Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

The Development Of Health System Resiliency: How Kenya's Experience With Malaria Impacted Its Reaction To The Covid-19 Pandemic, Zoe A. Ward

Baker Scholar Projects

Public health scholars have recently focused on health system resiliency to explain how previous experiences dealing with public health crises impact the healthcare sector, public behavior, and policy response to novel crises. However, it is unclear how resiliency develops. This study contributes by testing whether a health system’s experience with a health emergency and significant interventions impacts the response to a novel crisis. This research asks, “How has Kenya’s experience with malaria impacted its response to COVID-19?” Using the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) Malaria Indicator Survey (MIS), I develop a malaria adherence score to measure county-level compliance …

Impacts Of Covid-19 On Us Agri-Food Supply Chain Businesses: Regional Survey Results, Hikaru Hanawa Peterson, Gigi Digiacomo, Christa D. Court, Michelle Miller, Gustavo Oliveira, Andrew W. Stevens, Li Zhang, Lauri M. Baker, Joseph Nowak, Eyrika Orlando, Bijeta Bijen Saha

Geography

Visible disruptions of appropriate food distribution for end consumers during the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic prompted calls for an urgent, renewed look at how the U.S. agri-food system is impacted by and responds to pandemics, natural disasters, and human-made crises. Previous studies suggest the COVID-19 pandemic yielded uneven impacts across agri-food supply chain segments and regions. For a rigorously comparable assessment of the impact of COVID-19 on agri-food businesses, a survey was administered from February to April 2021 to five segments of the agri-food supply chain in three study regions (California, Florida, and the two-state region of Minnesota-Wisconsin). Results …

“The Drug Sellerswere Better Organized Than The Government”: A Qualitative Study Of Participants’ Views Of Drug Markets During Covid-19 And Other Big Events, Roberto Abadie

School of Global Integrative Studies: Faculty Publications

“Big events”, such as wars, economic crises, pandemics, or natural disasters, affect the risk environment in which people use drugs. While the impact of big events on injection risk behaviors and access to drug-treatment services is well documented, less is known about the effects of big events on drug markets. Based on self-reporting data on drug availability among people who use drugs (PWUD) in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico and during the COVID- 19 lockdown in a Midwestern US state, this study aims to document the effects of big events on drug markets. Qualitative data on the …

Did The Covid Pandemic Result In An Exodus Of The Latino Population Of New York City And The New York Metropolitan Region?, Laird W. Bergad

Center for Latin American, Caribbean, and Latino Studies

Data released by the U.S. Census Bureau’s American Community Survey 2021 One-Year samples indicate that despite the catastrophic health impact of COVID on the Latino population of the region, there was not a mass exodus of Latinos from the City or the metro area. The 2021 ACS One-Year samples, when compared with previous ACS One-Year samples, indicate that the City’s overall population increased by 0.5% between 2018 and 2021 and 1.3% between 2019 and 2021. The ‘Hispanic’ population, excluding Spaniards, rose by 0.2% between 2018 and 2021 and 1.4% between 2019 and 2021 according to these data.

Employing Respondent Driven Sampling (Rds) To Recruit People Who Inject Drugs (Pwid) And Other Hard-To-Reach Populations During Covid-19: Lessons Learned, Roberto Abadie, Patrick Habecker, Kimberly Gocchi Carrasco, Kathy S. Chiou, Samodha C. Fernando, Sydney Townsend, Aníbal Valentin-Acevedo, Kirk Dombrowski, John T. West, Charles Wood

School of Global Integrative Studies: Faculty Publications

Background: Respondent Driven Sampling (RDS) is an effective sampling strategy to recruit hard-to-reach populations but the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the use of this strategy in the collection of data involving human subjects, particularly among marginalized and vulnerable populations, is not known. Based on an ongoing study using RDS to recruit and study the interactions between HIV infection, injection drug use, and the microbiome in Puerto Rico, this paper explores the e􀀀ectiveness of RDS during the pandemic and provided potential strategies that could improve recruitment and data collection.

Results: RDS was employed to evaluate its effectiveness …

Nevada Economic Development And Public Policy 2022-2026: A Sustainable Future For All Nevadans, The Lincy Institute, Brookings Mountain West

Policy Briefs and Reports

This report evaluates economic development efforts in the State of Nevada since the 2011 publication of Unify, Regionalize, Diversify: An Economic Development Agenda for Nevada; assesses demographic and economic trends for Nevada and its regions; examines how state and federal actions since the onset of COVID-19 can position Nevada and its regions to address long-standing economic, educational, and social deficits; and offers policy recommendations to be implemented in the next four years to facilitate a sustainable future for all Nevadans.

