Arash Javanbakht, associate professor of psychiatry and director of the Stress, Trauma and Anxiety Research Clinic at Wayne State University, was a guest on Detroit Today hosted by Stephen Henderson. Javanbakht says there are multiple factors that contribute to stress, all of which are present in the COVID-19 pandemic. He says the rapid transition and change in lifestyle has made the already traumatic situation more stressful for many and adds that all the unknowns around the virus can also create stress. “There’s also a lot of uncertainty. Uncertainty always makes any difficult situation even more difficult.” Javanbakht says limiting negative news intake and checking in on friends can really help mental health. He says that friends can learn coping skills together, easing stress. “If I am happy, if I am doing well, share it with others. Call a friend and be encouraging, even lend some money if someone needs it. If I don’t have happiness, I can’t share it with others.”

Mark Evely, program director and assistant professor of mortuary science, wrote an article for The Conversation about what happens to the body following death. “In general, it depends on three things: where you die, how you die and what you or your family decide on for funeral arrangements and final disposition. Death can happen anywhere: at home; in a hospital, nursing or palliative care facility; or at the scene of an accident, homicide or suicide. A medical examiner or coroner must investigate whenever a person dies unexpectedly while not under a doctor’s care. Based on the circumstances of the death, they determine whether an autopsy is needed. If so, the body travels to a county morgue or a funeral home, where a pathologist conducts a detailed internal and external examination of the body as well as toxicology tests. Once the body can be released, some states allow for families to handle the body themselves, but most people employ a funeral director.”

President Trump has defended the way he downplayed the dangers of the coronavirus. He says he was showing leadership during a time of crisis, but that's the opposite of what crisis management experts recommend. NPR's Ayesha Rascoe spoke with Wayne State University Professor Matthew Seeger. After 9/11, he helped the Centers for Disease Control develop plans for talking to the public about emergencies. “Whenever I hear, you know, the rationale of panic as an explanation for why people are withholding information, it's like fingernails on a chalkboard.” Seeger says past crises have shown that people rarely panic in these situations, and that's why experts recommend transparency. “When there is an announcement of a hurricane warning in South Florida, people don't panic. I mean, they don't abandon everything and jump in their cars and drive north.”

Child psychology researchers don’t know yet what the effects of this school year will be on children, said Erika Bocknek, a Wayne State University associate professor of educational psychology. “We’re building the boat as we sail it,” Bocknek said. Unlike in a traditional classroom, children are viewing themselves and staring at the faces of their classmates, which can make them self-conscious about their own appearance, said Bocknek, who teaches courses on child psychology. “We don’t have good data on this yet, but a lot of people are in fact speculating that there may be impacts on self-esteem, on a positive sense of identity,” Bocknek said. Increased screen time during virtual school is another unknown for researchers, Bocknek said. But experts know this school year may exacerbate already existing mental and behavioral issues, she said. “I think we are going to have some positive and negative lessons learned from this time period,” Bocknek said. "We really don’t know yet for sure what the impacts are going to be. However, we hypothesize that there are children with different learning styles who might really benefit from being able to turn the camera off and focus on listening auditorily to the lesson.”

Wayne State University’s Chief Sustainability Officer, Daryl Pierson, thinks that bringing students together who are studying different subjects, and faculty who are in different areas, to form a multidisciplinary approach about sustainability is important. “You can't really just look at it from one side in order to get something that's truly sustainable,” he said. Pierson said that those who think things are moving too slowly need to be patient and not get frustrated, but continue to share the message of efficiency and the benefits of its work. It will ultimately lead to a big difference all around. Ashley Flintoff, director of planning and space management at WSU, said there’s also interdisciplinary sharing with students, who bring in fresh ideas and teach them while also being taught. Collaboration is vital to sustainability moving forward. Flintoff hopes that sustainability is able to get woven into the everyday vernacular and become less of a thing where people toot their horn about and have banners every time they achieve something with sustainability. "You just work it into your everyday life so that eventually the goal is that everything that you do has the sustainability aspect to it,” she said. “You don't have to think about it, you just do it. It just becomes kind of normal.”

