COVID-19 in the news

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‘We need help’: Coronavirus ‘devastating’ black cities in outstate Michigan

One month since Michigan’s first case of coronavirus, the pandemic is taking a far heavier toll on African American communities statewide, from metro Detroit to Ypsilanti and Flint to Lansing. An analysis of available public health data shows the disproportionate impact on African Americans has spread from southeast Michigan – a national hotspot for COVID-19 – to outstate. While data are limited, current statewide totals show 40% of Michigan’s nearly 1,000 coronavirus deaths are black. But the toll is likely higher since race is listed as “unknown” on 25% of all deaths; 14% of the state population is African American. Dr. M. Roy Wilson, an ophthalmologist and president of Wayne State University who worked on strategic planning on minority health and health disparities at the National Institutes for Health, said poverty and lower levels of education have left more minorities exposed to the virus through jobs that can’t be done from home. African Americans also are more likely to have a harder time with the virus because of underlying health conditions, Wilson said, noting that those underlying conditions create a quicker cadence from mobility to mortality. “During a pandemic, that cadence is going to be greatly accelerated and so whatever health care and health issues existed in normal times, whether it was on the lack of access to health care because of insurance or high prevalence of comorbid disease, all of that is going to be greatly magnified.”

How kids will remember the pandemic

For better or worse, we revisit our childhoods and the stories we tell about ourselves are rooted in childhood experience. Memories come out of experience, and so experiences shape the person we will become. There are concerns about the memories today’s children will be left with in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic. To understand how to inoculate children against or cure bad memories, it’s helpful to understand when and how memory is developed, but children’s brains do not work like adult brains. “We’re learning concepts, but we may not have any conscious access to experiences we had maybe up to age three,” said Noa Ofen, memory researcher and associate professor of psychology at Wayne State University. “Very young children tend to remember a lot, but those memories tend to not be available readily when they’re older. There’s a very real phenomenon called childhood amnesia that’s well documented.”  
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Wayne County morgues brings in refrigerated trucks for surge in coronavirus deaths

As COVID-19 deaths continue to rise, the Wayne County Medical Examiner’s Office is gearing up for the inevitable: more bodies than it can hold. To prepare for the surge, the morgue brought in two refrigerated trucks, another is expected this week, and a fourth arrives next week. The morgue can hold 300 bodies, and already has 200; the refrigerated trucks can hold about 35-40 bodies each. Mark Evely, director of the mortuary science program at Wayne State University, said the medical examiner’s office is properly planning for anticipated capacity issues, and addressed the additional precautions taken by funeral directors and funeral homes. “We as funeral directors, we believe very much in the value of having a funeral. We sympathize with the families who need that support of having people attend the funeral,” he said. “Not only have families lost a loved one, they’ve also lost the in-person support that they would have normally had from families and friends.” “
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Uber wants to redefine unemployment. More than 50 labor groups are fighting back.

A coalition of about 50 labor groups is asking congressional leaders to reject Uber Chief Executive Dara Khosrowshahi’s proposal for a new legal category that would allow the company to keep treating its workers as independent contractors while affording them partial employee benefits. Labor advocates have argued Uber does not provide as flexible a source of income as the company maintains. In a letter to Congress, Sanjukta Paul, an assistant law professor at Wayne State University, and Marshall Steinbaum, an assistant economics professor at the University of Utah, wrote that if the federal government pays for Uber and Lyft drivers’ unemployment insurance it should incentivize “states to side with the platforms on employment status, since doing so unlocks funds they would otherwise have to collect from the platforms.” The letter said that if the companies are not mandated to pay into a state’s unemployment funds as part of the stimulus act, they should be required to commit to reclassifying the workers as employees in exchange for the federal support.

