Digital Commons Network^™

The Aoc In The Age Of Covid - Pandemic Preparedness Planning In The Federal Courts, Zoe Niesel

Faculty Articles

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic created a crisis for American society—and the federal courts were not exempt. Court facilities came to a grinding halt, cases were postponed, and judiciary employees adopted work-from-home practices. Having court operations impacted by a pandemic was not a new phenomenon, but the size, scope, and technological lift of the COVID-19 pandemic was certainly unique.

Against this background, this Article examines the history and future of pandemic preparedness planning in the federal court system and seeks to capture some of the lessons learned from initial federal court transitions to pandemic operations in 2020. The Article begins by …

The End Of The Golden Age Of American Legal Education: My Year As Interim Dean, Vincent R. Johnson

Faculty Articles

This article is part of the story of my year as interim dean. The year began without a sign of trouble anywhere on the horizon and ended with an empty campus, cancellation of traditional law school events, face masks and social distancing requirements, uncertainty about whether new law graduates would be able to take the bar exam, and furloughs and layoffs of law school personnel. As my year drew to a close, dozens of American law school deans were meeting online every Friday to share information about how to cope with the challenges of the Covid-19 Pandemic and the uncertainties …

The Citation Of Unpublished Cases In The Wake Of Covid-19, Michael L. Smith

Faculty Articles

California's Rules of Court prohibit the citation of unpublished state court opinions. Courts and litigants, however, may still cite unpublished federal opinions and rulings and unpublished opinions from other states' courts. This may result in problems, such as limiting courts' and parties' authorities to a skewed sample set, and the covert importation of inapplicable, stricter federal court pleading standards in state court cases. COVID-19 was a stress-test that brought the problems with California's citation rules into focus. The pandemic led to a flood of claims for pandemic-related business interruptions by insured business owners against their insurance companies. While state courts …

Covid-19 And Public Accommodations Under The Americans With Disabilities Act: Getting Americans Safely Back To Restaurants, Theaters, Gyms, And “Normal”, Frank Griffin

Saint Louis University Law Journal

COVID-19 permanently changed the way places of public accommodation like restaurants, theaters, medical facilities, arenas, gyms, and many other proprietors of mainstream American activities must operate in order to accommodate people with newly-defined, COVID-19-related disabilities under Title III of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA). The required modifications will affect all patrons and employees of these establishments. Under the ADA, places of public accommodation are barred from discriminating against people with disabilities in the full and equal enjoyment of goods, services, and facilities. Infectious diseases like tuberculosis and HIV have been categorized as disabilities under the ADA, and COVID-19 is …

Covid-19 And Law Teaching: Guidance On Developing An Asynchronous Online Course For Law Students, Yvonne M. Dutton, Seema Mohapatra

Saint Louis University Law Journal

Most law schools suspended their live classroom teaching in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic and quickly transitioned to online programming. Although professors can be commended for rapidly adapting to an emergency situation, some commentators have nevertheless suggested that the emergency online product delivered to students was substandard. Based on our own experiences in designing and delivering online courses, we caution against embracing a broad-reaching, negative conclusion about the efficacy of online education. Indeed, much of this emergency online programming would be more properly defined as “emergency remote teaching,” as opposed to “online education.” Online education requires professors to …

Evaluation Of A Clinical Decision Support Strategy To Increase Seasonal Influenza Vaccination Among Hospitalized Children Before Inpatient Discharge, Evan W. Orenstein, Omar Elsayed-Ali, Swaminathan Kandaswamy, Erin Masterson, Reena Blanco, Pareen Shah, Patricia Lantis, Amy Kolwaite, Thomas E. Dawson, Edwin Ray, Christy Bryant, Srikant Iyer, Andi L. Shane, Stephanie Jernigan

Open Access Publications

Importance: Hospitalized children are at increased risk of influenza-related complications, yet influenza vaccine coverage remains low among this group. Evidence-based strategies about vaccination of vulnerable children during all health care visits are especially important during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Objective: To design and evaluate a clinical decision support (CDS) strategy to increase the proportion of eligible hospitalized children who receive a seasonal influenza vaccine prior to inpatient discharge.

