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Florida State Law Alumni Magazine & Annual Report (2020), Florida State University College Of Law Office Of Development And Alumni Affairs

Alumni Newsletter & FSU Law Magazine

No abstract provided.

Network Science: Insights For Pandemics, Julia Mcquillan, Patricia Wonch Hill

Worlds of Connections Resources

The focus of our current project is on helping members of the public to better understand the role of network science theories and tools for improving public health because often public health is connected to complex systems. We’ll focus today on the relevance of network science for understanding how to contain viruses that cause diseases.

Allocation Of Resources And Health Professionals’ Burden During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Reflections On Advanced Directives, Informed Consent And Social Perception In Mexico, Karen Herrera-Ferrá, Leonardo Souza-García, Antonio Muñoz-Torres

Journal of Health Ethics

One of the main problems in the COVID-19 pandemic is the insufficient availability of resources. This deficiency has resulted in emotional and moral burdens of health professionals. Decisions are having to be made as to who will live and who will die. Moreover, given the global impact of this pandemic, negative impacts are heightened in low and middle-income countries such as Mexico.

Authors focus on two issues related to, but not exclusive, to the Mexican healthcare system in an attempt to partially address scarce resources and health professionals’ burden. First, is the empowerment of patients’ autonomy through the incorporation of …

American Privacy Law At The Dawn Of A New Decade (And The Ccpa And Covid-19): Overview And Practitioner Critique, Kimberly Dempsey Booher, Martin B. Robins

Marquette Intellectual Property Law Review

No abstract provided.

Advancements In Vaccine Development: Measles Vs. Covid-19, Sarah Ziegler

The Science Journal of the Lander College of Arts and Sciences

As an ever-progressing field of study, vaccine development has made headway over the past decades. By doing a comparative study between development of the measles vaccine in the mid-20th century, and the ongoing development of the COVID-19 vaccine in 2020, many of the insights and advancements in the field can be easily highlighted. First, the knowledge and experience gained over those decades has helped the vaccine developing process become more efficient. With more vaccines in production, or at least under study, it is more likely to have a related precedent to build upon, as opposed to relying on a successful …

A Health Justice Perspective Of Asthma And Covid-19, Elizabeth Raterman

Human Rights Brief

No abstract provided.

Influence Of Cigarettes And Alcohol On The Severity And Death Of Covid-19: A Multicenter Retrospective Study In Wuhan, China, Mengyuan Dai, Liyuan Tao, Zhen Chen, Zhi Tian, Xiaofang Guo, Diane S Allen-Gipson, Ruirong Tan, Rui Li, Li Chai, Fen Ai, Miao Liu

All publications

Background: The recent emergence and rapid global spread of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) is leading to public health crises worldwide. Alcohol consumption and cigarette smoking (CS) are two known risk factors in many diseases including respiratory infections.

Methods: We performed a multi-center study in the four largest hospitals designated for COVID-19 patients in Wuhan. There are totally 1547 patients diagnosed with COVID-19 enrolled in the study, alcohol consumption and CS history were evaluated among these patients. The epidemiology, laboratory findings and outcomes of patients contracted COVID-19 were further studied.

Results: Our findings indicated that COVID-19 patients with a history of …

Faith In Trump, Moral Foundations, And Social Distancing Defiance During The Coronavirus Pandemic, Amanda Graham, Francis T. Cullen, Justin T. Pickett, Cheryl Lero Jonson, Murat Haner, Melissa M. Sloan

All publications

Purpose: Over the past several months, the coronavirus has infected more than six million Americans and killed nearly 200,000. Governors have issued stay-at-home orders, and prosecutors have filed criminal charges against individuals for defying those orders. And yet many Americans have still refused to keep their distance from their fellow citizens, even if they had symptoms of infection. The authors explore the underlying causes for those who intend to defy these norms.

