared.

Of course, there will always be lingering questions surrounding how a globally shared trauma and unimaginable death toll will impact our psyches in the long-term, as well as our relationships with family and friends. However, the research happening now will begin giving us the answers to just how much the past two years have changed us collectively. Cameron Berg, the study's lead researcher concluded, "These findings are among the first to suggest that, at the population level, specific periods of the COVID-19 pandemic exhibited measurable and durable impacts on human personality."

Truity's CEO Molly Owens also summarized the data's findings that acute changes in the pandemic have had a measurable impact on personality factors including conscientiousness, neuroticism, agreeableness, and openness. "What we have seen with this research is that the pandemic has actually done this at the population level -- making people less resilient to stress and less likely to engage in organized, goal-directed behaviors."

So, when we reflect on the past two years and the ways we have and haven't recovered our old selves, there will be an increasing amount of data to support us.

The Swedish Left Failed the Vulnerable During the Pandemic

Sweden’s “hands-off” COVID-19 response was hailed by libertarians abroad but also by most left-wingers at home. Far from enlightened, the Swedish left’s approach combined deference to authority with a disturbing faith in national exceptionalism.

Three nurses carry COVID-19 vaccines through the hallways of a nursing home in Gothenburg, Sweden, on January 7, 2021. (Fredrik Lerneryd / Getty Images)

BYMARKUS BALÁZS GÖRANSSON NICHOLAS LOUBERE
11.19.2023

JACOBIN

“When the next pandemic comes knocking — and it will — we must be ready to answer decisively, collectively, and equitably,” World Health Organization director-general Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus told a packed assembly in Geneva on May 25. He made his remarks twenty days after the WHO stopped classifying the COVID-19 pandemic as a global health emergency.

As we enter this new phase of the pandemic and survey the destruction the SARS-CoV-2 virus has wrought on global health and livelihoods over the past three years, we are left with more questions than answers. Many of these questions have serious implications for how we react to threats to our collective existence going forward, with the realities of our age of chronic crisis becoming clearer with each passing year, as heat records are broken, wildfires ravage the landscape and choke our air, and the environment progressively becomes more hostile to human life on this planet.

In this context, figuring out the most effective ways for us to face shared crisis together, in solidarity, is arguably one of the most important tasks that the global left faces. Here, the infamous case of the Swedish response to the pandemic stands as a stark example — and a cautionary tale. How did a country ruled by a social democratic party, supported by the Left Party in parliament, and nominally committed to legislating egalitarian and proworker policies end up being the poster child for an approach to the pandemic based on mass infection and natural herd immunity — an approach which left the working class and marginalized segments of society to fend for themselves as a deadly and unknown virus swept through the population?

The Swedish pandemic response stands as a testament to the folly of basing our responses to global crises primarily on domestic political considerations, as well as to the danger that leftist movements become unmoored from their own basic values and principles.

The Right Embraces Sweden

For many left-wingers in Sweden with international connections, the pandemic has been a surreal experience. In the early months, we waited for the Swedish Left Party (Vänsterpartiet) and high-profile voices on the Left to put pressure on the government and the Public Health Agency to change course from their plan to allow the vast majority of the population to be infected in order to gain supposed “herd immunity” prior to the arrival of vaccines.

Instead, the Swedish left — with a few notable exceptions — embraced the herd immunity approach and joined in attacking critics of the government’s pandemic response. As the months wore on and the toll of this pandemic strategy became clear, the Swedish left’s stance inexplicably became more entrenched. At the same time Sweden was becoming a darling of the far right, an example that pervaded antimask and antilockdown protests globally.For many left-wingers in Sweden with international connections, the pandemic has been a surreal experience.

Repeatedly, the international radical right has praised Sweden’s handling of the pandemic and held it up as a model for other countries to follow. Brazil’s right-wing, authoritarian ex-president Jair Bolsonaro, Florida’s Republican governor Ron DeSantis, and Donald Trump’s former pandemic advisor Scott Atlas are just a few of the many right-wingers who have praised Sweden’s response.

The same is true for libertarian, neoliberal, and neoconservative think tanks such as the American Institute for Economic Research (AIER), the Cato Institute, and the Brownstone Institute. These bodies that otherwise like to rail against climate policies and economic redistribution have often held up the Swedish approach as a shining exemplar of pandemic policy, using it to criticize proactive policies of infection control.