Design, Setting, and Participants: This quality improvement study was conducted among children eligible for the seasonal influenza vaccine who were hospitalized in a tertiary pediatric health system providing care to more than half …

Just Plain Dumb?: How Digital Contact Tracing Apps Could’Ve Worked Better (And Why They Never Got The Chance), Brian E. Ray

Law Faculty Articles and Essays

This essay describes how the privacy debate that emerged over digital contact tracing and Google’s and Apple’s decisions to strictly limit apps permitted to use their platforms resulted in undercutting their potential usefulness as a tool to combat the pandemic while still failing to engender trust in these tools as intended.

Towards An Ontology-Based Approach To The "New Normality" After Covid-19:The Spanish Case During Pandemic First Wave, Evelio Gonzalez

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

The impact of the pandemic caused by COVID-19 has been immense in all fields of human activity. In most of the affected countries, the authorities have decreed a series of legal measures to try to stop the growth of the disease and the number of people affected by it. These legal measures involved, in most cases, restrictions on the free movement of people and on work and trade activities, new hygiene procedures, and social distancing. In the particular case of Spain, the rapid evolution of the pandemic led to the declaration of a so-called state of alarm and a period …

A 'Public' Journey Through Covid-19: Donald Trump, Twitter, And The Secrecy Of U.S. Presidents’ Health, Mark Fenster

UF Law Faculty Publications

Donald Trump ignored numerous governance norms in his one term as U.S. President, especially those that prescribe disclosure of official and personal financial information. His brief period of illness from COVID-19, which he broadcast to the world via his Twitter account, revealed the complexity of Trump’s relationship to the concept and norms of transparency that presume information’s necessity for a functional and accountable state. At the same time that Trump offered little in the way of coherent and authoritative information about his health, he also provided an enormous amount of seemingly “inside” and direct accounts of the progress of his …

Pandemics And Partisanship: Following Old Paths Into Uncharted Territory, Luke Fowler, Jaclyn J. Kettler, Stephanie L. Witt

Public Policy and Administration Faculty Publications and Presentations

Although partisan politics tend be set aside during crisis, the timing of gubernatorial actions in response to COVID-19 is telling about how partisanship is shaping the way elected officials are reacting to this pandemic. Using an event history analysis, the authors find that Democratic governors responded to the White House’s attempts to downplay the severity of the pandemic by declaring emergencies in order to draw citizen attention to and to prepare for a public health crisis. On the other hand, Republican governors resisted doing so until Trump declared a national emergency on March 13; however, Republican reactions were conditional on …

Zooming Through Development: Using Video Chat To Support Family Connections., Gabrielle Strouse, Elisabeth Mcclure, Lauren Myers, Jennifer Zosh, Georgene Troseth, Olivia Blanchfield, Ellen Roche, Subul Malik, Rachel Barr

School of Education Faculty Publications

Video chat may allow young children and grandparents to develop and maintain bonds when they are physically separated because it enables them to share experiences with each other in real time. We used an ecological model framework (Bronfenbrenner and Morris, 2007) to examine factors associated with the development of the grandparent-grandchild relationship during the COVID-19 pandemic, when many families were experiencing reduced opportunities for in-person interaction. We analyzed survey data from grandparents (N = 855) and parents (N = 846) of children ages 0-5 years. Predictor variables included participant characteristics (age and education level), proximity variables (geographical distance and whether …

Covid-19 And Work-Family Conflict: A Gendered Lens Required For Developing Organizational Benefits And Programs, Qendresa Isniqi

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

The COVID-19 pandemic significantly impacted people's work and family lives. The work-family conflict has seen an increase with the onset of the pandemic as families have found themselves in complex roles such as family sustainers, teachers for their children, and family caregivers while quarantined with the same individuals for months. Concurrently there have been expectations grown from the employers to introduce effective programs or services to support employees so that an expected amount of productivity is maintained while also maintaining a sense of care for their employees. Some of the strategies suggested in the literature include flexible scheduling, leadership communication, …