Covid-19 And Outdoor Recreation In Maine And New Hampshire: Analysis Of Trends Using Passive Visitation Data, Andrea Knapp

Honors College

The COVID-19 pandemic has motivated alterations to the way people approach and practice outdoor recreation. Access to outdoor areas has changed rapidly in response to measures like travel bans, closures, and health and safety guidelines. Recreation managers have had to act quickly to keep up with these visitor use fluctuations in order to protect resources from use degradation. I explored how pandemic effects have changed visitation behaviors and trends in outdoor recreation in Acadia National Park and the White Mountain National Forest. Acadia National Park is a well-known and highly trafficked outdoor recreation area with over 3 million visits annually …

The Value Of Education: School Policy Decisions During The Covid-19 Pandemic, Elika W. Somani

Individually Designed Interdepartmental Major Honors Project

During the COVID-19 pandemic, lacking national U.S. policies, wide variation and conflict over chosen public school policy decisions emerged. What factors and guidelines informed the decision-making process in K-12 public schools during the COVID-19 pandemic and who were the key stakeholders? This study examines three school district types – a large city, medium city, and small-town – across Minnesota as case studies to unpack how policy decisions were made during the pandemic. Stakeholder interviews uncovered that the school decision-making process was a) connected to a district's political opinions, b) made by the superintendent and school board, c) primarily influenced by …

The Times, They Are A-Changin’: Tracking Shifts In Mental Health Signals From Early Phase To Later Phase Of The Covid-19 Pandemic In Australia, Siqin Wang, Xiao Huang, Tao Hu, Mengxi Zhang, Zhenlong Li, Huan Ning, Jonathan Corcoran, Asaduzzaman Khan, Yan Liu, Jiajia Zhang Ph.D., Xiaoming Li Ph.D.

Faculty Publications

Introduction Widespread problems of psychological distress have been observed in many countries following the outbreak of COVID-19, including Australia. What is lacking from current scholarship is a national-scale assessment that tracks the shifts in mental health during the pandemic timeline and across geographic contexts.

Methods Drawing on 244 406 geotagged tweets in Australia from 1 January 2020 to 31 May 2021, we employed machine learning and spatial mapping techniques to classify, measure and map changes in the Australian public’s mental health signals, and track their change across the different phases of the pandemic in eight Australian capital cities.

Results Australians’ …

Parents’ Attitudes Regarding Their Children’S Play And Sport During Covid-19, Monika B. Szpunar, Leigh M. Vanderloo, Brianne A. Bruijns, Stephanie Truelove, Shauna M. Burke, Jason Gilliland, Jennifer D. Irwin, Patricia Tucker

Geography & Environment Publications

The COVID-19 pandemic and associated public health measures have interrupted the daily routines of parents and children. The purpose of this study was to explore parents’ attitudes regarding their children’s play/sport during COVID-19. A secondary objective was to explore the influence of parent demographics and parent-reported physical activity levels and risk tolerance on these attitudes. Ontario parents of children aged 12 and younger completed an online survey (August—December 2020) that assessed their attitudes (grouped by support, safety and socialization-related attitudes; n = 14 items) regarding their child(ren)’s play/sport, their physical activity levels (n = 2 items), and demographic details …

A Lost Generation: Perpetual Education Insecurity Among The Rohingya, Robin E. Al-Haddad, Kendra L. Duran, Saleh Ahmed

Global Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

Education security exists when every child has equal access to quality education. Rohingya refugee children suffer widespread rates of education insecurity both in their home country, Myanmar and in their host country, Bangladesh. While the right to education is recognized in several human rights instruments, access to education is not ubiquitous, making the ability to achieve this right challenging for many Rohingya. Government restrictions on accredited education, COVID-19 related school closures, failures in launching a pilot of the Myanmar curriculum, and recent government plans to relocate refugees to Bhasan Char Island have created a ‘lost generation’ of Rohingya youth. This …

Population Growth In Mountain West Cities And Suburbs, 2010-2020, Dielle T. Telada, William E. Brown Jr.