Indeed, the authors of that most notorious right-wing pandemic manifesto, the Great Barrington Declaration, drafted at the AIER headquarters in 2020, were deeply influenced by Sweden’s pandemic approach. The Swedish American epidemiologist Martin Kulldorff, who later left his professorship at Harvard University for a job at the newly established libertarian think tank the Brownstone Institute, wrote to Sweden’s state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell in May 2020, thanking him for Sweden’s “wise and epidemiologically sound COVID-19 work”, which he called a “model for the rest of the world.” Similarly, the Indian American epidemiologist Jay Bhattacharya, another Great Barrington Declaration initiator who also advised against mass vaccination in India prior to the deadly Delta outbreak in early 2021, has repeatedly praised the Swedish COVID-19 strategy on Twitter. More recently, he has campaigned for Ron DeSantis in his bid for the US presidency.

Neoliberal Foundations

There are many reasons why the international radical right has been enamored with the Swedish pandemic response. The Swedish authorities’ skepticism towards face masks, their reluctance to introduce basic infection control measures, and their resistance to the closure of private businesses (though some public establishments, including high schools and universities, were closed in Sweden, a fact that is rarely highlighted in Sweden or abroad) have naturally curried favor with the Right. The Swedish response, incorrectly described in some circles as a success story, has been a useful example for those opposing state-led contagion control measures.

But there is also a deeper ideological affinity between the Swedish approach and the global right, indeed one that precedes the pandemic. In an award-winning journal article, Swedish researchers Carl Rådestad and Oscar Larsson have traced the unfolding neoliberalization of Swedish crisis management since the 1990s. They note that an ever-greater share of responsibility has been placed on the shoulders of individuals in a process they term “responsibilization,” as individuals have been “expected to take responsibility for their own safety.”

Swedish authorities have sought to justify such individualization of responsibility on the grounds that it can free up public resources. But it must also be seen in the context of a broader effort to shed some of the state’s former responsibilities. As French philosopher Émilie Hache has pointed out, the concept of personal responsibility is a key element of neoliberalism and has repeatedly been invoked in Western countries to justify attempts to scale back the state’s responsibilities.

During the pandemic, talk of personal responsibility had a prominent place in official Swedish rhetoric on the pandemic response. Public bodies insisted time and time again that the SARS-CoV-2 contagion should be handled, not through TTI (testing, tracing, and isolation), improved ventilation, quarantining of the sick, the introduction of a pandemic app, or other measures that could be carried out under the state’s auspices, but rather through the voluntary compliance of individuals with the authorities’ infection control advice.

When Britta Björkholm, head of the Department of Contagion Control and Public Health Protection at the Public Health Agency, was asked in April 2021 why the agency did not put more measures in place despite a growing number of COVID-19 cases and escalating pressure on the health services, she answered that it had chosen to rely on informing and convincing the public. In her view, voluntary compliance with public infection control advice “has the absolutely greatest effect.” In the spirit of neoliberal crisis management, a collective, systemic crisis was to be managed through private efforts.

From a left-wing perspective, this is obviously deeply problematic. To claim that protection from a deadly contagion is a matter of personal responsibility is to seek to individualize a collective problem, while willfully ignoring those members of society who are unable to protect themselves and others. A solidarity-based pandemic approach would have emphasized society’s shared responsibility to protect vulnerable and exposed people. But in Sweden, the Social Democratic/Green coalition government delegated responsibility for people’s lives and health to individual citizens — that is, people who faced very different socioeconomic conditions and had wildly divergent abilities to protect themselves and others.To claim that protection from a deadly contagion is a matter of personal responsibility is to seek to individualize a collective problem.

As has been amply documented, the Swedish authorities made matters worse by designing their infection control advice with the white-collar middle class in mind — a group who could generally work from home and who were socially less exposed to the virus anyway. Infection control advice such as work from home if you can, stay at home if you have symptoms, and keep a distance from others was far easier for those who were not required to be physically present for work, who had flexible working hours, lived in more spacious homes, and did not work in a service profession.