Nursing homes closed their doors to most visitors in March in an attempt to shield vulnerable residents from the virus, which has killed more than 75,000 residents and staff in long-term care this year, according to early-September Kaiser Family Foundation data. But cautionary confinement has meant a second affliction for residents, and not just for those who missed final goodbyes. Some experts on aging say isolation can lead to depression, anxiety, and overall health decline. Desperate for connection, relatives of the country’s more than 1 million nursing home residents have scrambled for creative workarounds – from strained video calls to bucket truck-assisted window visits. And now, care facilities face high-stakes decisions about how to reopen safely. That means most reunions will come for the foreseeable future at a wrenching 6-foot distance. “The benefits [of visits] are really enormous,” says Peter Lichtenberg, director of Wayne State University’s Institute of Gerontology, who also speaks from personal experience. After weeks of isolation, he visited his own father for an end-of-life exception visit at a Pennsylvania facility this spring. My dad died without anxiety,” says Dr. Lichtenberg. “I thought in large part that was because I was there.”  

Many colleges in Michigan have begun the fall semester, and all have varying approaches to try to keep students safe from COVID-19. A few have chosen to move all of their classes online, but many are offering a mix of online, in-person and hybrid classes to limit interactions on campus. Schools like Central Michigan University and Adrian College have already had outbreaks of COVID-19 on campus after students returned, and because of that, schools such as Kalamazoo College and Eastern Michigan University have chosen to move their classes online or delay the in-person fall semester by a few weeks. Wayne State University offers five options for students, according to its return to campus plan, which include traditional course instruction, remote instruction at specific times, online instruction, hybrid classes and individually arranged classes, which include dissertations, theses and individual research credits.

Students at most Michigan public universities began classes this week, and even though schools have spent months preparing for a safe return amid the pandemic, what's happening off campus is causing heightened concern. The parties were inevitable, some say. They started happening at schools where students returned to campuses earlier than most, such as the University of South Carolina, which began Aug. 20 and now has more than 1,000 cases of COVID-19. All but nine positive cases are students. In Michigan, Central Michigan University now has 260 cases traced to the Aug. 17 return of students, including people living in and around the community, according to the Central Michigan District Health Department that serves six mid-Michigan counties. At Adrian College, the number of cases reached 152, which includes 138 cases that are active, the Lenawee County Health Department reported Thursday. At Wayne State University, President M. Roy Wilson sent a letter to students, asking them to behave. Dr. Teena Chopra, an infectious disease professor at Wayne State, said getting the younger generation to embrace safe behaviors is tough. "We can control what students do on campus," she said. "But when they are off campus, we cannot control that. These social gatherings are very good examples of how we are spreading the virus, and how the transmission can happen. Right now, students tend to gather outside, which is less risky. But once the weather changes and it's too cold to be outside all the time, Chopra doesn't expect schools to be able to continue in-person instruction. "We are going to be in a different situation," she said. "I don’t think the schools and colleges in the midst of winter will be able to remain open very long. It is impossible for younger kids to comply with 100% masking, and not be within 6 feet of one another."

We’re living through one of the worst economic crises America has ever experienced. Roughly 55 million people have filed for unemployment since the coronavirus pandemic hit back in March. More than 70,000 small businesses have closed forever. The Aspen Institute estimates one in five renters are at risk of being evicted by the end of this month. With all of the uncertainty and upheaval in our economy and the world more generally, what kinds of decisions should we be making with our own money? What does all of this mean for our ability to plan for the future — or even just get through the day? Matthew Roling is the executive director of Wayne State University’s office of business innovation and teaches personal finance at Wayne State’s business school. He says many Americans are looking for ways to make sure they have cash available to them, instead of being tied up in assets. “Cash is king in a way that it really never has been before because we really don’t know what’s around the corner,” says Roling. “We’re just starting to measure the impact that this has had on the long term [health] of the US economy.” He also notes that while many working-class and low-income people are being hit especially hard during the pandemic, wealthier people are taking advantage of new opportunities to make more money. “This is becoming a tale of two economies,” he says.

Most businesses are open and schools are coming back in session, but there are major concessions to the coronavirus. From kindergarten to college, schools are switching to virtual learning and businesses are operating at reduced capacity. There is a race to create a COVID-19 vaccine to beat back the virus, and now, we're looking at who can require you to get the future vaccine, and what rights you have to push back. There's a lot of hope a coronavirus vaccine can help us get back to normal life, but that only works if the public takes the vaccine. Public Health Law Expert Professor Lance Gable said confidence in vaccines is the key to public health. Gable said despite parent protest, the state can require kids to get a future coronavirus vaccine, just as other childhood shots. "State requirements of this sort, as long as they have scientific evidence supporting their necessity, often they're going to be upheld," he said. He added, "It's really important we get this right and it's really important we maintain trust." Parents can request a non-medical waiver. It will require a visit with a county health educator and during disease outbreaks, non-vaccinated kids can be excluded from school. What about your job? Federal guidance says employers can require a COVID-19 test to look for active infection but not for antibodies. A vaccine can be closer to antibody screening. “So it could violate the Americans with Disabilities Act and it might be a problem for employers to do that," Gable said.