Public Interest Technology – Exploring Covid-19 Health Data, Sarah Zelikovitz

Open Educational Resources

This module is part of a Introduction to Data Science course that covers the different parts of the data science process: data acquisition, cleaning, exploratory data analysis, and modeling. The COVID-19 pandemic has created much interest in public health data, as well as interest in visualization of all types of data. Public health data has a set of challenges that is unique to health data, with HIPAA laws, and real time collection of data. With COVID-19, the challenges are particularly amplified, as data collection and statistics collected are constantly changing in response to feedback from labs, hospitals, drug companies, and …

Remote Math Or Remotely Math? : A Qualitative Study Of The Challenges Of A Covid-19 Induced Transition To Ict-Based Teaching For High School Mathematics Teachers, David Hurst

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

In the blink of an eye schools across the country closed their doors in March 2020 and teachers were forced to transition from face-to-face instruction within a brick-and-mortar setting to ICT-based remote teaching. Many high school mathematics teachers were accustomed to their students having devices as their schools had established 1:1 computing programs. Even so, not all teachers had fully embraced ICT enhanced instruction in their classrooms. Research has shown that the degree of ICT utilization in a classroom has a strong positive correlation with the comfort level of the teacher. The COVID-19 closures required teachers to incorporate ICT in …

Applied Methodologies Demonstrated Through Three Independent Studies For Assessing The Effects Of Socioeconomic, Environmental Chemical Exposure, And Therapeutic Factors On Oncological Diseases And Covid-19, Bayarmagnai Maggie Munkhjargal

Legacy Theses & Dissertations (2009 - 2024)

When trying to understand risk factors for a disease, even before we know the causal agents, it is necessary to create a surveillance data set that answers the questions of who, when, and where, and includes any potential covariates which may either promote or prevent the disease. There are a wide variety of surveillance data. For example, hospital discharge data, such as the New York Statewide Planning and Research Cooperative System (SPARCS) data, encompass all hospitalized cases in the state, while clinical datasets cover a specially constructed population in pursuit of research of a certain disease type. Analysis of surveillance …

Unsafe At Any Campus: Don't Let Colleges Become The Next Cruise Ships, Nursing Homes, And Food Processing Plants, Peter H. Huang, Debra S. Austin Dr

Indiana Law Journal

The decision to educate our students via in-person or online learning environments while COVID-19 is unrestrained is a false choice, when the clear path to achieve our chief objective safely, the education of our students, can be done online. Our decision-making should be guided by the overriding principle that people matter more than money. We recognize that lost tuition revenue if students delay or defer education is an institutional concern, but we posit that many students and parents would prefer a safer online alternative to riskier in-person options, especially as we get closer to fall, and American death tolls rise. …

Current Mutatome Of Sars-Cov-2 In Turkey Reveals Mutations Of Interest, Doğa Eski̇er, Evren Akalp, Özlem Dalan, Gökhan Karakülah, Yavuz Oktay

Turkish Journal of Biology

As the underlying pathogen for the COVID-19 pandemic that has affected tens of millions of lives worldwide, SARS-CoV-2 and its mutations are among the most urgent research topics worldwide. Mutations in the virus genome can complicate attempts at accurate testing or developing a working treatment for the disease. Furthermore, because the virus uses its own proteins to replicate its genome, rather than host proteins, mutations in the replication proteins can have cascading effects on the mutation load of the virus genome. Due to the global, rapidly developing nature of the COVID-19 pandemic, local demographics of the virus can be difficult …

Effects Of Covid-19 On Electric Energy Consumption In Turkey And Ann-Basedshort-Term Forecasting, Harun Özbay, Adem Dalcali

Turkish Journal of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences

: Due to the coronavirus, millions of people worldwide carry out their work, education, shopping, culture, and entertainment activities from their homes now using the advantages of today's technology. Apart from this, patient care and follow-up are carried out with the help of electronic equipment especially in the institutions where health services are provided. It is important to provide a reliable electricity supply for humanity so that people can perform all these services. In this study, the outlook of energy in Turkey was examined. The current energy consumption and investments were examined. Then, the precautions by the government in the …