Methods: Using national-level data from a March 2020 survey of 989 Americans, the authors explore intentions to defy social distancing norms by testing an interactionist theory of foundation-based …

Development And Validation Of A Model For Individualized Prediction Of Hospitalization Risk In 4,536 Patients With Covid-19, Lara Jehi, Xinge Ji, Alex Milinovich, Serpil Erzurum, Amy Merlino, Steve Gordon, James B. Young, Michael W. Kattan

All publications

Background: Coronavirus Disease 2019 is a pandemic that is straining healthcare resources, mainly hospital beds. Multiple risk factors of disease progression requiring hospitalization have been identified, but medical decision-making remains complex.

Objective: To characterize a large cohort of patients hospitalized with COVID-19, their outcomes, develop and validate a statistical model that allows individualized prediction of future hospitalization risk for a patient newly diagnosed with COVID-19.

Design: Retrospective cohort study of patients with COVID-19 applying a least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (LASSO) logistic regression algorithm to retain the most predictive features for hospitalization risk, followed by validation in a temporally …

Aerosol And Surface Contamination Of Sars-Cov-2 Observed In Quarantine And Isolation Care, Joshua L. Santarpia, Danielle N. Rivera, Vicki L. Herrera, M. Jane Morwitzer, Hannah M. Creager, George W. Santarpia, Kevin K. Crown, David Brett-Major, Elizabeth R. Schnaubelt, M. Jana Broadhurst, James V. Lawler, St. Patrick Reid, John Lowe

Journal Articles: Epidemiology

The novel severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) originated in Wuhan, China in late 2019, and its resulting coronavirus disease, COVID-19, was declared a pandemic by the World Health Organization on March 11, 2020. The rapid global spread of COVID-19 represents perhaps the most significant public health emergency in a century. As the pandemic progressed, a continued paucity of evidence on routes of SARS-CoV-2 transmission has resulted in shifting infection prevention and control guidelines between classically-defined airborne and droplet precautions. During the initial isolation of 13 individuals with COVID-19 at the University of Nebraska Medical Center, we collected air …

Us-County Level Variation In Intersecting Individual, Household And Community Characteristics Relevant To Covid-19 And Planning An Equitable Response: A Cross-Sectional Analysis, Taylor Chin, Rebecca Kahn, Ruoran Li, Jarvis T. Chen, Nancy Krieger, Caroline O. Buckee, Satchit Balsari, Mathew V. Kiang

All publications

Objectives: To illustrate the intersections of, and intercounty variation in, individual, household and community factors that influence the impact of COVID-19 on US counties and their ability to respond.

Design: We identified key individual, household and community characteristics influencing COVID-19 risks of infection and survival, guided by international experiences and consideration of epidemiological parameters of importance. Using publicly available data, we developed an open-access online tool that allows county-specific querying and mapping of risk factors. As an illustrative example, we assess the pairwise intersections of age (individual level), poverty (household level) and prevalence of group homes (community-level) in US counties. …

Hsp90 Inhibitors For Ipf/Covid-19, Ruben Manuel Luciano Colunga Biancatelli, Pavel A. Solopov, John Catravas

Bioelectrics Publications

Heat shock protein 90 (HSP90) is an important chaperone that assists the late stage folding of several proteins involved in cell survival in response to environmental stressors. The inhibition of HSP90 is followed by a complex modulation of the proteome and the kinome, that has proved beneficial in cancer and various neurodegenerative diseases. Additionally, accumulating literature suggests that HSP90 may be a key target during the development of pulmonary fibrosis and that its inhibition could serve as a new and exciting therapeutic approach. We have summarized the current evidence about HSP90’s role in Idiopathic Pulmonary Fibrosis (IPF), the results from …

Air Quality Improvement During Triple-Lockdown In The Coastal City Of Kannur, Kerala To Combat Covid-19 Transmission, C. T. Resmi, T. Nishanth, M. K. Satheesh Kumar, M. G. Manoj