Journalist Martin Klepke of the left-wing newspaper Arbetet has in a number of articles pointed out the overwhelmingly middle-class bias of the Swedish pandemic strategy. Swedish workers, he has noted, were thrown under the bus when the infection control advice issued by the Public Health Agency completely failed to take their professional and social situation into account. For example, while others could work from home or avoid crowded public transport by travelling outside of rush-hour periods, many workers had to commute to work on poorly ventilated, jam-packed public transportation. This happened even as the Public Health Agency urged people to keep a distance — but refused to mandate or even recommend mitigation measures like face masks.

This deeply inequitable pandemic approach has left telltale black marks in the statistics. As of June 2022, 1 in 621 Swedes had died from COVID-19, according to statistics from the Swedish National Board of Health and Welfare. The same figure for Swedes with personal assistance was 1 in 169. Today’s figures are unknown, since the National Board of Health and Welfare has stopped publishing the statistics.

Meanwhile, several reports have documented that foreign-born people and blue-collar workers have been at greatest risk of dying from COVID-19. For instance, a report from the Center for Epidemiology and Community Medicine concluded in November 2020 that “income is the socioeconomic factor most clearly associated with the risk of dying from COVID-19.”

Neoliberal Pandemic Management on the Swedish Left

Despite the deeply problematic aspects of the country’s pandemic response, the Swedish left has generally refrained from criticizing it. Klepke and a handful of others are the only left-wingers of note who have questioned it.

In fact, not only has the Swedish left refused to criticize the country’s pandemic strategy, but prominent left-wingers have heaped praise on it. Karin Rågsjö, the Left Party’s public health policy spokesperson, called state epidemiologist Anders Tegnell a “bureaucrat with the halo of a hero.” Left Party member of parliament Hanna Gunnarsson unironically tweeted “All power to Tegnell, our liberator,” a reference to a children’s book by Astrid Lindgren, where Tengil, a bloodthirsty dictator, is hailed as a liberator by his deferential subjects. Lena Mellin, a political pundit for Sweden’s largest left-wing newspaper Aftonbladet called Tegnell “the Swedish people’s guide to the galaxy,” while another journalist at the same newspaper described him as “a hero in an adventure movie.” Another columnist in Aftonbladet wrote a sexually charged adoring piece, which mused on Tegnell’s “wonderful torso . . . his flat bust,” and the author’s own love of “academic men with colored sweaters on top of long-sleeved shirts,” a reference to Tegnell’s usual attire. The political editor-in-chief of Aftonbladet, Anders Lindberg, has missed few opportunities to praise Sweden’s handling of the pandemic on the pages of his social democratic newspaper, while accusing critics of being conspiracy theorists for correctly pointing out that the pandemic strategy aimed to achieve an imagined herd immunity through natural infection, which Tegnell himself has admitted.

Why has the Swedish left celebrated a pandemic response that has been explicitly based on the neoliberal principle of personal responsibility and has systematically disregarded marginal and vulnerable groups?

One explanation lies in the personal ties between the Left Party and the Public Health Agency. In a remarkable conflict of interest, the party’s health spokesperson Karin Rågsjö was also employed by the Public Health Agency (she was on a leave of absence for her political work and ended her employment with the Public Health Agency in April 2021). In disclosed emails between Rågsjö and her colleagues at the Public Health Agency, Rågsjö repeatedly showered praise on the agency for its handling of the pandemic and on occasion had very harsh words for critics. It is obviously problematic that the person who represented the Left Party line on pandemic policy was also employed by the government agency in charge of that same response.

Second, in Sweden during the pandemic there has been the rise of a brand of left-wing or progressive nationalism. Swedish political scientist Gina Gustavsson has noted that support for Sweden’s pandemic response has had a strong nationalist dimension and has often been couched in rhetoric of national exceptionalism. The cult of Anders Tegnell, with its bizarre manifestations including fawning articles, tattoos, food, clothing, and even Christmas decorations depicting an angelic Tegnell, is part and parcel of this nationalist outpouring that has helped to solidify support for the Public Health Agency among leftists.

Finally, in Sweden the pandemic was initially portrayed less as an acute and unprecedented public health threat than as a crisis of distrust in the authorities. Many left-wing Swedes had fresh memories of the disinformation that had occurred during the election of Donald Trump as US president and the Brexit debate in the UK in 2016 and came to view deference to the Public Health Agency — which was widely perceived as a nonpolitical expert state body — as a means of guarding against such politicized disinformation. Conversely, people who criticized the Public Health Agency’s handling of the pandemic were described as behaving irresponsibly and even harmfully, and representing a threat to national security. For many progressive Swedes, refraining from criticizing the Public Health Agency was regarded as a public duty — even though the agency was pursuing a deeply ideological pandemic policy.The Swedish left has, by and large, ended up on the same side of the global pandemic debate as the far right globally.

