ABSTRACT
As new variants of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2) continuously evolve and mutate, it is vital to understand how novel and emerging variants affect public health outcomes. Our understanding of COVID-19 can have significant impacts on how we approach measures to mitigate the virus's deleterious effects on the world Therefore, in this study, we aim to 1) quantify the relationships between county-characteristics, such as the proportion of residents vaccinated, and certain countylevel health outcomes related to COVID-19 such as: case counts, death counts, positivity rates, infection rates, ICU occupancy levels, hospitalizations, and the proportion of ICU admissions due to COVID-19. We also aim to 2) compare these relationships across three different time periods - two periods where Delia was the dominant strain of the U.S. and one period where Omicron was the dominant strain ofthe U.S. In this study, we used multiple regression to measure the strength of relationships between healthcare outcomes and county characteristics from June 20, 2021 to March 19, 2022, which span across three time periods. The first two time periods, June 20, 2021 to September 18, 2021 and September 19, 2021 to December 18, 2021, are when Delia was dominant (> 50% of cases) in the U.S. and the thirdperiod, December 19, 2021 to March 19, 2022, is during Omicron's dominance (up to March 19, 2022).
ABSTRACT
Black/African American (Black thereafter) and Hispanic/Latino (Latinx thereafter) communities bear disproportionate burden of HIV infections in the U.S. These communities also tend to be disproportionately affected by social and structural determinants of health that hamper access to and engagement in HIV prevention and care services. Public health research efforts must advance HIV prevention and care through biomedical and structural interventions tailored to the needs of and culturally acceptable for the affected communities.The CDC Minority HIV Research Initiative (MARI) was established in 2003 to build capacity for HIV epidemiologic and prevention research in mostly Black and Latinx communities and among historically underrepresented early-career scientists working in highly affected communities. The MARI program supports the goal of promoting health equity and reducing HIV-related health disparities.From 2007–2020, 11 MARI investigators have developed HIV prevention interventions in highly affected communities. The interventions developed by seven MARI investigators will be discussed. Best practices about the recruitment and engagement of communities of color using evidence-based online recruitment campaigns, establishing community and scientific advisory boards, engaging community members in all stages of HIV research, and integration of mobile technologies to sustain HIV prevention and care interventions during the COVID-19 pandemic will be illustrated. We will also highlight the accomplishments of MARI investigators building successful partnerships with local health departments and community-based organizations to promote disseminations of findings and sustainability of interventions tailored to their communities. Lastly, we describe why initiatives like MARI that support the development of innovative and effective interventions to reduce HIV disparities in communities of color are essential to ending the HIV epidemic in the U.S.Ensuring the communities’ engagement in HIV policy changes and intervention development are crucial to intervention uptake and sustainability. As such, MARI research initiative is filling gaps in how we address HIV in racial/ethnic and sexual minority communities.
ABSTRACT
There is an immediate need to study COVID-19, and the COVID-19 Data Archive (COVID-ARC) provides access to data along with user-friendly tools for researchers to perform analyses to better understand COVID-19 and encourage collaboration on this research. The COVID-19 pandemic has been spreading rapidly across the world, and there are still many unknowns about COVID-19. There is an urgent need for scientists around the world to work together to model the virus, study how the virus has changed and will change over time, understand how it spreads, and study transmission after vaccination. COVID-ARC can also prepare scientists for future pandemics by putting the infrastructure in place to enable researchers to aggregate data and perform analyses quickly in the event of an emergency. We have developed a platform of networked and centralized web-accessible data archives to store multimodal data related to COVID-19 and make them broadly available and accessible to the world-wide scientific community to expedite research in this area. COVID-ARC provides tools for researchers to visualize and analyze various types of data as well as a website with tools for training, announcements, virtual information sessions, and a knowledgebase wherein researchers post questions and receive answers from the community.
ABSTRACT
This article provides a review of the underlying drivers of mortgage spreads at various points of the housing and economic cycle, with an in-depth look at the spreads between mortgage-backed securities (MBS) and Treasury rates and between mortgage and MBS rates. The authors provide evidence of the role of prepayment and credit-related risks, as well as lender capacity issues and large-scale asset purchases by the Federal Reserve in explaining these spreads. They also investigate recently observed differences in rates across purchase and refis as additional evidence of the role of capacity constraints in the persistent widened spreads during the ongoing COVID-19 outbreak. Copyright © 2020 Urban Institute. All rights reserved.