Digital Commons Network^™

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 …

From A 'Super Spreader Of Mers' To A 'Super Stopper' Of Covid-19: Explaining The Evolution Of South Korea's Effective Crisis Management System, Seung-Youn Oh

Political Science Faculty Research and Scholarship

COVID-19 has placed global and national leadership under a serious stress test by threatening lives and livelihoods on an unprecedented scale. South Korea emerged as one of the first countries to flatten the transmission curve despite its high population density and proximity to China, without imposing the aggressive lockdowns or complete travel bans that China and many other countries adopted. This paper explores two questions. First, what kind of institutional and legal foundations explain South Korea’s strong public health response to the pandemic? Second, from a historical perspective, South Korea evaded the worst of the SARS outbreak in 2003 yet …

How The Covid-19 Pandemic Has And Should Reshape The American Safety Net, Andrew Hammond, Ariel Jurow Kleiman, Gabriel Scheffler

UF Law Faculty Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic has delivered an unprecedented shock to the United States and the world. It is unclear precisely how long the twin crises, epidemiological and economic, will last, and it is difficult to gauge the extent and direction of the changes in American life these crises will cause. Nonetheless, it is beyond dispute that the COVID-19 pandemic is putting significant strain on both the ability of Americans to meet basic needs and our government’s capacity to assist them. Federal, state, and local governments have responded in various ways to deploy existing safety net programs like Medicaid, SNAP (food stamps), …

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 …

Food System Resilience In The Face Of Covid-19: A Study Of Maine’S Food Sovereignty Movement, Hania M. Lincoln Lenderking

Honors Theses

As the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the vulnerabilities in the United States’ industrialized food system, the need for a more resilient alternative is stronger than ever. In Maine, food sovereignty - the right of people to determine their own food system - has been enacted at the local level through the adoption of the Local Food and Community Self-Governance Ordinance (LFCSGO). Using unstructured interviews with leaders of Maine’s food sovereignty movement conducted prior to the pandemic, this study aims to link food sovereignty in Maine to the concept of food system resilience. Participants defined food sovereignty specifically in relation 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.

Regulators, Pivotal Clinical Trials, And Drug Regulation In The Age Of Covid-19, Joel Lexchin, Janice Graham, Matthew Herder, Tom Jefferson, Trudo Lemmens

Articles, Book Chapters, & Popular Press

Medicine regulators rely on pivotal clinical trials to make decisions about approving a new drug, but little is known about how they judge whether pivotal trials justify the approval of new drugs. We explore this issue by looking at the positions of 3 major regulators: the European Medicines Agency, Food and Drug Administration, and Health Canada. Here we report their views and the implications of those views for the approval process. On various points, the 3 regulators are ambiguous, consistent, and demonstrate flexibility. The range of views may well reflect different regulatory cultures. Although clinical trial information from pivotal trials …

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, …

The Perils Of Pandemic Exceptionalism, Julian Arato, Kathleen Claussen, J. Benton Heath

Articles

In response to the pandemic, most states have enacted special measures to protect national economies and public health. Many of these measures would likely violate trade and investment disciplines unless they qualify for one of several exceptions. This Essay examines the structural implications of widespread anticipated defenses premised on the idea of “exceptionalism.” It argues that the pandemic reveals the structural weakness of the exceptions-oriented paradigm of justification in international economic law.

Older Workers In The Time Of Covid-19: The Senior Community Service Employment Program And Implications For Social Work, Cal J. Halvorsen, Olga Yulikova

Harvey A. Friedman Center for Aging

It has long been the goal of many gerontological social work scholars to increase the ability and opportunity for people to be engaged in paid and unpaid work throughout the life course. Yet the COVID-19 pandemic is revealing and exacerbating the financial insecurity of many older adults. In this paper, we review information related to older workers and how they might be affected by this pandemic and its aftermath, paying particular attention to the most socioeconomically and physically vulnerable older workers. We also offer first-hand experiences from our careers working with and conducting scholarship on older workers, paying particular attention …

Covid-19 And Lgbt Rights, Suzanne B. Goldberg

Faculty Scholarship

Even in the best of times, LGBT individuals have legal vulnerabilities in employment, housing, healthcare and other domains resulting from a combination of persistent bias and uneven protection against discrimination. In this time of COVID-19, these vulnerabilities combine to amplify both the legal and health risks that LGBT people face.

This essay focuses on several risks that are particularly linked to being lesbian, gay, bisexual, or transgender, with the recognition that these vulnerabilities are often intensified by discrimination based on race, ethnicity, age, disability, immigration status and other aspects of identity. Topics include: 1) federal withdrawal of antidiscrimination protections; 2) …

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.

The Role Of Social Entrepreneurship During Covid Pandemic – A Case Study Analysis On Select Social Entrepreneurial Initiatives From India And Hong Kong, Man Hin, Eve Chan

Department of Design and Architecture

Social entrepreneurship can be explained in simple terms as doing business for a social cause. Social entrepreneurs are perceived as creative innovators, who combine commerce and social issues in a way that improves the life of people connected to the issue. The COVID pandemic is having a very detrimental effect on the communities and the social entrepreneurs from various parts of the world have emerged as a support system for the government and the COVID warriors of their respective countries. The authors have selected different case studies from India and Hong Kong to explore the role of social entrepreneurs during …

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 …

When Contact Kills: Indigenous Peoples Living In Voluntary Isolation During Covid, Sital Kalantry, Nicholas Koeppen

Cornell Law Faculty Publications

During the global pandemic, people around the world are at risk of serious illness and death from contact and proximity to other people. But Indigenous peoples, particularly those in voluntary isolation, have always faced that risk. International organizations have relied on the right to self-determination as the primary legal grounds to justify the principle of no-contact for Indigenous peoples living in voluntary isolation. This Essay argues that the right to life and right to health when properly contextualized are stronger bases to push states to prevent outsiders from contacting people living in voluntary isolation.