As a result of this deference to the Public Health Agency, the Swedish left has, by and large, ended up on the same side of the global pandemic debate as Trump, Bolsonaro, Nigel Farage, the AIER, the Cato Institute, and other representatives of the far right globally, whose positions on the pandemic also aligned with those of the Swedish Public Health Agency. Swedish leftists have adopted much the same stances on face masks, legal restrictions on businesses, and other proactive infection control measures as the global radical right, not because of any ideological kinship with the latter but because they uncritically decided to throw in their lot with the Swedish Public Health Agency.
A Lesson for Future (and Present) Collective Crisis

As we sink further into the age of collective crisis, and before the next pandemic breaks out, it is instructive to review the failures of the Swedish left during the COVID-19 pandemic. What lessons can the Left in Sweden and elsewhere learn from these failures for next time?

One important lesson is that the Left needs to orient itself internationally in the event of a global, collective crisis. During the pandemic, many people on the Left in Sweden seemed unaware that the Swedish handling of the pandemic was seen as a model by neoliberals, libertarians, and other groups on the far right globally. Instead, the Swedish left positioned itself entirely in relation to domestic concerns, making no attempt to build a common international left-wing platform on the pandemic with leftists abroad, let alone pursue common practical solutions to the crisis.

Conversely, leftists elsewhere failed to take Swedish leftists to task for their support for a neoliberal pandemic response that became the poster child for right-wing attempts to torpedo infection control in other countries. Vocal criticism from international and foreign leftist groups would have forced the Swedish left to look outward and possibly made them more inclined to review their support for the Swedish pandemic response. Yet the Left around the world, mirroring the mistakes of the Swedish left, also turned inward during the pandemic, engaging primarily in domestic debates.

In the case of future pandemics and other collective crises (such as the climate crisis), left-wingers around the world need to recognize their shared responsibility for combating them and mobilize internationally around common goals. They need to pause and consider how best to translate basic left-wing principles, such as community and solidarity, into practical policies and find ways to work more effectively together internationally.

Hopefully, the mistakes of the COVID-19 pandemic in Sweden can provide a point of reflection and a cautionary tale going forward. If the global left fails to root itself in basic leftist principles and an international outlook based on solidarity — choosing instead to position itself in relation to parochial domestic political battles — there is no future for a global leftist movement in the coming age of chronic crisis.

An earlier version of this article appeared in Swedish in the Swedish left-wing magazine Flamman.

CONTRIBUTORS

Markus Balázs Göransson is a senior lecturer in war studies at the Swedish Defence University.

Nicholas Loubere is an associate professor in the study of modern China at the Lund University Centre for East and South-East Asian Studies in Sweden.

Academic Medicine Faculty Perceptions of Work-Life Balance Before and Since the COVID-19 Pandemic

 

Original Investigation 

Medical Education

June 15, 2021

Susan A. Matulevicius, MD, MSCS^1,2; Kimberly A. Kho, MD, MPH, MSCS³; Joan Reisch, PhD⁴; et alHelen Yin, PhD^1,5

Author Affiliations Article Information

JAMA Netw Open. 2021;4(6):e2113539. doi:10.1001/jamanetworkopen.2021.13539

Key Points

Question  How is the COVID-19 pandemic associated with academic medicine faculty perceptions of work-life integration?

Findings  In this survey of 1186 medical, graduate, and health professional school faculty, more faculty considered leaving since the COVID-19 pandemic than before. Faculty with children, particularly female faculty with children, were more likely to consider leaving since the pandemic.

Meaning  These findings suggest that the stressors of integrating work and life are higher in female faculty than male faculty, highest in women with children, and may have been heightened by the COVID-19 pandemic.

Abstract

Importance  How the COVID-19 pandemic has affected academic medicine faculty's work-life balance is unknown.