Soft $\Beta$-Rough Sets And Their Application To Determine Covid-19, Mostafa K. El Bably, Abd El Fattah A. El Atik

Turkish Journal of Mathematics

Soft rough set theory has been presented as a basic mathematical model for decision-making for many real-life data. However, soft rough sets are based on a possible fusion of rough sets and soft sets which were proposed by Feng et al. [20]. The main contribution of the present article is to introduce a modification and a generalization for Feng's approximations, namely, soft $\beta$-rough approximations, and some of their properties will be studied. A comparison between the suggested approximations and the previous one [20] will be discussed. Some examples are prepared to display the validness of these proposals. Finally, we put …

Pre-Service Music Teachers’ Understanding Of Blended Learning: Implications For Teaching Post Covid-19, Louise E. Jenkins, Renee Crawford

Australian Journal of Teacher Education

The significant increase in online teaching during the COVID-19 pandemic has created a heightened need for educators to implement teaching methods which do not rely solely on “face-to-face” learning within the same physical space. Blended Learning (BL) is one such approach, allowing for flexibility in the delivery of a class and constant access to unit materials. This paper reports on an investigation, by two Australian Pre-service Teacher (PST) educators, of their students’ understanding of BL at the beginning and end of a BL music method unit. Data were collected for three consecutive years with three separate cohorts. Findings indicated that …

The Effect Of Weekend Curfews On Epidemics: A Monte Carlo Simulation, Hakan Kaygusuz, Ahmet Ni̇hat Berker

Turkish Journal of Biology

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is being responded with various methods, applying vaccines, experimental treatment options, total lockdowns or partial curfews. Weekend curfews are among the methods for reducing the number of infected persons, and this method is practically applied in some countries such as Turkey. In this study, the effect of weekend curfews on reducing the spread of a contagious disease, such as COVID-19, is modeled using a Monte Carlo algorithm with a hybrid lattice model. In the simulation setup, a fictional country with three towns and 26,610 citizens were used as a model. Results indicate that applying a weekend …

The Current State Of Validated Small Molecules Inhibiting Sars-Cov-2 Non-Structural Proteins, Fati̇h Kocabaş, Merve Uslu

Turkish Journal of Biology

The current COVID-19 outbreak has had a profound influence on public health and daily life. Despite all restrictions and vaccination programs, COVID-19 still can lead to fatality due to a lack of COVID-19-specific treatments. A number of studies have demonstrated the feasibility to develop therapeutics by targeting underlying components of the viral proteome. Here we reviewed recently developed and validated small molecule inhibitors of SARS-CoV-2's nonstructural proteins. We described the validation level of identified compounds specific for SARS-CoV-2 in the presence of in vitro and in vivo supporting data. The mechanisms of pharmacological activity, as well as approaches for developing …

Predicting College Enrollment During A Global Crisis, Jake Colin Hewins

Honors Theses and Capstones

This paper looks at how the COVID-19 pandemic has affected college enrollment at colleges and universities within New England, how this effect compares to the Great Recession of 2008-2009, and then predict future trends in total enrollment by first identifying the major factors of change in college enrollment during the Great Recession and COVID-19 pandemic. These factors include the perceived value of getting a degree by traditional and nontraditional students, where colleges and universities generate their revenue, and where and how students are enrolling in higher education, and the cost and value of online learning. Based on these factors, questions …

Videoconference Fatigue? Exploring Changes In Fatigue After Videoconference Meetings During Covid-19, Andrew A. Bennett, Emily D. Campion, Kathleen R. Keeler, Sheila K. Keener

Management Faculty Publications

In response to the COVID-19 global health pandemic, many employees transitioned to remote work, which included remote meetings. With this sudden shift, workers and the media began discussing videoconference fatigue, a potentially new phenomenon of feeling tired and exhausted attributed to a videoconference. In the present study, we examine the nature of videoconference fatigue, when this phenomenon occurs, and what videoconference characteristics are associated with fatigue using a mixed methods approach. Thematic analysis of qualitative responses indicates that videoconference fatigue exists, often in near temporal proximity to the videoconference, and is affected by various videoconference characteristics. Quantitative data was collected …

Assessing Transformation Of Optimizing Ambulatory Surgery Center Services With Telehealth, Kevin Vince Allison Jr.

