How Did Reskilling During the COVID-19 Pandemic Relate to Entrepreneurship and Optimism? Barriers, Opportunities, and Implications for Equity.

With shorter durations and fewer barriers to entry, reskilling programs may serve as vehicles for social mobility and equity, as well as tools for creating a more adaptive workforce and inclusive economy. Nevertheless, much of the limited large-scale research on these types of programs was conducted prior to the COVID-19 pandemic. Thus, given the social and economic disruptions spurred by the pandemic, our ability to understand the impact of these types of programs in recent labor market conditions is limited. We fill this gap by leveraging three waves of a longitudinal household financial survey collected across all 50 US states during the pandemic. Through descriptive and inferential methods, we explore the sociodemographic characteristics related to reskilling and associated motivations, facilitators, and barriers, as well as the relationships between reskilling and measures of social mobility. We find that reskilling is positively related to entrepreneurship and, for Black respondents, to optimism. Moreover, we find that reskilling is not merely a tool for upward social mobility, but also economic stability. However, our results demonstrate that reskilling opportunities are stratified across race/ethnicity, gender, and socioeconomic status through both formal and informal mechanisms. We close with a discussion of implications for policy and practice.

Drivers of High Concentrations of Secondary Organic Aerosols in Northern China during the COVID-19 Lockdowns.

During the COVID-19 lockdown in early 2020, observations in Beijing indicate that secondary organic aerosol (SOA) concentrations increased despite substantial emission reduction, but the reasons are not fully explained. Here, we integrate the two-dimensional volatility basis set into a state-of-the-art chemical transport model, which unprecedentedly reproduces organic aerosol (OA) components resolved by the positive matrix factorization based on aerosol mass spectrometer observations. The model shows that, for Beijing, the emission reduction during the lockdown lowered primary organic aerosol (POA)/SOA concentrations by 50%/18%, while deteriorated meteorological conditions increased them by 30%/119%, resulting in a net decrease in the POA concentration and a net increase in the SOA concentration. Emission reduction and meteorological changes both led to an increased OH concentration, which accounts for their distinct effects on POA and SOA. SOA from anthropogenic volatile organic compounds and organics with lower volatility contributed 28 and 62%, respectively, to the net SOA increase. Different from Beijing, the SOA concentration decreased in southern Hebei during the lockdown because of more favorable meteorology. Our findings confirm the effectiveness of organic emission reductions and meanwhile reveal the challenge in controlling SOA pollution that calls for large organic precursor emission reductions to rival the adverse impact of OH increase.

Doubling Down on Racial Capitalism during COVID-19: Qualitative Interviews with Bank Employees

The COVID-19 Pandemic Recession has revealed examples of systematic discrimination within a wide range of industries, including banking. Using data from interviews conducted with bank employees in March and April 2020, we explore how private banks exemplify racialized organizations and operate within the broader economic system of racial capitalism that prioritizes pursuit of profits over the interests of their customers. We explain how the banking industry’s responses to the pandemic reflect the logic of racial capitalism, and we develop the theme of doubling down to illustrate this logic and to explain the patterns revealed in employees’ narratives. Subthemes included pursuit of profits, bureaucratic mundane, forced choices, history limits imagination, and dissonance. We conclude with implications for the banking industry.

Variations and Sources of Organic Aerosol in Winter Beijing under Markedly Reduced Anthropogenic Activities During COVID-2019.

The COVID-19 outbreak provides a "controlled experiment" to investigate the response of aerosol pollution to the reduction of anthropogenic activities. Here we explore the chemical characteristics, variations, and emission sources of organic aerosol (OA) based on the observation of air pollutants and combination of aerosol mass spectrometer (AMS) and positive matrix factorization (PMF) analysis in Beijing in early 2020. By eliminating the impacts of atmospheric boundary layer and the Spring Festival, we found that the lockdown effectively reduced cooking-related OA (COA) but influenced fossil fuel combustion OA (FFOA) very little. In contrast, both secondary OA (SOA) and O3 formation was enhanced significantly after lockdown: less-oxidized oxygenated OA (LO-OOA, 37% in OA) was probably an aged product from fossil fuel and biomass burning emission with aqueous chemistry being an important formation pathway, while more-oxidized oxygenated OA (MO-OOA, 41% in OA) was affected by regional transport of air pollutants and related with both aqueous and photochemical processes. Combining FFOA and LO-OOA, more than 50% of OA pollution was attributed to combustion activities during the whole observation period. Our findings highlight that fossil fuel/biomass combustion are still the largest sources of OA pollution, and only controlling traffic and cooking emissions cannot efficiently eliminate the heavy air pollution in winter Beijing.