Cities & Metros

COVID-19 altered population growth trends within large cities and the relative growth of cities and suburbs within the nation’s largest metropolitan areas. Brookings senior fellow William H. Frey suggests “that most big cities with populations exceeding 250,000 experienced lower population growth in the year the pandemic began than in the previous year.” This Fact Sheet examines annual growth rates within selected Mountain West metros and suburbs from 2010 and 2020.

Revealing Public Opinion Towards Covid-19 Vaccines With Twitter Data In The United States: Spatiotemporal Perspective, Tao Hu, Siqin Wang, Wei Luo, Mengxi Zhang, Xiao Huang, Yingwei Yan, Regina Liu, Kelly Ly, Viraj Kacker, Bing She, Zhenlong Li

Faculty Publications

Background: The COVID-19 pandemic has imposed a large, initially uncontrollable, public health crisis both in the United States and across the world, with experts looking to vaccines as the ultimate mechanism of defense. The development and deployment of COVID-19 vaccines have been rapidly advancing via global efforts. Hence, it is crucial for governments, public health officials, and policy makers to understand public attitudes and opinions towards vaccines, such that effective interventions and educational campaigns can be designed to promote vaccine acceptance.

Objective:The aim of this study was to investigate public opinion and perception on COVID-19 vaccines in the United …

More-Than-Human And Deeply Human Perspectives On Covid-19, Elizabeth Lunstrum, Neel Ahuja, Bruce Braun, Rosemary Collard, Patricia J. Lopez, Rebecca W.Y. Wong

Global Studies Faculty Publications and Presentations

This multi-authored contribution explores what the COVID-19 pandemic demands of critical inquiry with a focus on the more-than-human. We show how COVID-19 is a complex series of multispecies encounters shaped by humans, non-human animals, and of course viruses. Central to these encounters is a politics of difference in which certain human lives are protected and helped to flourish while others, both human and animal, are forgotten if not sacrificed. Such difference encompasses practices of racialisation and racism, healthcare austerity, the circulation of capital, border-making, intervention into non-human nature, wildlife trade bans, anthropocentrism, and the exploitation of animal test subjects. The …

Using Mobile Device Data To Track The Effects Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On Spatiotemporal Patterns Of National Park Visitation, John A. Kupfer, Zhenlong Li, Huan Ning, Xiao Huang

Faculty Publications

Effective quantification of visitation is important for understanding many impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on national parks and other protected areas. In this study, we mapped and analyzed the spatiotemporal patterns of visitation for six national parks in the western U.S., taking advantage of large mobility records sampled from mobile devices and released by SafeGraph as part of their Social Distancing Metric dataset. Based on comparisons with visitation statistics released by the U.S. National Park Service, our results confirmed that mobility records from digital devices can effectively capture park visitation patterns but with much finer spatiotemporal granularity. In general, triggers …

How Did Homelessness Change During The Great Recession And Recovery?, Jenny Schuetz, Matthew Ring

Policy Briefs and Reports

Job losses from the COVID-19 pandemic have exacerbated housing insecurity among low-income renters over the past year. Federal, state, and local policymakers have created temporary measures to help reduce displacement among people who have lost their jobs, but there is considerable uncertainty about what will happen when these temporary measures end. To gain insight into how homelessness changes over macroeconomic cycles, we examine changes in homelessness rates from 2007 to 2020. Our analysis focuses on four metro areas that were particularly hard-hit by the foreclosure crisis: Las Vegas, Los Angeles, Phoenix, and Riverside. Overall homelessness rates declined in all metros …

Spatial Disparities Of Covid-19 Cases And Fatalities In United States Counties, Sarah L. Jackson, Sahar Derakhshan, Leah Blackwood, Logan Lee, Qian Huang, Margot Habets, Susan L. Cutter

Faculty Publications

This paper examines the spatial and temporal trends in county-level COVID-19 cases and fatalities in the United States during the first year of the pandemic (January 2020–January 2021). Statistical and geospatial analyses highlight greater impacts in the Great Plains, Southwestern and Southern regions based on cases and fatalities per 100,000 population. Significant case and fatality spatial clusters were most prevalent between November 2020 and January 2021. Distinct urban–rural differences in COVID-19 experiences uncovered higher rural cases and fatalities per 100,000 population and fewer government mitigation actions enacted in rural counties. High levels of social vulnerability and the absence of mitigation …