Objective  To assess the association of perceived work-life conflict with academic medicine faculty intention to leave, reducing employment to part time, or declining leadership opportunities before and since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Design, Settings, and Participants  An anonymous online survey of medical, graduate, and health professions school faculty was conducted at a single large, urban academic medical center between September 1 and September 25, 2020.

Main Outcomes and Measures  Self-assessed intention to leave, reducing employment to part time, or turning down leadership opportunities because of work-life conflict before and since the COVID-19 pandemic.

Results  Of the 1186 of 3088 (38%) of faculty members who answered the survey, 649 (55%) were women and 682 (58%) were White individuals. Respondents were representative of the overall faculty demographic characteristics except for an overrepresentation of female faculty respondents and underrepresentation of Asian faculty respondents compared with all faculty (female faculty: 649 [55%] vs 1368 [44%]; Asian faculty: 259 [22%] vs 963 [31%]). After the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, faculty were more likely to consider leaving or reducing employment to part time compared with before the pandemic (leaving: 225 [23%] vs 133 [14%]; P < .001; reduce hours: 281 [29%] vs 206 [22%]; P < .001). Women were more likely than men to reduce employment to part time before the COVID-19 pandemic (153 [28%] vs 44 [12%]; P < .001) and to consider both leaving or reducing employment to part time since the COVID-19 pandemic (leaving: 154 [28%] vs 56 [15%]; P < .001; reduce employment: 215 [40%] vs 49 [13%]; P < .001). Faculty with children were more likely to consider leaving and reducing employment since the COVID-19 pandemic compared with before the pandemic (leaving: 159 [29%] vs 93 [17%]; P < .001; reduce employment: 213 [40%] vs 130 [24%]; P < .001). Women with children compared with women without children were also more likely to consider leaving since the COVID-19 pandemic than before (113 [35%] vs 39 [17%]; P < .001). Working parent faculty and women were more likely to decline leadership opportunities both before (faculty with children vs without children: 297 [32%] vs 84 [9%]; P < .001; women vs men: 206 [29%] vs 47 [13%]; P < .001) and since the COVID-19 pandemic (faculty with children vs faculty without children: 316 [34%] vs 93 [10 %]; P < .001; women vs men: 148 [28%] vs 51 [14%]; P < .001).

Conclusions and Relevance  In this survey study, the perceived stressors associated with work-life integration were higher in women than men, were highest in women with children, and have been exacerbated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The association of both gender and parenting with increased perceived work-life stress may disproportionately decrease the long-term retention and promotion of junior and midcareer women faculty.

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic has altered the ways we live and work with far-reaching impacts on all sectors of society. In the United States, 9.8 million jobs were lost between February and December 2020.¹ This job loss has disproportionately affected women, who accounted for 46% of the prepandemic workforce but have experienced 54% of pandemic-related job losses.² Structural inequalities further affect parents who have significantly increased their time spent on household and childcare duties by an additional 27 hours per week.¹ This change has disproportionately affected mothers of young children, who have experienced a 4- to 5-fold decrease in work hours than working fathers since the pandemic.³

The COVID-19 pandemic has not spared the field of medicine, magnifying both the unique and universal stressors faced by physicians and medical scientists. Even before the pandemic, the US health care system had put a great deal of stress on health care workers through systems of high workload, high administrative burdens, inefficiency, emphasis on high productivity, and a culture of constant availability.^4,5 Gender differences in pay parity, promotion, and work distribution have unevenly affected female physicians, leading more female physicians to reduce their working hours to part time or leave the field of medicine entirely.⁶ In academic medicine, women were already underrepresented in senior leadership positions before the pandemic. Although women make up 41% of all full-time academic medical school faculty, they account for 18% of academic chairs, 18% of deans, and 25% of full professors.⁷ The COVID-19 pandemic threatens to cause a regressive effect on the positive trends in gender equity and success in academic medicine unless action is taken.

To better understand how the COVID-19 pandemic is associated with faculty work-life conflict within our large urban academic medical institution, we conducted a campus-wide faculty survey to evaluate the perceived stress of the pandemic and maintaining work-life balance has affected faculty intention to leave, consideration of reducing their employment to part time and turning down leadership opportunities.