Detroit’s nursing homes are the next coronavirus hot spot

A spike in the number of coronavirus cases in Detroit’s nursing homes is straining the region’s hospitals and is partially responsible for an uptick in the state’s already-high mortality rate. Now, public health officials are working to head off the kind of facility-based outbreak that has killed hundred of elderly nursing home residents in Seattle, New York and elsewhere. Dr. Teena Chopra, a professor at the Wayne State University School of Medicine and a DMC epidemiologist, called the growing mortality rate among the region’s nursing home population “astonishing.” She estimated that about 60% of coronavirus-infected residents who are admitted to metro Detroit hospitals die, and that the population accounts for at least 25% of the region’s overall coronavirus deaths. The Detroit Health Department and Wayne State University are heading up a new citywide testing effort, with a goal of testing the entire resident population at one nursing home per day.
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Michigan reports another 114 deaths of COVID-19; Whitmer to extend stay-at-home order

Governor Gretchen Whitmer plans to announce an extension of her stay-at-home order as public health officials recorded another 114 deaths from the coronavirus in Michigan in the past day. The Michigan Department of Health and Human Services reported another 1,376 confirmed cases of coronavirus, bringing the total number of cases to 20,346 and total deaths to 959 on April 8. Detroit has become a hot spot for the virus, and has continued to ramp up testing efforts. The city was set to start using its Abbott Laboratories rapid COVID-19 testing on residents and workers in nursing homes. For resident who can’t go to a test site, Wayne State University School of Medicine students will visit nursing homes to take samples, and then run the tests at night.
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9 ways stress messes with your body – and what you can do about it

Stress isn’t just something that happens in your head – the effects reach almost every other part of your body. In simple terms, stress is the way your body responds to potential dangers. Stress is not inherently evil or bad for you, and is a biological response designed to help us successfully escape threats. In an ideal world, your body responds to stress and returns to its normal state – but in a less-than-ideal world, stress can become chronic and start to negatively impact your health. “People that are stressed may use food as a comfort,” said Dr. Joel Kahn, clinical professor of medicine at Wayne State University School of Medicine. “You don’t usually eat much broccoli when you’re stressed. You’re usually grabbing for a doughnut and chips.”
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Michigan Poison Center getting calls regarding accidental misuse of hand sanitizer

Since many common household disinfection products are in short supply, some have been substituting products not meant for use in the home. The Michigan Poison Center at the Wayne State University School of Medicine has received more than 80 calls regarding accidental misuse of automotive products, household industrial cleaning products and disinfectants. “We’ve had a few instances of people ingesting it (hand sanitizer),” said Denise Kolakowski, an educator with the center. “We’re not shocked because we understand that people are scared.” The center has recently issued a reminder about disinfection products.
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COVID-19 is disproportionately taking black lives

As of Tuesday, black people made up 33% of cases in Michigan and 40% of deaths, despite being just 14% of the state’s population. This racial disparity is also reflected in other states, although some states have not released data broken down by race, including New York, deemed to be the country’s epicenter. Years of slavery, racism, and discrimination have compounded to deliver poor health and economic outcomes for blacks, including heart disease, diabetes, and poverty, that are only being magnified under the lens of the coronavirus pandemic. “What we are seeing is that because of the way COVID-19 attacks the body, in terms of what it does to the lungs and how it interacts with the part of the body that controls the blood system, people with hypertension are more susceptible to the illness itself,” said Phillip Levy, a professor of emergency medicine and assistant vice president of translational science and clinical research innovation at the Wayne State University School of Medicine.
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Detroit’s WSU Physician Group purchases devices for on-site COVID-19 testing

Supported by a grant from Wayne State University President M. Roy Wilson, the WSU Physician Group has purchased four new devices that will provide rapid, on-site processing of COVID-19 test samples in Detroit. Th units are now in place in Detroit Medical Center hospitals. The units allow the hospitals to perform tests on high-risk patients in-house to avoid the delays of sending the tests to commercial laboratories. The devices provide results in less than an hour. “Rapid identification to facilitate appropriate isolation of COVID-19 patients is mission-critical to reducing the spread of COVID-19 in the hospital environment and the community,” said Dr. Charles Shanley, president and CEO of the physician group and vice dean of clinical affairs for the Wayne State University School of Medicine.
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Q&A: Why pandemic modeling is an imperfect, but important, tool

