Pandemic

A new study by MIT researchers finds that more people started walking during the height of the Covid-19 pandemic last year, but how much they walked was correlated to their income levels, reports Arianna MacNeill for Boston.com. The researchers found “people in higher-income areas walked more during the pandemic, while people in lower-income areas – including neighborhoods with more BIPOC and those suffering from long-term illnesses like diabetes and obesity – walked less,” writes MacNeill.

Writing for The Boston Globe, Visiting Prof. Susan J. Blumenthal and research scientist David Kong underscore the need to reimagine America’s public health infrastructure. “A new multidisciplinary academic field of public health technology should be established to integrate diverse expertise in public health, technology, engineering, data analytics, and design to help build the products, programs, and systems necessary to modernize the nation’s public health infrastructure and ready it for 21st-century challenges and opportunities,” they write.

Prof. Justin Reich speaks with Mashable reporter Chris Taylor about the need to rethink the future of education and how kids learn. “There are going to be more interruptions in schooling in the future,” says Reich. “More fires, more floods, more freezing, more pandemic events, more tropical diseases migrating. The West will continue to have terrible fires. When it’s unsafe to travel, kids should be able to switch to remote learning for a week or two.”

Nuria Oliver PhD ’00 speaks with Wired reporter Willem Marx about her work developing a data gathering system to help combat Covid-19 in Valencia, Spain. Olivier and her team developed “a powerful predictor that's been road-tested during a time of unprecedented strain, and continues to be used across Valencia," writes Marx. "They have also created a system that can suggest a small number of specific, effective pandemic-related policies or interventions that a government can make.”

Wall Street Journal reporter Sara Castellanos spotlights Prof. Markus Buehler’s work combining virtual reality with sound waves to help detect subtle changes in molecular motions. Castellanos notes that Buehler and his team recently found, “coronaviruses can be more lethal or infectious depending on the vibrations within the spike proteins that are found on the surface of the virus.”

In an article for Fortune, Prof. Amy Glasmeier and Alison Omens of JUST Capital underscore the importance of paying workers a living wage. “Those companies that will thrive in both the current and post-pandemic economy will be those that prioritize their workers—not just in their rhetoric but in paying them a living wage,” they write.

Writing for The New York Times, Prof. David Autor explores how the current labor shortage provides an opportunity to improve the quality of jobs in the U.S. “The period of labor scarcity, then, is an opportunity to catalyze better working conditions for those who need them most,” writes Autor.

Prof. David Autor speaks with Kara Miller of GBH’s Innovation Hub about the impact of Covid-19 on the future of work.

Postdoc Freddy Nguyen, former co-director of the MIT Hacking Medicine hackathon, speaks with Forbes contributor Michelle Greenwald about how transitioning to virtual hackathons during the Covid-19 pandemic shed light on how to improve hackathons going forward. "One of the benefits of being virtual was that it allowed participants from around the globe that normally couldn’t afford the airfare or time to go to overseas, to take part,” writes Greenwald. “As a result, there were more participants, more diversity of thought, and a wider range of mentors involved, comporting well with MIT’s belief that great ideas can come from anywhere.”

A new report by Prof. Justin Reich and Jal Mehta of Harvard proposes a new path forward for rethinking K-12 schools after Covid-19, reports Paul Darvasi for KQED. “The report recommends that educators build on the positive aspects of their pandemic learning experience in the years ahead,” notes Darvasi, “and supports increased student independence to cultivate a safe and healthy environment that is more conducive to learning.”

Writing for STAT, Prof. Susan Silbey and Prof. Ruthanne Huising of Emlyon Business School make the case that to prevent lab leaks, there should be a greater emphasis placed on biosafety. “The global research community does not need more rules, more layers of oversight, and more intermediary actors,” they write. “What it needs is more attention and respect to already known biosafety measures and techniques.”

National Geographic reporter Roxanne Khamsi spotlights how Prof. Richard Braatz is working on developing continuous manufacturing processes that could help boost global vaccine availability. Khamsi notes that one feature Braatz and his colleagues are testing is using “a filter that attaches to the side of their production tanks to continuously extract vaccine material, rather than harvesting it in bulk.”

A new tabletop device developed by researchers from MIT and other institutions can identify Covid-19 variants in a person’s saliva, reports CBS Boston. “We tried to limit the number of user steps to make sure it was as easy as possible,” explains graduate student Devora Najjar.

A study by graduate student Carly Ziegler finds that how cells in the nose respond to the coronavirus could help predict how sick a person might become with Covid-19, reports Nancy Lapid for Reuters. "If further studies support our findings, we could use the same nasal swabs we use to diagnose COVID-19 to identity potentially severe cases before severe disease develops, creating an opportunity for effective early intervention," says Ziegler.

Profs. Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee speak with Axios reporter Dave Lawler about how the failure of rich countries to share Covid-19 vaccines and financial assistance will exacerbate global poverty and lead to increased resentment. "Nobody is talking of expanding aid,” says Banerjee. “I think the psychology, unfortunately, in rich countries somehow — even though the U.S. is going to grow faster in this year than it has in modern memory — is that we are in dire straits and we need to keep resources.”