In the upcoming issue of US Black Engineer magazine the exclusive list of educators includes M. Roy Wilson, president of Wayne State University. Wilson became the 12th president of Wayne State University on Aug. 1, 2013. During his inauguration in April 2014, Wilson, a leading physician focused on the themes of academic excellence, biomedical knowledge and research, innovation, creativity, diversity, and what public universities must do to respond to market forces. He said he felt “truly fortunate to have experienced the challenges of the urban core culture, to have been immersed in diversity at both the local and global level, to have experienced the thrill of discovery of new knowledge and educational excellence where the highest of achievements for the public good was an expectation.” In the fall of 2018, Wayne State announced that it admitted its largest incoming class ever, a 15 percent increase over the prior year. The university’s six-year graduation rate earned the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities’ 2018 Degree Completion Award, which recognizes innovative and successful approaches to improve degree completion and ensure educational quality. Wayne State’s graduation rate gains were especially pronounced among first-generation, low-income, and minority students, according to the university.

As the majority of public universities begin fall semester classes this week amid the COVID-19 pandemic, Wayne State University has developed a plan with specific benchmarks about when to take action to contain any potential spread of the virus. The university would take its most drastic step and depopulate the campus if testing shows positive cases within the university community to exceed 15%, or three or more clusters appear in seven days or if fewer than 15% of hospital beds and fewer than 15% of intensive care unit beds are available. The "tipping point metrics," posted online Monday, include thresholds that will trigger and guide Wayne State officials in their decision-making in the event of numerous COVID-19 cases. While many universities have a plan of when to take action, the Detroit university is among a small number of universities nationwide that are publishing specific numerical thresholds to trigger actions if coronavirus infections escalate. Wayne State made the move after watching other universities that have returned to campus and grappled with numerous coronavirus cases. It also wanted to be transparent and clear about what will happen if necessary, President M. Roy Wilson said. "I don't think the time to make a decision is ... when everything is getting worse," said Wilson, who is an epidemiologist. "You have to have some things already worked out so you are not wasting time. We know the science, and we know when things reach a certain level, it’s bad." 

Spotlight on the News host Chuck Stokes interviewed Dawn Medley, associate vice president of enrollment, about the increase in student enrollment at Wayne State University.

For women who are pregnant, the pandemic can be particularly fraught with anxiety as they worry about the effects of COVID-19 on themselves and their babies, all while coping with potential job loss, child care issues and economic uncertainty. An evolving body of research — including a recent study by investigators at the Wayne State University Medical School and the National Institutes of Health Perinatology Research Branch in Detroit — has shown it's unlikely for the virus to pass from a pregnant woman to her fetus. A data analysis of U.S. cases, published by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July, concluded that pregnant women are at no greater risk of dying from the virus than non-pregnant women, though they are more likely to end up in intensive care and require a ventilator. With 24 million cases of COVID-19 worldwide, including about 6 million in the United States and more than 100,000 in Michigan, there has been no consistent evidence of pregnant mothers passing the infection to their newborns, what's called vertical transmission. While other viral infections such as Zika, cytomegalovirus and rubella can be passed from mother to fetus, researchers led by Dr. Roberto Romero, chief of the Perinatology Research Branch at the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development at Wayne State, investigated why the same isn't true of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. "The rate of vertical transmission is extremely low," Romero said. "The best estimates that we have are less than 2%, or less than 1%. There have been some reports of neonates testing positive after birth, but there is always the question: Was that virus acquired in utero, or was it acquired from a mother who is sick?" 

In this installment, Wayne State University assistant professor of African American Studies Valerie Sweeney Prince, author of “Burnin’ Down the House: Home in African American Literature,” discusses the role of African American literature from Ralph Ellison’s time to the present, and questions whether Black literature exists in a pure form considering the white lens of the publishing industry. On the recent killings in Kenosha, Wis., Prince says the white lens impacts so many aspects of Black life, not just in literature. “When someone is tweeting ‘law and order,’ that is very clearly a frame of reference that allows a 17-year-old white kid with an assault weapon to not be seen as a murderer,” she says. When it comes to Black literature, Prince says the question is about who ultimately gets to determine what audiences read and internalize about Black life in America. “Blackness exists because it’s a culture. We have music, we have food, we have dance, we have all these things, a way of speaking, a way of just being and seeing and living in the world. But what does not exist are the mechanisms by which these things get codified and communicated outside our culture.”