READ HERE

Academic Medicine Faculty Perceptions of Work-Life Balance Before and Since the COVID-19 Pandemic | Coronavirus (COVID-19) | JAMA Network Open | JAMA Network

NO JOE, IT'S NOT

President Biden declares that the COVID-19 pandemic 'is over' weeks before the midterm elections

Adam Sabes

FOX NEWS
Sun, September 18, 2022 

President Biden said during a television interview on Sunday night that the COVID-19 pandemic "is over."

"Is the pandemic over?," a reporter asked Biden. "The pandemic is over. We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it," Biden responded.

Biden made the statement during an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes," which was his first interview with a news organization in seven months.

"If you notice, no one's wearing a mask, everybody seems to be in pretty good shape," Biden added while he walked through the Detroit Auto Show.


US President Joe Biden 

MANDEL NGAN/AFP via Getty ImagesMore

Biden has used the COVID-19 pandemic emergency as a reason for his administration's plan to end Title 42 as well as the recent student loan handout.

Biden's remarks about the COVID-19 pandemic come as America is just about a month and a half away from the midterm elections.

Biden says the 'pandemic is over' despite the US maintaining one of the highest death rates worldwide with nearly 400 Americans dying of COVID-19 daily

Isabella Zavarise
Sun, September 18, 2022 

President Joe Biden speaks with reporters on the South Lawn of the White House on September 1, 2022.AP Photo/Susan Walsh

President Biden said the COVID-19 pandemic was over in an interview with CBS News on Sunday.

"We're still doing a lot of work on it, but the pandemic is over," said Biden.

According to the CDC, the US is averaging around 400 deaths per day.

President Joe Biden said the COVID-19 pandemic was over in an interview with CBS News on Sunday, despite the US maintaining one of the highest death rates worldwide.

The comment was made during a tour of the Detroit Auto Show with 60 Minutes correspondent Scott Pelley. As they were walking, Pelley asked Biden: "Is the pandemic over?"

"The pandemic is over," Biden said, but acknowledged the virus is still a problem. "We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lot of work on it," he added.

Gesturing to attendees who weren't wearing masks to support his point, Biden said "Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it's changing. And I think this is a perfect example of it."

While cases are falling, Biden's comments come as hundreds of Americans continue to die from the infectious disease. According to data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the US is averaging around 400 deaths per day.

As of September 17, data from Johns Hopkins University found that the US has some of the highest COVID-19 figures globally in terms of cases and deaths. Next to the US is Japan, with 1,139 deaths recorded over the previous week.

States across the US are rolling back pandemic-related restrictions such as lifting mask mandates. Federal regulations still require passengers flying to the US from international destinations to be vaccinated.

In May, the President told Americans to not grow numb as the country's death toll rose to 1 million people.

On Wednesday, a spokesperson from the World Health Organization said the "end is in sight" but urged countries to maintain their vigilance, according to Reuters.

The news outlet reported that experts from the organization will meet again in October to decide whether the pandemic is still an international public health emergency.

Biden says 'the pandemic is over' even as death toll, costs mount


 A woman takes a coronavirus disease (COVID-19) test at a pop-up testing site in New York

Sun, September 18, 2022

By Trevor Hunnicutt

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - U.S. President Joe Biden said in an interview aired on Sunday that "the pandemic is over," even though the country continues to grapple with coronavirus infections that kill hundreds of Americans daily.

"The pandemic is over," Biden said during an interview conducted with CBS' "60 Minutes" program on Wednesday on the sidelines of the Detroit auto show, an event which drew thousands of visitors.

"We still have a problem with COVID. We're still doing a lotta work on it. But the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one's wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it's changing."

The toll of the COVID-19 pandemic has diminished significantly since early in Biden's term when more than 3,000 Americans per day were dying, as enhanced care, medications and vaccinations have become more widely available.

But nearly 400 people a day continue to die from COVID-19 in the United States, according to the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

Biden spent more than two weeks isolated in the White House after two bouts with COVID-19, starting in July. His wife Jill contracted the virus in August. Biden has said the mild cases were a testament to the improvements in care during his presidency.

Biden has asked Congress for $22.4 billion more in funding to prepare for a potential fall case surge.

Reporting by Trevor Hunnicutt; Editing by Shri Navaratnam

Health experts dismayed by President Biden’s view that the pandemic is over: ‘Hell no — not even close’

Ciara Linnane -19/09/2022 - AFP

© joseph prezioso/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Health experts reacted with dismay Monday to President Joe Biden’s assertion that the pandemic is over in an interview on “60 Minutes” that aired on Sunday.

