The Pandemic’s Hidden Victims

How COVID-19 Made Other Illnesses More Deadly

If we told you that marathons lead to spikes in deaths from heart attacks, you might picture exhausted weekend warriors collapsing before they cross the finish line. The story is not that simple. In 2017, Harvard researchers found that blocking traffic during events like marathons delayed emergency care response by 4.4 minutes on average. In some cases, those few minutes proved fatal. No more heart attacks were recorded on marathon days, but more of them led to death.

Something similar happened during the first wave of the COVID-19 pandemic. In the …

by Maria Carnovale and Imre Varju | August 16, 2021

What Happened to Digital Contact Tracing’s Summer of Potential?

I Saw the Challenges of Harnessing Digital Data for Public Health up Close During the Pandemic

by Maria Carnovale | May 13, 2021

In the summer of 2020, when most countries were cherishing the quiet before the second peak in COVID-19 cases, the non-profit I was volunteering at was bustling with activity. It …

It’s Time to Embrace the Vaccine Passport

There Shouldn’t Be Any Controversy Around This Crucial Public Good

by Peter Baldwin | May 5, 2021

Vaccine passports, and the questions of whether governments or private businesses can or should require people to show them, have recently inspired controversy, and much misinformation, in many countries.

Some …

To Reckon With the Post-Apocalypse, Cities Need to Better Invest in Community

Urban Areas Need the Buy-in of Locals if They Want to Address Major Problems From Public Health to Climate Change

by Jackie Mansky | April 7, 2021

Most people in the world today live in cities. So it is unsurprising that cities have weathered the extremes of an extreme historical moment: they are where the pandemic first …

A Turn-of-the-Century ‘Vaccine Revolt’ in Brazil Carries Seeds of Today

Anti-Science Arguments, Mistrust of Public Health, and Fake News Incited the 1904 Uprising Against Mandatory Smallpox Immunization

by Raphael Tsavkko Garcia | February 10, 2021

On November 9, 1904, the Brazilian newspaper A Notícia published the government’s vaccination plan against smallpox.

The following day, the so-called Vaccine Revolt began in Rio de Janeiro, then the country’s …

Why Delivering COVID-19 Vaccines Might Be Just as Hard as Developing Them

From Liability Laws to Production Delays, the 2009 H1N1 Swine Flu Vaccine Rollout Offers a Cautionary Tale for Today

by Lee Hampton | December 17, 2020

The COVID-19 pandemic has killed more than 1,600,000 people worldwide, more than the population of Philadelphia, and it could kill far more if it isn’t brought under control. A number …

public health