As colleges grapple with the decision of when to resume athletic competition, the NCAA’s chief medical officer suggested mental health issues — especially among Black athletes — are getting insufficient attention. Mental health concerns were highest among respondents of color, those whose families are facing economic hardship and those living alone, according to an NCAA news release about the findings of the survey, which was conducted April 10-May 1. Greater financial pressures and more instability at home among Black athletes make separation from their teammates an even bigger issue, said M. Roy Wilson, president of Wayne State University and a panelist. “We have to deal with those aspects with the same rigor and concentration as we do social distancing, wearing masks, sanitation of facilities,’’ Wilson said. “All those things are good. But we’ve got to look at the well-being of our student athletes also, because they’re not going to be able to come back if they don’t."

The women who made up the suffrage movement a century ago were dismissed, degraded, even jailed. Yet they persisted. But even after women secured the right to vote (for most women – many women of color, especially Black women, notably remained disenfranchised even after ratification of the 19th Amendment), the fight to be elected to office was long and fraught. After helping secure the right for women to vote in her home state of Montana in 1914, social worker, pacifist and suffragette Jeannette Rankin set a new goal. Rankin became the first woman elected to Congress in 1916, four years before the ratification of the 19th Amendment and as the U.S. was debating whether to enter World War I. "She was an ardent suffragist,” said Liette Gidlow, an associate professor of history at Wayne State University and a fellow at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study at Harvard University. “And it's not necessarily remembered this way these days, but Americans' feelings about being involved in the first World War were very mixed."

As schools across Michigan begin an unpredictable new year, teachers are facing what may seem like an insurmountable task: Helping students, particularly the most vulnerable, who’ve experienced learning loss because of the pandemic. There is little doubt that the disruption caused by COVID-19, marked by an unheard-of shift from physical to remote learning, will leave many students struggling academically. That concern runs especially deep in cities like Detroit, home to long-existing inequities and students whose communities have borne the brunt of the virus’s damage. Sarah Winchell Lenhoff, an assistant professor at Wayne State University, says schools offering choices between in-person and remote instruction should have considered the needs of students who may have suffered the greatest losses. Most district leaders left it up to parents to decide between the two. “Parents choose what’s best for them,” Lenhoff said. “But that really leaves it up to chance whether the students who would benefit the most from face to face are the ones who are going to sign up for it.” Lenhoff said it’s “scary, frankly,” to think about the long-term consequences for students from low-income families and students of color who attend economically segregated schools who will “are likely bearing the brunt of the learning loss.” 

During this episode in the series titled “America Dissected: Coronavirus,” Wayne State University President M. Roy Wilson discusses the risks of going “back” to in-person learning at schools and colleges.

Going off to college is, for many young adults, their first real plunge into freedom and adulthood. It’s where they’re encouraged to take risks and find new connections in dining halls and laundry rooms. But those collegiate rites of passage aren’t possible if they’re largely confined to an extra-long twin bed in a stuffy dorm room, peering out at the world through barred windows. The fall 2020 semester looks a lot like that for some undergraduates who’ve returned to campus during the pandemic. And as anticipated, some of those undergrads have already started to rebel. CNN spoke with experts about the drivers behind these risky decisions, including Hannah Schacter, assistant professor and developmental psychologist at Wayne State University. Teens are also particularly sensitive to the potential rewards of risky decisions at this stage in their life. It’s not that they don’t understand the negative consequences, but they struggle to regulate those impulses that lead them to take risks because the potential reward is too great, said Schacter, who leads a lab at Wayne State University on adolescent relationships. “It’s this combination of being restricted from social contact for a while at an age where spending time with peers is so essential to development, to making teenagers feel good, and so, there’s some sort of calculation going on where the perceived benefit — ‘I get to spend time with friends’ — seems to be outweighing the potential costs,” Schacter said. When you plop students back on campus after a spring and summer spent cooped up in their childhood bedrooms, many of them will take those opportunities to connect with their friends and strangers. Their fear of the virus may be overtaken by their eagerness to connect, she said. “No one’s going back to college because they want to sit in their dorm all weekend by themselves,” Schacter said. “Peers are so essential that it’s no coincidence that we’re seeing these behaviors more and that they’re particularly peer-oriented,” Schacter said.