“We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lot of work on it. … But the pandemic is over,” Biden told CBS News correspondent Scott Pelley. “If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.”

Eric Topol, director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, accused the president of magical thinking and perhaps having too much confidence in the new bivalent boosters.

Others noted that with more than 400 deaths from COVID every day on average, the U.S. is suffering 9/11-level casualties every week, hardly a sign that the pandemic is fully contained.

Others said there’s no way of knowing what will happen once winter sets in and people spend more time indoors together.

Just last week, the head of the World Health Organization said that while the end is in sight, “we’re not there yet.”

The statement sent the stocks of vaccine makers sharply lower. Moderna was last down 9.5%, Pfizer was down 1.8% and BioNTech was down 11.8%. Novavax which had its protein-based vaccine win authorization in the U.S. in July, was down 2.4%.

U.S. known cases of COVID are continuing to ease, although the true tally is likely higher than reported, because data is not being collected on the many people who are testing at home.

The daily average for new cases stood at 61,712 on Sunday, according to a New York Times tracker, down 29% from two weeks ago. The tracker is showing that cases are rising in seven states, all in the Northeast — Connecticut, Maine, New York, New Jersey, Massachusetts, New Hampshire and Vermont — and that cases are flat in Pennsylvania.

See also: Impact of COVID-19 on life expectancy is misleading

The daily average for hospitalizations was down 12%, to 33,143, while the daily average for deaths was down 6%, to 464.

From the CDC: Stay Up to Date with COVID-19 Vaccines Including Boosters

Coronavirus Update: MarketWatch’s daily roundup has been curating and reporting all the latest developments every weekday since the coronavirus pandemic began

Other COVID-19 news you should know about:

• A bus reportedly taking 47 people to COVID-19 quarantine in southwestern China crashed before dawn Sunday morning, killing 27 and injuring 20 others, the Associated Press reported. The bus overturned on an expressway in Guizhou province, according to a brief statement from the Sandu county police, which did not mention any connection to quarantine.

• The beer is flowing at Munich’s world-famous Oktoberfest for the first time since 2019, the AP reported separately. With three knocks of a hammer and the traditional cry of “O’zapft is” — “It’s tapped” — Mayor Dieter Reiter inserted the tap in the first keg at noon on Saturday, officially opening the festivities after a two-year break forced by the coronavirus pandemic.

• Cities from Anchorage to New Orleans have ended or are winding down a program that housed homeless people in hotels and motels during the pandemic, the AP reported. The program was designed to avoid crowding in shelters. In Denver, Federal Emergency Management Agency funds directed through the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless helped keep a Quality Inn running for the past two and a half years. But the $9 million spent to lease the hotel from its owner and an additional $5 to $6 million in operational costs became unsustainable, said John Parvensky, president and CEO of the coalition.The COVID-19 pandemic has renewed interest in the practice of testing sewage to track outbreaks of disease, including polio, an outbreak of which prompted a disaster emergency declaration in New York state earlier this month. The Wall Street Journal visited a Bay Area wastewater facility to find out how testing works and what it can tell us about public health. (Photo illustration: Ryan Trefes)

Here’s what the numbers say

The global tally of confirmed cases of COVID-19 topped 612 million on Monday, while the death toll rose above 6.52 million, according to data aggregated by Johns Hopkins University.

The U.S. leads the world with 95.7 million cases and 1,053,461 fatalities.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s tracker shows that 224.6 million people living in the U.S. are fully vaccinated, equal to 67.7% of the total population. Just 109.2 million have had a booster, equal to 48.6% of the vaccinated population, and 22.5 million of those 50 and over who are eligible for a second booster have had one, equal to 34.7% of those who received a first booster.

Biden declares COVID ‘pandemic is over.’ Here’s what experts say about the data

Alex Brandon/AP

Julia Marnin  Mon, September 19, 2022 

Since President Joe Biden’s declaration that the COVID-19 pandemic is done, a number of health experts are speaking out in response with some pointing to virus data.

“The pandemic is over,” Biden said Sunday, Sept. 18 during an interview with “60 Minutes.” “We still have a problem with COVID. We’re still doing a lotta work on it…but the pandemic is over. If you notice, no one’s wearing masks. Everybody seems to be in pretty good shape. And so I think it’s changing.”