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 …

Organizational Management Of Distance Learning: An Analysis Of Teacher Feedback Throughout Hampton Roads Public High Schools During The Covid-19 Pandemic Response, Cody P. Trudeau

OTS Master's Level Projects & Papers

Public schools throughout the United States experienced closures and transitions to online curriculum in the spring of 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. However, many of the policies and strategies implemented to manage teaching faculty were hastily designed and employed out of necessity. This study sought to examine organizational management policies and strategies throughout public high schools in the Hampton Roads region of Virginia through teaching faculty perspectives. This cross-sectional study examined descriptive and correlational statistics of survey responses to determine and evaluate how schools managed communication, responsibilities and delegation, and training for distance learning in order to provide policy …

Financial Consequences Of Covid-19 For U.S. Hospitals, Laura Petty, Trevor Mullins

Theses, Dissertations and Capstones

Introduction: The coronavirus pandemic has caused many financial issues for many businesses including putting a substantial strain on hospitals in the U.S. The impact of COVID-19 on the financial well-being of hospitals has been evaluated and the severity is still being measured as the pandemic is ongoing. The purpose of this research was to assess the financial consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic for hospitals in the United States.

Methodology: A literature review with a semi-structured interview with an expert from a local hospital was used for the methodology of this qualitative study. Five government websites and five databases …

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 …

Can We Handle The Truth Of What Covid-19 Is Telling Us?, James A. Marcum

Animal Sentience

Wiebers & Feigin (W&F) are right that what COVID-19 is telling us is that to prevent future zoonotic pandemics we need to put an end to our exploitation of wild and farmed animals. To implement W&F’s recommendations we need to overcome at least three obstacles: (1) the way we have responded historically to zoonoses, (2) our insatiable appetite for meat (wild or farmed) and (3) our speciesist attitude toward nonhuman animals.

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 …

Finetuning Pre-Trained Language Models For Sentiment Classification Of Covid19 Tweets, Arjun Dussa

Dissertations

It is a common practice in today’s world for the public to use different micro-blogging and social networking platforms, predominantly Twitter, to share opinions, ideas, news, and information about many things in life. Twitter is also becoming a popular channel for information sharing during pandemic outbreaks and disaster events. The world has been suffering from economic crises ever since COVID-19 cases started to increase rapidly since January 2020. The virus has killed more than 800 thousand people ever since the discovery as per the statistics from Worldometer [1] which is the authorized tracking website. So many researchers around the globe …

Communication Strategies For Connecting Onevcu, The Grace E. Harris Leadership Institute At Virginia Commonwealth University, Jason Jacobus, Amy Lutero, Mary Peace Mcrae, Shravan Renapurkar, Kristin Richardson, Christian Wernz, Tonka Williams

The Grace E. Harris Leadership Institute Publications

This project analyzes and makes improvement suggestions for communication to VCU faculty and staff. The COVID-19 crisis has brought to light a variety of communication needs. Faculty and staff are feeling overwhelmed by a flood of emails, while at the same time are missing key information. We have assessed the current communication infrastructure, and together with the key VCU communicators have identified improved processes and policies.

Partisan Polarization And Resistance To Elite Messages: Results From Survey Experiments On Social Distancing, Syon Bhanot, D. J. Hopkins

Economics Faculty Works

COVID-19 compelled government officials in the U.S. and elsewhere to institute social distancing policies, shuttering much of the economy. At a time of low trust and high polarization, Americans may only support such disruptive policies when recommended by same-party politicians. A related concern is that some may resist advice from “elite” sources such as government officials or public health experts. We test these possibilities using novel data from two online surveys with embedded experiments conducted with approximately 2,000 Pennsylvania residents each, in spring 2020 (Study 1 in April and Study 2 in May-June). We uncover partisan differences in views on …

Damn It! A Conversation On Being Black, Female, And Marginalized During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Is The World Listening? A Conversation Between Black Female Law Professors, Patricia A. Broussard

Journal Publications

We are African American women with a combined forty-four years in academia. We are professors of law and have seen firsthand how COVID-19 has ravaged African Americans across this country. As we conversed with one another in the Spring of 2020 about what we were witnessing, we began to look through the spectrum of the law and discrimination, and how this novel Coronavirus is laying bare the inequities and inequalities that have been evident for hundreds of years in the Black community. We felt compelled to put pen to paper and document our conversations in an attempt to give a …

Ultra-Rapid Development And Deployment Of A Family Resilience Program During The Covid-19 Pandemic: Lessons Learned From Families Tackling Tough Times Together, Yumary Ruiz, Shelley Macdermid Wadsworth, Cézanne M. Elias, Kristine Marceau, Megan L. Purcell, Thomas S. Redick, Elizabeth A. Richards, Elizabeth Schlesinger-Devlin

School of Nursing Faculty Publications

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic brought uncertainty, anxiety, and stress into households; however, it also created an opportunity as many families, sequestered at home, found themselves spending much more time together. To support families and improve their ability to cope, recover, and build resilience amid the pandemic, Purdue University’s College of Health and Human Sciences (HHS) launched Families Tackling Tough Times Together (FT), a strength-based multi-week online program informed by scientific evidence about family resilience. Offered through a Facebook group, FT targeted parents or caregivers, children, youth, young adults, older adults, and helping professionals serving families. FT was designed to appeal …