Non-negligible contributions to human health from increased household air pollution exposure during the COVID-19 lockdown in China.

BACKGROUND: Ambient and household air pollution are found to lead to premature deaths from all-cause or cause-specific death. The national lockdown measures in China during COVID-19 were found to lead to abrupt changes in ambient surface air quality, but indoor air quality changes were neglected. In this study, we aim to investigate the impacts of lockdown measures on both ambient and household air pollution as well as the short-term health effects of air pollution changes. METHODS: In this study, an up-to-date emission inventory from January to March 2020 in China was developed based on air quality observations in combination with emission-concentration response functions derived from chemical transport modeling. These emission inventories, together with the emissions data from 2017 to 2019, were fed into the state-of-the-art regional chemistry transport model to simulate the air quality in the North China Plain. A hypothetical scenario assuming no lockdown effects in 2020 was also performed to determine the effects of the lockdown on air quality in 2020. A difference-to-difference approach was adopted to isolate the effects on air quality due to meteorological conditions and long-term decreasing emission trends by comparing the PM2.5 changes during lockdown to those before lockdown in 2020 and in previous years (2017-2019). The short-term premature mortality changes from both ambient and household PM2.5 changes were quantified based on two recent epidemiological studies, with uncertainty of urban and rural population migration considerations. FINDINGS: The national lockdown measures during COVID-19 led to a reduction of 5.1 µg m-3 in ambient PM2.5 across the North China Plain (NCP) from January 25th to March 5th compared with the hypothetical simulation with no lockdown measures. However, a difference-to-difference method showed that the daily domain average PM2.5 in the NCP decreased by 9.7 µg m-3 between lockdown periods before lockdown in 2020, while it decreased by 7.9 µg m-3 during the same periods for the previous three-year average from 2017 to 2019, demonstrating that lockdown measures may only have caused a 1.8 µg m-3 decrease in the NCP. We then found that the integrated population-weighted PM2.5, including both ambient and indoor PM2.5 exposure, increased by 5.1 µg m-3 during the lockdown periods compared to the hypothetical scenario, leading to additional premature deaths of 609 (95% CI: 415-775) to 2,860 (95% CI: 1,436-4,273) in the short term, depending on the relative risk chosen from the epidemiological studies. INTERPRETATION: Our study indicates that lockdown measures in China led to abrupt reductions in ambient PM2.5 concentration but also led to significant increases in indoor PM2.5 exposure due to confined indoor activities and increased usages of household fuel for cooking and heating. We estimated that hundreds of premature deaths were added as a combination of decreased ambient PM2.5 and increased household PM2.5. Our findings suggest that the reduction in ambient PM2.5 was negated by increased exposure to household air pollution, resulting in an overall increase in integrated population weighted exposure. Although lockdown measures were instrumental in reducing the exposure to pollution concentration in cities, rural areas bore the brunt, mainly due to the use of dirty solid fuels, increased population density due to the large-scale migration of people from urban to rural areas during the Chinese New Year and long exposure time to HAP due to restrictions in outdoor movement.

Four-Month Changes in Air Quality during and after the COVID-19 Lockdown in Six Megacities in China

The pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) resulted in a stringent lockdown in China to reduce the infection rate. We adopted a machine learning technique to analyze the air quality impacts of the COVID-19 lockdown from January to April 2020 for six megacities with different lockdown durations. Compared with the scenario without lockdowns, we estimated that the lockdown reduced ambient NO2 concentrations by 36–53% during the most restrictive periods, which involved Level-1 public health emergency response control actions. Several cities lifted the Level-1 control actions during February and March, and the avoided NO2 concentrations subsequently dropped below 10% in late April. Traffic analysis during the same periods in Beijing and Chengdu confirmed that traffic emission changes were a major factor in the substantial NO2 reduction, but they were also associated with increased O3 concentrations. The lockdown also reduced PM2.5 concentrations, although heavy pollution episodes occurred on certain days due to the enhanced formation of secondary aerosols in association with the increased atmospheric oxidizing capacity. We also observed that the changes in air pollution levels decreased as the lockdown was gradually eased in various cities.