MUSC Theses and Dissertations

Background: As technology advances and the ability to provide adequate and convenient surgical procedures improves; the usage of telehealth resources in an Ambulatory Surgery Center setting are evermore capable. The current environment of Ambulatory Surgery Center’s provides a baseline of support to alleviate main operating volume and to absorb more of the outpatient procedures with support from technology and telehealth. Objective: To understand how the telehealth abilities can enhance the efficiency and scope of service of Ambulatory Surgery Centers. To explore if telehealth resources can be utilized to strengthen, improve, and combine tasks that delay progress in the current model. …

From Digital Divide To Digital Literacies And Mother-Child Pedagogies: The Case Of Latina Mothers, Jie Y. Park, Laurie Ross, Deisy Rodriguez Ledezma

Sustainability and Social Justice

This article reports on a qualitative study of 22 Latina mothers and their experiences supporting their children’s remote education during COVID-19. Drawing on digital literacies and mujerista theory, the authors analyzed focus group data to find the following: Latina mothers’ struggles involved not just understanding online learning platforms but an educational system that was not responsive to the economic constraints and stressors faced by families; Latina mothers perceived the school district’s response to COVID-19 as performative and inadequate; Latina mothers developed mother-child pedagogies or pedagogies in which the mother and child are involved in teaching to and learning from each …

Securing Safe Supply During Covid-19 And Beyond: Scoping Review And Knowledge Mobilization, Matthew Bonn, Natasha Touesnard, Brianna Cheng, Michael Pugliese, Emilie Comeau, Claire Bodkin, Thomas D. Brothers, Leah Genge, Matthew Herder, Candis Lepage, Ayden Scheim, Dan Werb, Sheila Wildeman

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Background

Safe supply is defined as the legal and regulated provision of drugs with mind and/or body altering properties that have been typically accessible only through the illegal drug market. In response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic and related social/physical distancing measures, efforts have been made to scale up and increase access to safe supply programs in an effort to reduce overdose and other drug- and drug policy-related risks. However, it remains unclear whether these efforts taken thus far have meaningfully mitigated the barriers to safe supply experienced by People Who Use Drugs (PWUD), both during and beyond …

Zoom In, Class Out: An Event Study On Publicly Traded Ed Tech Firm Valuations During Covid-19, Matiss Ozols

CMC Senior Theses

This paper examines how publicly traded Ed Tech firms reacted to negative announcements regarding COVID-19. Using an event study method, I document how an international portfolio of Ed Tech firms react across multiple event windows. The results show that Ed Tech firms reacted positively to the announcement of the first US death and negatively to the World Health Organization’s declaration that COVID-19 was a pandemic. Additionally, differences in geographical location did not impact cumulative abnormal returns across event windows. Finally, firm-specific characteristics such as volatility and financial leverage had little or no significance on stock returns.

Twin Threats: The Short-Sighted Us Response To Global Climate Change And Pandemics, Bryan Williams

CMC Senior Theses

This thesis examines the failure of the United States government to mitigate global climate change and the COVID-19 pandemic by comparing poor public reactions and governmental administration between the two threats. Using developmental constructs to serve as a framework for assessing public reactions to climate change and pandemics, this thesis implements a content analysis study of American news media from 2000 to 2020; it identifies the rhetoric embedded in communications that has directed the US public’s focus of attention and shaped public opinion on these issues. The results indicate significantly less focus of attention on human health issues than economic …

Covid-19 And The Effects On World's Most Admired Companies, Justin P. Mooney

Honors Theses and Capstones

No abstract provided.