Open Access archive

The novel SARS-CoV-2 coronavirus that emerged in the city of Wuhan, China, last year has since become the COVID-19 pandemic across all continents. To restrict the spread of the virus pandemic, the Government of India imposed a lockdown from 25 March 2020. In India, Kannur district was identified as the first "hotspot"of virus transmission and a "triple-lockdown"was implemented for a span of twenty days from 20 April 2020. This article highlights the variations of surface O3, NO, NO2, CO, SO2, NH3, VOC's, PM10, PM2.5 and meteorological parameters at the time of pre-lockdown, lockdown and triple-lockdown days at Kannur town in …

Swipe Right For Condoms And Testing: Differences In High-Risk Sexual Behavior And Sexual Health Beliefs Among Dating App Users Compared To Non-App Users, Shelby A. Smout

Theses and Dissertations

Millions of Americans are currently using smartphone dating applications (apps) to socialize and meet with others. In some cases, app-based conversations lead to sexual interactions. Previous research examining the relationship between the use of dating apps and sexual behaviors has found that individuals who use dating apps and meet with partners from the app are more likely to engage in high-risk sexual behaviors such as having multiple partners and inconsistent condom use. Individuals between the ages of 18 and 24 are the group most likely to be using dating apps compared to other age groups and are a high-risk group …

Faith In Trump, Moral Foundations, And Social Distancing Defiance During The Coronavirus Pandemic, Amanda Graham, Justin T. Pickett, Cheryl Lero Jonson, Murat Haner, Melissa M. Sloan

Criminology Faculty Publications

Purpose: Over the past several months, the coronavirus has infected more than six million Americans and killed nearly 200,000. Governors have issued stay-at-home orders, and prosecutors have filed criminal charges against individuals for defying those orders. And yet many Americans have still refused to keep their distance from their fellow citizens, even if they had symptoms of infection. The authors explore the underlying causes for those who intend to defy these norms.

Methods: Using national-level data from a March 2020 survey of 989 Americans, the authors explore intentions to defy social distancing norms by testing an interactionist theory of foundation-based …

The United Postal Service—The One Word That Makes All The Difference, Jena Martin, Matthew Titolo

Law Faculty Scholarship

In recent months, the United States Postal Service (USPS) has taken center stage on a number of intersecting issues in our society: the pandemic; the upcoming election (through mail-in voting) and the controversy surrounding the appointment of Louis DeJoy to the position of Postmaster General. President Donald Trump has frequently made derogatory remarks regarding the Postal Service, calling it a “joke,” and has made repeated statements encouraging its privatization. However, President Trump’s rhetoric (as well as the rhetoric of others before him) obfuscates the critical mission of the USPS – to provide service to every American in the country; not …

Acknowledgement Entity Recognition In Cord-19 Papers, Jian Wu, Pei Wang, Xin Wei, Sarah Rajtmajer, C. Lee Giles, Christopher Griffin

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Acknowledgements are ubiquitous in scholarly papers. Existing acknowledgement entity recognition methods assume all named entities are acknowledged. Here, we examine the nuances between acknowledged and named entities by analyzing sentence structure. We develop an acknowledgement extraction system, AckExtract based on open-source text mining software and evaluate our method using manually labeled data. AckExtract uses the PDF of a scholarly paper as input and outputs acknowledgement entities. Results show an overall performance of F₁=0.92. We built a supplementary database by linking CORD-19 papers with acknowledgement entities extracted by AckExtract including persons and organizations and find that only up to …

The Role Of The Chinese Communist Party In The Covid-19 Crisis, Matthew Farrell

Management Faculty Publications

The Chinese Communist Party (CCP) has received plaudits from international press and organizations for their handling of the COVID-19 crisis, with some describing it as a win for China in terms of propaganda. In this essay, I explore an alternative view: That the CCP is responsible for the origin and extent of the pandemic, and that much of their perceived altruism is carefully disguised opportunism and propaganda. Facts are drawn from scholarly work and the popular press to support my arguments. This essay carries strong implications for interpretation of recent events.

