Colleges plan for on-campus classes, even as scientists warn of risk for COVID-19 | Boston Globe

“We should not let our own financial and reputational worries cloud our judgment about matters of life and death,” Sorrell wrote.

Still, some public health experts said colleges can bring back students to some degree, and many are trying to figure out how many students and how.

Sandro Galea, the dean of the BU School of Public Health, said he expects institutions to adapt with smaller classes, fewer students in dorms, everyone on campus wearing masks, contact tracing programs, efforts to boost hygiene, and areas cordoned off to isolate those who may get the virus.

“Ultimately, it’s an issue of managing risk,” Galea said. “How do colleges and universities adapt to the risk?”

Read the full piece.

An Ohio county labeled ‘racism’ as a public health crisis | Mic

"For minorities and especially for African Americans, there are huge disparities,” Assistant Health Commissioner Theresa Seagraves told The Columbus Dispatch. “It is unfortunate that here in Ohio we are a state that has some of the best clinical and health services in the nation ... [but] when it comes to health care outcomes, we are consistently rated at the bottom. .... The underlying reason for these really institutionalized and systemic poor health outcomes and disparities does link back to racism."

The resolution explicitly calls out manifestations of racism in housing, employment, education, and criminal justice, which combine to meet "the definition of a public health crisis proposed by Dr. Sandro Galea who notes: 'The problem must affect large numbers of people, it must threaten health over the long-term, and it must require the adoption of large scale solutions.'"

Read the full piece.

Where Do We Stand On Treatment for COVID-19 Patients | WBUR

On Monday, the Cambridge-based company Moderna announced that the first phase of testing of its COVID-19 vaccine has delivered positive results. Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, joins us to give an update on what we know, and what we still don't, about treating COVID-19 patients.

Listen to the whole interview here.

Is "Quaranteaming" Safe? | Elemental Medium

Craig, who made plans to hang out in someone’s backyard, was right to assume that if you’re going to see friends, it’s best to do so outside. Experts agree that outdoor spaces appear to be considerably safer than indoors, where poor ventilation and airflow make it more likely that the virus is hanging around in the air.

“Broadly speaking, it will probably be okay to see family and friends in small groups while carefully monitoring symptoms,” provided that groups really are small, and anyone who thinks they may have been exposed gets tested and continues to self-isolate, says Sandro Galea, MD, an epidemiologist and professor of family medicine at Boston University’s School of Public Health.

Read the full piece here.

Coronavirus Seminar Series : Climate Change and Health: learning from COVID-19 | Boston University School of Public Health

This seminar explores the intersection of the COVID-19 pandemic and climate change. The pandemic has sharpened our thinking and informed insights around climate change, impacting how systems respond and what conversations on climate change will look like in a post-COVID era.

Increased Alcohol Consumption Among Behavior Changes Linked to COVID-19 Related Stressors | Psych Congress

Several financial stressors created by the COVID-19 pandemic have been linked to higher odds of experiencing negative health behavior changes, including increased alcohol consumption, according to Flatten the Curve, a national survey developed by digital health company Sharecare and Sandro Galea, MD, MPH, DrPH, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health, and Publicis Health Media.

In addition to alcohol consumption, behavior changes tracked by the survey, which received 115,000 responses in April, included exercise, eating habits and sleep.

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Valley Voice: Are California Leaders ‘losing the locker room’ with coronavirus response?

“Some 4.5 million Californians have filed for unemployment since mid-March and this week it was announced the unemployment fund is out of money and has to borrow from the federal government. The figures alone are distressing. Add this to that the vast mental and physical cost of the stress to families and strain of job loss.

Drs. Sandro Galea and Nason Maani write in Scientific American: “The true costs of the COVID-19 pandemic….Unemployment has long been associated with significantly increased risk of death in general….The risk of heart disease, the leading cause of death in the U.S. at almost 650,000 deaths per year, has been shown to increase by 15-30 percent in men (and women) unemployed for 90 days.”