A snapshot of recent U.S. data shows there have been more than 2 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and about 12,700 deaths due to the virus across the country within the past 28 days, according to Johns Hopkins University. Since the start of the pandemic, more than 1 million people have died nationwide.

The dean of Brown University’s School of Public Health, Dr. Megan Ranney, disgreed with the president’s assertion that the pandemic is “over” by referencing recent death counts.

“Is the pandemic DIFFERENT? Sure,” Ranney wrote on Twitter on Sept. 18. “We have vaccines & infection-induced immunity. We have treatments. We have tests (while they last). The fatality rate is way down. And so we respond to it differently.”

“But over?! With 400 deaths a day?! I call malarkey,” Ranney added.

In the week before Sept. 15, 2,743 people died from COVID-19 in the U.S., according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Based on the data, that is about 391 deaths each day.

In another Sept. 18 tweet, Dr. Eric Feigl-Ding, an epidemiologist and health economist, wrote “with all due respect, @JoeBiden — you’re wrong. Pandemic is not over,” and noted the number of deaths within the past week.

“Almost 3,000 Americans are dying from #COVID19 every single week. A weekly 9/11 is a very big deal,” Feigl-Ding added, referencing how nearly 3,000 people died in during the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks.

What is the definition of a pandemic?

There are several similar definitions of a pandemic out there that emphasize one detail in particular — it is a global occurrence.

Columbia University defines a pandemic as cutting “across international boundaries.”

“A true influenza pandemic occurs when almost simultaneous transmission takes place worldwide,” according to a scholarly paper published 2011 in the National Library of Medicine.

Internationally, there have been nearly 16 million COVID-19 cases and about 54,000 deaths within the past 28 days, Johns Hopkins University data shows.

During a Sept. 14 World Health Organization news briefing, WHO Director-General Dr. Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus said “Last week, the number of weekly reported deaths from COVID-19 was the lowest since March 2020.”

“We have never been in a better position to end the pandemic,” Ghebreyesus added. “We are not there yet, but the end is in sight.”

When asked about what is next for COVID-19 and the pandemic, Dr. William Gruber, senior vice president of Pfizer Vaccine Clinical Research and Development, told McClatchy News in an interview on Sept. 12 that “no one can absolutely predict the future, but we’ve seen with each successive wave that there have been fewer hospitalizations.”

“I’m optimistic that we’ll see a continuum where yes, COVID-19 is something we have to reckon with every winter, like we do influenza. But it won’t create the degree of illness that we’ve seen filling up our hospitals and overwhelming our medical personnel,” Gruber added, “provided we do vaccinate, and provide protection to individuals so the virus doesn’t have an opportunity to mutate and come back and produce serious disease.”

More experts comment on the status of the COVID pandemic

Dr. Eric Topol, a cardiologist and director of the Scripps Research Translational Institute, wrote Sept. 19 on Twitter that “remember when the pandemic was over in June 2021, when we were down to <12,000 (real number) confirmed cases per day, and Independence was declared?”

“Then came Delta. And then Omicron BA.1, BA.2, BA.2.12.1, BA.5,” Topol added.

Meanwhile, Dr. Vinay Prasad, an epidemiology and biostatistics professor at the University of California San Francisco, described Biden’s pandemic comments as “important.”

“The emergency or pandemic phase is over,” Prasad wrote on Twitter on Sept. 18. “COVID will be around for tens of thousands of years. Time to stop using EUA at FDA and time to actively advise people to throw away their n95s and get back to living. Getting COVID is inevitable.”

Dr. Gregg Gonsalves, an associate professor of epidemiology at the Yale School of Public Health, described Biden’s Sept. 18 statement about the pandemic being “over” as “deeply craven, cynical” in a Sept. 19 Twitter thread.

Gonsalves added that it “dishonors our 1M+ dead, those who have fought to keep people alive and safe.”

As of Sept. 19, about 50% of the U.S. lives in a location where COVID-19 levels in the community are considered medium or high, while the other half of the nation lives in a location where virus transmission levels are considered low, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

U.S. COVID-19 cases were dominated by the omicron BA.5 subvariant for the week ending Sept. 17 as it made up 84.8% of cases, agency data estimates show.