Transparency Too Little, Too Late? Why And How Health Canada Should Make Clinical Data And Regulatory Decision-Making Open To Scrutiny In The Face Of Covid-19, Sterling Edmonds, Andrea Macgregor, Agnieszka Doll, Ipek Eren Vural, Janice Graham, Katherine Fierlbeck, Joel Lexchin, Peter Doshi, Matthew Herder

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Hard-won gains in the transparency of therapeutic product data in recent years1 have occurred alongside growing reliance by regulators upon expedited review processes.2 The concurrence of these two trends raises fundamental questions for the future of pharmaceutical regulation about whether the institutionalization of transparency will foster improved oversight of drugs, biologics, vaccines, and other interventions, or else, provide cover for a relaxing of regulatory standards of safety, effectiveness, and quality.3 The urgency of the COVID-19 pandemic, however, has brought this tension into immediate and sharp relief. During the course of the global health crisis, regulatory bodies have markedly expanded the …

Covid-19 Vaccines As Global Public Goods, Jason W. Nickerson, Matthew Herder

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Vulnerable: The Law, Policy and Ethics of COVID-19 confronts the vulnerabilities that have been revealed by the pandemic and its consequences. It examines vulnerabilities for people who have been harmed or will be harmed by the virus directly and those harmed by measures taken to slow its relentless march; vulnerabilities exposed in our institutions, governance, and legal structures; and vulnerabilities in other countries and at the global level where persistent injustices affect us all. COVID-19 has forced us to not only reflect on how we govern and how we set policy priorities, but also to ensure that pandemic preparedness, precautions, …

Forum Shopping Covid-19 Business Interruption Insurance Claims, Chris French

Faculty Scholarship

Insurance disputes are typically governed by state law, and state insurance laws vary considerably, with some states being favorable to policyholders and others being unfavorable. With forum shopping, a plaintiff often has many choices regarding where it can bring a lawsuit, including multiple states in which to bring the case and whether to bring the case in federal or state court. Of the over 1000 COVID-19 business interruption insurance lawsuits filed thus far, more than 700 of them have been filed in, or removed to, federal court, with more than 250 of the cases filed as class actions. Many of …

Covid-19 In Canadian Prisons: Policy, Practice And Concerns, Adelina Iftene

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Correctional Service of Canada and the provincial prison systems have a duty to provide incarcerated individuals with health services that are comparable to those in the community, but they have failed to do so during the COVID-19 pandemic. There are inherent practical difficulties to implementing health care in prisons. In addition, prison demographics include a higher proportion of populations that are vulnerable to disease. These factors together mean that the prison response to COVID-19 must involve depopulation and the implementation of guidelines provided by public health agencies in all institutions. So far, the measures taken have been insufficient, as is …

Automatic Detection From Chest X-Rays Using Deep Learning, Evan Lang

Technical Library

Over the past year, COVID-19 has affected countries world-wide. COVID-19 detection tests have allowed us to control the spread of the disease; however, COVID-19 testing kits are highly specialized and difficult to procure in quantity. X-rays, on the other hand, have broad clinical usage and therefore tend to be readily available. As a result, radiologists have begun using chest X-rays to diagnose COVID-19 in patients with respiratory distress. The goal of this research project was to demonstrate that deep learning can be used to automatically detect COVID-19 from chest X-rays. Automated detection with deep learning models could help make X-ray …

Executive Overreach And Underreach In The Pandemic, Kim Lane Scheppele, David E. Pozen

Faculty Scholarship

The pandemic that convulsed the globe in 2020 was long foretold but still surprising to many. Within a few months of its appearance, COVID-19 became one of the leading causes of death worldwide. Governments struggled at first to comprehend what was happening – and then reacted in very different ways. Most political leaders followed the advice of epidemiologists. Many declared states of emergency. A few pursued autocratic agendas. And some did almost nothing.