Read the full piece.

COVID-19 Exacts High Toll on People of Color | Daily Nurse Blog

In a recent interview with Boston’s WGBH, Dr. Sandro Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health and co-author of the textbook Public Health, discussed the issue of health inequities during the pandemic: “There are two levels where we’re seeing these inequities. We are seeing people of color and people in low-income groups disproportionately testing positive … And among people testing positive, they are affected at disproportionately higher rates than people who are white or are more privileged—and then, among those who do test positive, the rate of fatality is higher.”

Dr. Galea hopes that the toll COVID-19 is taking on people of color will finally spur action against health inequities. “What we are seeing is a set of problems that we have had for decades. It is not new that minorities and people of low income suffer much more illness than people of higher income and majority groups. There is a 15-year difference in life expectancy between the richest 1% and the poorest 1%. That’s an enormous difference. But the coronavirus is revealing things that had really been there already. Perhaps—if one were to think of a silver lining—this is a wake-up call, and our job collectively, should be to say, how can we remove these health gaps?”

Read the full piece here.

Too Much Alone Time? Tips to Connect and Find Joy While Social Distancing | NPR

"Humans are wired to come together physically," says psychologist Judith Moskowitz of Northwestern University. But, loneliness has become widespread in modern life. And, social distancing has just exacerbated the problem," Moskowitz says.

Finding ways to connect is essential to our well-being, since prolonged isolation can increase the risk of depression and anxiety, says Dr. Sandro Galea of Boston University's School of Public Health.We know from other events, the longer the isolation, the more risk," Galea says.

Read the full piece.

Disparities push coronavirus death rates higher | MSN

Krieger and her colleagues determined how much the total death rates increased in all ZIP codes and municipalities across the state compared to the same time period the previous five years. Taking into account age, they calculated the rise in mortality rates and then analyzed the differences by where the deceased had lived, looking at race and ethnicity, poverty, the prevalence of crowded housing, and more.

“This kind of data should be a wake-up call,” said Dr. Sandro Galea, a physician, epidemiologist, and dean of the Boston University School of Public Health. “It’s not enough to pay attention to the whole, but to pay attention to the fact that particular groups need particular help.”
Galea said state and local leaders could use the data to better target health messages and narrow health gaps — not just with COVID-19 but with so many other diseases that disproportionately affect lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color.

Read the full piece.

A new analysis: Coronavirus death rate surged in Massachusetts locations that already Faced challenges | Boston Globe

Galea said state and local leaders could use the data to better target health messages and narrow health gaps — not just with COVID-19 but with so many other diseases that disproportionately affect lower-income neighborhoods and communities of color.
“This speaks to the fact that tending to health inequities is not discretionary. It’s not an act of charity. It’s essential to creating a healthy world,” Galea said. "Having some people left behind threatens not only their health but everyone’s health.”

Read the full piece.

SPH Dean’s Forum Focuses on Global Gun Violence Pandemic | BU Today

“Held via Zoom and cohosted with the George Washington University Milken Institute School of Public Health and The Lancet, the seminar convened gun violence experts from around the world, including Australia and Guatemala, to foster a global understanding of guns and health.
“Recent months have shown that we can change the world in fundamental ways when health is at stake,” said Sandro Galea, SPH dean and Robert A. Knox Professor, in his opening remarks. “This starts with having the necessary, and at times uncomfortable, conversation about guns and their contribution to poor health worldwide.”

Read the full piece.

COVID-19 Raises Questions About the Value of Personalized Medicine | Wall Street Journal

‘The one-size-fits-all camp believes that it has been a mistake to focus on the genome as the main driver of health. The most serious threats, they argue, come not from people’s genes but from their environment and behavior. The wider world in which a person is situated plays the primary role in determining health outcomes.
“The notion that we can improve health by focusing on the individual is false,” says Sandro Galea, a professor and dean at Boston University School of Public Health, a participant in the group. “So much of our health is beyond the control of individuals.”

