ABSTRACT
Introduction: With the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the utilization of telemedicine now offered an alternative diagnostic and treatment resource to providers in many areas of medicine including oncology and cancer genetics. This care option paired with genetic testing labs' ability to send saliva-based DNA collection kits to patients, enabled our community hospital in Detroit to offer diagnostic testing without the patient coming to a healthcare setting for a host of reasons. Social determinants of health have been found to influence success with telehealth, and this study sought to analyze how successful telehealth cancer genetics care was throughout the Detroit Metro area. Methods: Patient demographics for in person visits six months before COVID were analyzed, and then compared with demographics of patients during the 2020-2021 pandemic period where visits were telehealth. Results: Pre-pandemic there were , 192 unique patients seen in person with the top three cities patients were from were Detroit (12.1%), Clinton Township (8.3%), and Saint Clair Shores (10.4%). During the pandemic, with telehealth as the major modality, the top three cities were Macomb (7.2%), Detroit (7%), and Clinton Township (7%). Detroit is in Wayne County, while St.Clair Shores and Clinton Township are in Macomb County. Per the US Census Bureau Macomb county has a median income of $64,641 and Wayne county has a median income of $49,359, and poverty level in Macomb county is 9.2% versus in Wayne the level is 20%. Conclusions: This paper outlines the challenges of initiating a telemedicine program in an urban community area and highlights the benefits of a concierge service in serving cancer patients who may have economic and historically poor perceived technologic abilities.
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The North American International Auto Show (NAIAS) returned to Detroit in September after a three-year hiatus due to the COVID-19 pandemic, and it could fairly be described as weird. Becker usually attends to see not just the latest automobile designs but the newest technology. This year, the show was smaller than ever, had fewer automakers participating and had almost no displays on the inner workings of the vehicles. How did the public react? One measure would be attendance, which in prepandemic years often exceeded 800,000 people. Unfortunately, the Detroit Auto Dealers Association (DADA), which runs the show, has announced it will not be releasing attendance figures this year. A DADA spokesperson, Frank Buscemi, didn't explain the reason behind this decision. His guess is that the number would be embarrassingly small.
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Chin asserts that before the COVID-19 pandemic, over 40,000 Chinese restaurants were operating across America. That's more than all the McDonalds, KFC's, Wendy's and Pizza Huts combined. Located in nearly every community and corner of the country, these ubiquitous establishments, big and small, are as American as apple pie, and, of course, more delicious. The $15 billion Chinese restaurant industry, which includes many independently owned family businesses, was amongst the first to be hit, and hit hard, by the economic crisis wrought by the coronavirus. The first Chinese restaurant in America, the Canton Restaurant, opened in San Francisco in 1849. Thousands of Chinese men had left Southern China to mine for treasures on Gold Mountain. These bachelors needed a place to eat. By 1850, there were five such establishments. However, the growing wave of anti-Asian immigration policies, including the Chinese Exclusion Act, kept the community small and limited the number of Chinese restaurants to a dozen or so.
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Low-income older people in particular face a number of risks and precarities related to health, housing, and care. This article offers case studies from members of a city-wide advocacy group, Senior Housing Preservation-Detroit. Although the coalition's work began in raising awareness about risks arising from displacement due to HUD building contracts expiring, its work was altered by COVID-19. Thus the article outlines how community-based initiatives protected older residents from risks at the intersections of poverty, housing, and health amidst the COVID-19 pandemic.
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GeoHealth research both characterizes and predicts problems at the nexus of earth and human systems like climate change, pollution, and natural hazards. While GeoHealth excels in the area of integrated science, there is a need to improve coordinated and networked efforts to produce open science to enable environmental justice. There is a need to resource and empower frontline populations that are disproportionately marginalized by environmental injustice (i.e., the unequal protection from environmental harms and lack of access and meaningful engagement in decision making for a healthy environment;EPA, 2022, https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice). GeoHealth practice has the opportunity to advance environmental justice or the “fair treatment and meaningful involvement of all people regardless of race, color, national origin, or income” with respect to how research and collaboration of GeoHealth professionals supports the “development, implementation, and enforcement of environmental laws, regulations, and policies” that produce equal protection from environmental and health hazards and access to the decision making for a health environment (EPA, 2022, https://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice). Here we highlight barriers and opportunities to apply an equity‐centered ICON framework to the field of GeoHealth to advance environmental justice and health equity.
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An obituary for Janet L. Langlois, a leading legend scholar, who died on May 22, 2021, is presented. Langlois received a master's degree in Library Science and then joined the doctoral program in folklore at Indiana University, receiving her PhD in 1977. That same year, she became Professor of English and Folklore Studies at Wayne State University, where she taught for 38 years. A two-time winner of Wayne State's President';s Award for Excellence in Teaching, she influenced countless students and fellow scholars, both in classes at Wayne State and through her folklore publications and talks.
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When COVID-19 was first reported in the United States in spring 2020, it illuminated society to the vast inequities that racially marginalized populations face in comparison to their White counterparts. Metropolitan areas, in particular, were hit the hardest by the pandemic. New York City and Detroit, cities with large numbers of racially marginalized populations, experienced high COVID-19 test positivity rates during the pandemic's first and second waves. It is the aim of this research note to provide policymakers, practitioners, and healthcare personnel with an overview of response and recovery efforts through an analysis of the intersection between racially marginalized groups and access to healthcare in New York City and Detroit. We propose three recommendations: 1) increased centralized data on the differences between racially marginalized populations and non-minorities;2) additional federal funding to local health departments;and 3) the utilization of faith-based and community-based organizations as additional COVID-19 testing sites.
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[...]the principal aspects of heterogeneity that produce complexity in MOFs, their effects in the structure chemistry, performance and applications have been thoroughly reported. Since there is no other book that covers all of the aspects of complexity in MOFs with heterogeneous structures, the findings can be seen as essential concepts, with introducing complexity to design, the new platforms of materials with advanced and better properties in the future. Visitors from both the lubricant community and end-user OEMs will find a comprehensive showcase of all lubricant technologies, including finished lubricants, additives, process equipment and machinery, condition monitoring, automation systems, testing and analysis, data technologies, lubricant manufacturing equipment, end-user application systems and more. The Lubricant Expo will provide a dedicated showcase of the technology and knowledge needed to reduce costs, improve efficiency, maximize the performance of lubricants, achieve the requirements of the products they enable and preserve the health of machinery across operating environments.
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Native American descendants, archaeologists, non-profit organisations and environmental activists have joined forces to call for landscape-scale studies before government agencies allow further leases. Perhaps the most obvious of these new materialities relates to personal protective equipment, or PPE—plastic face masks, gloves and aprons—as well as the vials and syringes now used to deliver life-saving vaccines. With billions of items of plastic waste generated since the start of the pandemic, the authors argue that archaeologists can bring a distinctive perspective to the problem—one that threatens to reverse recent trends away from single-use plastics—by working with other specialists to influence public policy (Figure 1). In Islands of abandonment: life in the post-human landscape, Cal Flyn travels to a series of places around the world, from Pripyat near Chernobyl to Paterson, New Jersey, which have been abandoned for a variety of reasons.5 Surprisingly, she finds these deserted towns and industrial complexes full of life;in the absence of humans, even the most toxic and polluted of built environments have been recolonised by animals and plant life.