By WKTV Staff
joanne@wktv.org
Getting Off the Life Raft
“We’ve managed to get to the life raft,” says epidemiologist Marc Lipsitch, of the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health (HSPH), in a recent AAAS/Science Magazine article. “But I’m really unclear how we will get to the shore.”
The article states that as governments move forward, there are many things officials will have to consider such as health of citizen, freedoms of the population, and economic constraints. Countries will be follow different paths to reopen as there is no controlled experiments to compare the effectiveness of different social distancing measures with one expert noting the comparisons of these paths could be revealing.
Breaking those habits
As the debate continues on when U.S. states and cities will reopen, one item everyone can agree on is that to beat the pandemic, everyone will need to make a change in their behavior. Throughout the crisis, people have been ordered to seek protection in large and small ways from washing their hands to avoiding almost all physical contact.
According to an AAAS/Science Magazine article, politicians, executives and Facebook and Twitter leaders have consulted with Robb Willer, a sociologist at Stanford University who has recruited more than 40 top behavioral sciences to help determine how to steer people into certain actions.
U.S. Census Delayed
When it comes to the U.S. Census, it appears U.S. leaders are in agreement: data collection is going to be delayed. The Trump administration has requested that Congress give the Census Bureau a four-month extension, until April 30, 2021, to deliver its data to the president and another four months to tell each state how many seats it will hold in the 435-member House.
The reason for the request, according to an article in AAAS/Science Magazine, the COVID-19 pandemic has forced the Census Bureau to delay sending out enumerators to track down anyone who hasn’t already completed the 10-question census that became available last month. Field operations are expected to continue until the end of October, making it impossible to meet the current statutory deadlines, which had field work being completed on Aug. 14.