Using Mobile Device Data To Track The Effects Of The Covid-19 Pandemic On Spatiotemporal Patterns Of National Park Visitation, John A. Kupfer, Zhenlong Li, Huan Ning, Xiao Huang

Faculty Publications

Effective quantification of visitation is important for understanding many impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on national parks and other protected areas. In this study, we mapped and analyzed the spatiotemporal patterns of visitation for six national parks in the western U.S., taking advantage of large mobility records sampled from mobile devices and released by SafeGraph as part of their Social Distancing Metric dataset. Based on comparisons with visitation statistics released by the U.S. National Park Service, our results confirmed that mobility records from digital devices can effectively capture park visitation patterns but with much finer spatiotemporal granularity. In general, triggers …

Spatiotemporal Patterns Of Human Mobility And Its Association With Land Use Types During Covid-19 In New York City, Yuqin Jiang, Xiao Huang, Zhenlong Li

Faculty Publications

The novel coronavirus disease (COVID-19) pandemic has impacted every facet of society. One of the non-pharmacological measures to contain the COVID-19 infection is social distancing. Federal, state, and local governments have placed multiple executive orders for human mobility reduction to slow down the spread of COVID-19. This paper uses geotagged tweets data to reveal the spatiotemporal human mobility patterns during this COVID-19 pandemic in New York City. With New York City open data, human mobility pattern changes were detected by different categories of land use, including residential, parks, transportation facilities, and workplaces. This study further compares human mobility patterns by …

Covid Conspiracy Narratives: Dissecting The Origins Of Misinformation In Digital Space, Finn Odum

Geography Honors Projects

The COVID-19 pandemic has highlighted the role of digital spaces in the dissemination of health information. These online spaces present legitimate dangers for the future of global health, as they perpetuate COVID-19 conspiracies and promote the rejection of health authority. This thesis asks how digital social spaces allow for the spread of COVID-19 misinformation. Through a discourse analysis of conspiracy narrative news coverage, I study the development of three COVID-19 conspiratorial narratives: the Wuhan Lab theory, the Plandemic theory, and the 5G-Coronavirus theory. I aim to understand how these discourses took advantage of the unique character of digital social spaces …

Viral Data, Agnieszka Leszczynski, Matthew Zook

Geography Faculty Publications

We are experiencing a historical moment characterized by unprecedented conditions of virality: a viral pandemic, the viral diffusion of misinformation and conspiracy theories, the viral momentum of ongoing Hong Kong protests, and the viral spread of #BlackLivesMatter demonstrations and related efforts to defund policing. These co-articulations of crises, traumas, and virality both implicate and are implicated by big data practices occurring in a present that is pervasively mediated by data materialities, deeply rooted dataist ideologies that entrench processes of datafication as granting objective access to truth and attendant practices of tracking, data analytics, algorithmic prediction, and data-driven targeting of individuals …

Mapping Covid-19: How Web-Based Maps Contribute To The Infodemic, Peter Mooney, Levente Juhasz

GIS Center

A proliferation of web-based maps have appeared depicting many different aspects of the spread of the novel coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2). In this commentary, we consider the usage of web-based mapping during the COVID-19 pandemic and argue that web maps have been widely misused for delivering public information on this fast moving, epidemiologically complex, and geographically unbounded process.

Covid-19 Is Spatial: Ensuring That Mobile Big Data Is Used For Social Good, Age Poom, Olle Järv, Matthew Zook, Tuuli Toivonen

Geography Faculty Publications

The mobility restrictions related to COVID-19 pandemic have resulted in the biggest disruption to individual mobilities in modern times. The crisis is clearly spatial in nature, and examining the geographical aspect is important in understanding the broad implications of the pandemic. The avalanche of mobile Big Data makes it possible to study the spatial effects of the crisis with spatiotemporal detail at the national and global scales. However, the current crisis also highlights serious limitations in the readiness to take the advantage of mobile Big Data for social good, both within and beyond the interests of health sector. We propose …

Hospital Bed Capacity In Nevada Counties, Yanneli Llamas, Caitlin Saladino, William E. Brown

Health

This Fact Sheet shows data on hospital bed capacity within Nevada’s 17 counties, as originally published by High Country News on March 19, 2020. The original data source includes maps and charts compiled by Megan Lawson of Headwater Economics. The data include information from the Department of Homeland Security and the Department of Commerce.