During emergencies, constitutional scholars normally worry about executive aggrandizement at the expense of human rights and democratic values. Emergencies often require national executives to act quickly and …

Decarcerating New York City: Lessons From A Pandemic, Nicole Smith Futrell

Faculty Scholarship

Over the last decade, long before the sweeping impact of COVID-19, the criminal legal system in New York City has been on a halting path toward decarceration. Set against the national backdrop of declining crime rates and a reckoning with the economic, social, and racial costs of mass criminalization and incarceration, elected officials in New York City and State have acknowledged that a shift toward reducing the number of people held in New York City jails is long overdue. Particular attention has been focused on Rikers Island, the notoriously violent, sprawling jail complex, which has been regarded as one of …

Executive Underreach, In Pandemics And Otherwise, David E. Pozen, Kim Lane Scheppele

Faculty Scholarship

Legal scholars are familiar with the problem of executive overreach, especially in emergencies. But sometimes, instead of being too audacious or extreme, a national executive's attempts to address a true threat prove far too limited and insubstantial. In this Essay, we seek to define and clarify the phenomenon of executive underreach, with special reference to the COVID-19 crisis; to outline ways in which such underreach may compromise constitutional governance and the international legal order; and to suggest a partial remedy.

Library Experiences Of Technical Services And Special Collections During The Covid-19 Pandemic At Edith Garland Dupré Library, University Of Louisiana At Lafayette, Zachary G. Stein, Sheryl Curry, Janelle Zetty, Michael Mitchell, Scott Jordan

Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic put a major strain on everyday life. Academic institutions were forced to close, leaving many employees to resort to teleworking. Academic libraries were put in an unusual position, as they strove to provide access to library materials and services, despite limited to no access to the actual sites. This proved to be especially tricky for technical services and special collections departments, which heavily rely on being present at libraries. Therefore, these departments needed to develop solutions that would allow them to continue performing their duties while adhering to stay-at-home orders. With careful preparation and frequent communication, the …

Covid-19: Lessons Learned In Public Procurement. Time For A New Normal?, Laurence Folliot Lallion, Christopher R. Yukins

GW Law Faculty Publications & Other Works

The COVID-19 crisis upended markets and assumptions in public procurement, and posed an almost existential threat to traditional procurement systems. Seismic changes in economic relationships – governments were no longer monopsonists, government officials failed as economic intermediaries between suppliers and the public, and supplies that were traditionally treated as private (such as medical equipment) suddenly became “public” goods under worldwide demand. Traditional trade rules were rendered irrelevant, as the goal was no longer simply to open individual procurements but rather to open borders to intense global demand. Although the disruption was revolutionary, ironically the solution is to return to first …

The Survival Of Critical Infrastructure: How Do We Stop Ransomware Attacks On Hospitals?, Helena Roland

Catholic University Journal of Law and Technology

Our nation’s infrastructure is under an emerging new threat: ransomware attacks. These attacks can cause anything from individual laptops, to entire cities to shut down for a period of time until the victim pays a ransom to the attacker. Unfortunately, these attacks are on the rise and the attackers have a new target: hospitals. Ransomware attacks on hospitals can temporarily shut down operating room technology and limit physician access to patient files, ultimately threatening the safety of hospital patients and the surrounding community. This paper examines how the threat of ransomware attacks on hospitals is on the rise and what …

Legal Lessons From A Very Fast Problem: Covid-19, Eric E. Johnson, Theodore Bailey

Faculty Articles

The course of a pandemic is as much a function of social structures as protein structures. Law is among the most important of these social structures, and it is among those most capable of the kind of rapid adaptation that is needed against an exponentially replicating virus. Thus, there is an urgent need to scrutinize the role of the law in impeding or supporting timely and effective measures to combat the great pandemic caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) and its associated malady, coronavirus disease 2019, better known as COVID-19. This Essay offers a look back on …