Reforming Federal Public Health Powers: Responding to National and Global Threats

Fundamentally uncaring: The differential multi-scalar impacts of COVID-19 in the U.S

2020 in the United States was marked by two converging crises—the COVID-19 pandemic and the large-scale uprisings in support of Black lives. These crises were met with both a counterproductive and inadequate response from the federal government. We examine these converging crises at the individual, social, and political scales. The biological realities of COVID-19 impact different populations in widely varied ways—the poor, the elderly, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, and those living with comorbidities get sick and die at the highest rates. Social distancing guidelines shifted millions of people to work-from-home and millions more lost their jobs, even as care laborers, preponderantly women, Black, Indigenous, and people of color, were asked to put their and their loved ones' lives on the line for the continuation of all of our lives. These biological, social, and economic crises have been punctuated by civil unrest, as millions took to the streets for racial justice, noting the unequal impacts of the pandemic. These converging crises have laid bare decades of neoliberal and neoconservative policies and ideologies, undergirded as they have been by racial capitalism, for their fundamental uncaringness. In this paper, we argue that this pandemic not only made a wider population more acutely aware of the necessity and importance of the need to care and for caring labors, but also that we stand at the precipice of potentiality--of producing a more caring society. To frame our argument, we draw on Nancy Scheper-Hughes and Margaret Lock's (1987) framework of three bodies—individual, social, and political—to unpack the multi-scalar entanglements in the differential impacts of COVID-19, questions of care, and their articulation in the current political-economic context.

The emergence of human Powassan virus infection in North America

Powassan virus (POWV) is a tickborne flavivirus discovered in Ontario, Canada in 1958 that causes long-term neurological sequelae in about half the reported cases and death in a little more than 10 % of cases. The incidence of POWV disease is rising in the United States but there is limited understanding of the scope and causes of recent changes in POWV epidemiology. We focus on quantifying the increase in human POWV disease incidence and infection prevalence in the United States. We also examine differences in the frequency of symptomatic cases and asymptomatic or mildly symptomatic cases, as well as limitations in national and state surveillance for POWV infection. We searched SCOPUS for all articles containing original POWV prevalence research, case studies, or literature reviews published in English. Case studies were supplemented by Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report POWV data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and surveillance information from state health department websites. An increase in the number of POWV cases has been reported in the United States over the past 50 yr, and the geographic range of human POWV cases has expanded. The age distribution of symptomatic POWV cases has shifted, with significantly more individuals over 40 yr old being diagnosed after 1998. The emergence of POWV is due in large part to: (i) a change in transmission of POWV from a vector that rarely bites people (Ixodes cookei) to a new vector that often bites people (Ixodes scapularis) and has expanded its geographic range, (ii) enhanced surveillance efforts for arboviruses, and (iii) a greater awareness of POWV infection.