The nearly minute-by-minute onslaught of COIVD-19 related news is enough to leave most crestfallen. Governor Gretchen Whitmer is using a model that shows deaths and cases per day peaking in early May, while the Institute for Health Metrics and Evaluation model says Michigan will level off mid-April. Those are very different projections with very different outcomes – so, who’s right? Crain’s interviewed Hengguang Li, chair of Wayne State University’s mathematics department, to discuss the flaws of mathematical modeling.
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Duggan: Detroit will run $100M deficit due to COVID-19 outbreak

The economic slowdown caused by the coronavirus pandemic is wreaking havoc on the finances of Detroit, a city just six years removed from exiting the largest municipal bankruptcy in U.S. history. Mayor Mike Duggan said that he expects the city will run a $100 million deficit this fiscal year amid the COVID-19 crisis. He said that while there will be “painful cuts” as a result, shelling out to protect residents remains Detroit’s priority. “We’re going to spend what we need to, to take care of our residents,” Duggan said. “Then as a community, we’re going to have to deal with the fact that we have a major budget deficit.” Duggan’s administration has worked to build up its reserves and a strong management team, as part of a forecasting partnership with Wayne State University and the University of Michigan.
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COVID-19 patient advocacy at a distance, maintaining mental health at home

Arash Javanbakht, director of the Stress, Trauma, and Anxiety Research Clinic and a professor of psychiatry at Wayne State University, discusses maintaining mental health during the coronavirus pandemic. “We can be physically distant and safe, but not be a-social. The idea of socially distancing from other people and not being connected is scary to us because we’re social creatures,” he said. “There are multiple stressors that people are dealing with at this time. In fact, a lot of factors that contribute to stress, trauma, and anxiety, in general, are happening right now. Transition is always stressful, and everybody is going through multiple transitions, from changes in work style and family balance, and having to stay home and develop a new routine. All of those changes happened fairly suddenly.”
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Michigan reports 77 more deaths; Beaumont CEO calls for more hospital reporting

Another 77 people in Michigan have died due to COVID-19, pushing total deaths up to 617 – a 14 percent increase from Saturday. The number of new cases in the state increased by 1,493 from Saturday, brining the total to 15,718, according to data from the Michigan Department of Health and Human Services. The city of Detroit, which has by far the largest number of cases and deaths in the state, reported an additional 27 deaths over the 24-hour period, bringing its total death count to 158. The number of cases in the city hit 4,495, an increase of 545 from the previous day. At least five health care workers have died in Southeast Michigan from COVID-19 since early March. Wayne State University’s School of Social Work and College of Nursing are launching a crisis hotline Tuesday, April 7 to offer support for first responders and health care workers on the front lines of the outbreak.
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Help with COVID-19 patients or lose job, Beaumont Health says

Beaumont Health, the state’s largest health care system, informed employees that anyone who refuses a transfer to work with COVID-19 patients will be considered to have resigned and ineligible for future employment. The policy provides exceptions for those with underlying conditions, and comes amid increasing angst in Metro Detroit hospital systems that are reaching capacity in the face of the nation’s third largest outbreak of the coronavirus. Adding to the stress is the news of deaths and hospitalizations of colleagues and concerns over shortages of protective equipment. “There has not been a time, in my lifetime, of so much angst and tension in the healthcare community,” said Dr. Richard Balon, program director for the psychiatry residency at Detroit Medical Center and a professor of psychiatry and anesthesiology at Wayne State University's School of Medicine. “We are facing an additional crisis – mental health issues in healthcare workers due to this enormous pressure, tension, the push to make difficult decisions, feelings of lack of support, lack of protection, long hours, not being with their families, and worry about endangering their families by bringing the infection home.”