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The CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy (CUNY SPH) is working to understand many aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic and how it is affecting the population. As part of that strategy, the school is funding six internal projects.
The Carceral Health Crisis of New York, 2020 investigates the capacity of the New York jail and prison system to adequately protect the vulnerable state and city residents held within the public systems of incarceration. Drs. Naomi Zewde, Emma Tsui, Nick Freudenberg, and Ms. Erinn Bachus will draw on inmate and employee interviews, regulatory analyses, and historical and contemporary policy comparisons to evaluate and monitor the prison system’s response and to make health-focused recommendations for the treatment of incarcerated people while incorporating the crucial perspectives of those men and women directly affected.
The Communities, Households and SARS/COV-2 Epidemiology Cohort Study aims to assess recent symptoms of respiratory illness consistent with novel coronavirus (COVID-19) and related health care utilization or social factors (e.g., work and community policies); trends in recent symptoms of respiratory illness consistent with COVID-19; the uptake of health messaging, health behaviors and public health interventions (including social distancing); the impact of misinformation about COVID-19 circulated on social media; and, measure the incidence rate and attack rate of SARS/COV2 using antibody testing (when available). The study will enroll 20,000 participants from all 50 U.S. states and Puerto Rico, to complete a baseline survey followed by monthly surveys for 6 months (months 1-6) followed by less frequent surveys for up to two years. (Drs. Denis Nash & Christian Grov)
The central goal of the Understanding Social and Behavioral Dimensions of COVID-19 and Designing Novel Interventions via System Dynamics Modeling and Big Data Study is to account for the social and behavioral factors associated with the spread of the COVID pandemic in the U.S. through the application of systems science and machine learning approaches. Drs. Nasim Sabounchi and Terry Huang will use news and social media posts from primarily Twitter and Facebook that are collected to examine social and behavioral responses to the COVID-19 epidemic and how the inter-dependencies of these factors influence the trajectory of the disease.
Dr. Sheng Li will develop a modeling analysis platform of systems model and machine learning that provides explicit links between the models of COVID-19 human transmission process and models of environmental exposure. This analysis platform will integrate population movement, environmental exposure and social media data to understand important COVID-19 epidemiological characteristics (e.g., R0, generation time); and assess ongoing and planned control efforts.
Dr. Diana Romero and her team will collect rich quantitative survey data from a sample of women from New York City and New York State who recently gave birth, are currently pregnant, or are/were considering a pregnancy in 2020 regarding their experiences with and views on the coronavirus pandemic since it began to be taken seriously in the United States (US) (approx. late February 2020). They will explore critical issues related to healthcare, mental health, social support, living situation, increased stress during the pandemic, and pregnancy-related concerns.
Professor Bruce Y. Lee’s Public Health Computational and Operations Research (PHICOR) team will launch a broader COVID-19 coronavirus modeling program that will be similar to the flu epidemic and pandemic modeling work that they have done for the past 15 years. While other have developed models that have looked at single or limited aspects of the current pandemic (e.g., the biological spread of the virus), the PHICOR team develops systems models that represent and bring together all the different mechanisms and systems that affect and are affected by the COVID-19 coronavirus. For example, the PHICOR Team’s models will present not only the virus and its spread, but what will happen to individual patients that end up being infected, their health care seeking behaviors, their health care resource use, their clinical outcomes, and the associated costs and how this in turn may affect the overall health care system. The PHICOR Team also has a long history of working with decision makers at the local, state, federal, and international levels, using such models to develop and implement various strategies, policies, and interventions