Read the full piece.

Mental Health an Emerging Crisis of COVID Pandemic | WebMD

“In a recent opinion piece published in the Journal of the American Medical Association, Sandro Galea, MD, MPH, DrPH, a professor at the Boston University School of Public Health, warned of an upcoming wave of mental disorders because of coronavirus.
He noted that “large-scale disasters, whether traumatic (the World Trade Center attacks or mass shootings), natural (hurricanes), or environmental (Deepwater Horizon oil spill), are almost always accompanied by increases in depression, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), substance use disorder, a broad range of other mental and behavioral disorders, domestic violence, and child abuse."

Read the full piece.

World games with looser lockdowns, risking coronavirus lockdowns | Aljazeera

“Infections and deaths remain comparatively low on the continent, with a total of 50,000 cases and more than 2,000 deaths. But the WHO said on Thursday as many as 190,000 could die on the African continent in the coming 12 months without containment measures. 
COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the new coronavirus, "could become a fixture in our lives for the next several years unless a proactive approach is taken by many governments in the region", said Matshidiso Moeti, WHO chief for Africa. 
But with lockdowns unsustainable, African countries need to come up with other strategies, wrote Salma Abdalla and Sandro Galea at the Council on Foreign Relations.

Read the full piece.

The World After Coronavirus: The Future of Mental Health - Sandro Galea | BU Pardee Center

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global crisis of unprecedented scale, with aftershocks that will be felt in virtually every aspect of life for years or decades to come. The Frederick S. Pardee Center for the Study of the Longer-Range Future at the Pardee School of Global Studies has launched a new video series called "The World After Coronavirus," in which we ask leading experts and practitioners from Boston University and across the world to explore the challenges and opportunities we will face in our post-coronavirus future. The series is hosted by Prof. Adil Najam, the Inaugural Dean of the Pardee School of Global Studies and former Director of the Pardee Center. In this episode, Dean Najam speaks with Sandro Galea, Dean of the School of Public Health at Boston University, about the future of mental health after COVID-19.

Read the full piece.

WBUR Town Hall: The Societal Costs of COVID-19

The measures necessary to control the spread of COVID-19 will also have unprecedented consequences on our economy, health outcomes and social fabric. Job losses, school closures and the coming recession will exacerbate already existing social inequities. Public policies need to be implemented to protect the most vulnerable and prevent the consequences of future pandemics.

WBUR reporter Callum Borchers discussed the consequences with Dr. Sandro Galea, an epidemiologist, dean and professor at Boston University School of Public Health, and Danielle Allen, Harvard University professor and director of Harvard’s Edmond J. Safra Center for Ethics.

Read the full piece.

Let these adorable ticklish pets soothe your lockdown woes | Metro

There’s a lot of very serious things happening in the world right now, what with the pandemic and all, so it’s unfortunately even easier than ever these days to lose ourselves in doom and gloom. Dr Sandro Galea from Boston University previously spoke to us about the impact coronavirus and the resulting lockdown may have on our mental health, saying: ‘While these steps may be critical to mitigate the spread of this disease, they will undoubtedly have consequences for mental health and wellbeing in both the short and long term.’ Therefore it’s especially important to take some time for happy and silly things when and where you can, which is where these ticklish pets come in.

Read the full piece.

The pandemic paradox: Canadians asked to go out and face threat that kept them inside for weeks | CBC

“It's all happening so fast that it's not clear who should be protected. How do you decide if you're at a higher risk? Obesity, high blood pressure, asthma, age — the list of potential risk factors is only just emerging.
"I do not really want individuals to be making those risk calculations, because even understanding that if you're 70 and you're healthy, your risk is actually quite different than someone who is 60 and has underlying diabetes and heart disease," said Sandro Galea, dean of the Boston University School of Public Health.
"I think that's the role of government to come up with the guidance that essentially arrives at a consensus acceptable risk within society."

Read the full piece.