COVID-19 brings a new urgency for advance care planning: Implications of death education.

The U.S. has the highest number of coronavirus disease (COVID-19) cases and deaths of any nation. Deaths due to COVID-19, especially among older adults and people of color, have created an urgency for advanced care planning (ACP). Despite benefits of ACP, only one-third of U.S. adults have completed advance directives, in part due to a lack of death education. We recommend four actions to increase death education and ACP completion: (1) integrate death education into teacher preparation programs, (2) incorporate death education in undergraduate curricula, (3) provide better education in death and dying to future health professionals, and (4) educate the public.

The COVID-19 pandemic has changed dying and grief: Will there be a surge of complicated grief?

Worldwide, more than 3 million people have died from COVID-19. Each decedent represents a person who was loved, will be missed, and whose death elicited grief. COVID-19 has changed the way we die and grieve. Many people have died without family members and friends present and many of the bereft have grieved and mourned alone. Individuals and communities have experienced multiple losses within a short time while suffering from concomitant stress, anxiety, and depression. More deaths and more grief will continue in the foreseeable future. Preventive education is needed to prepare for and manage the likely increase in complicated grief.

Indoor and Outdoor Radon Concentration Levels in Lebanon.

Lebanon's lung cancer rates, among the highest in the Arab region, contribute to the burden of noncommunicable diseases. A number of studies have shown that lung cancer risk increases when smokers vs. nonsmokers exposed to elevated radon levels are compared. This research employs indoor and outdoor space and time concentration surveys across Lebanon, where the smoking rate among the population is among the highest in the world. The distributional properties of measured radon concentration were shown to be lognormal with median indoor and outdoor concentrations of 17 and 10 Bq m, respectively. Standard deviation for indoor concentrations was 1.2 times smaller than its outdoor counterpart, suggesting that weather-related patterns affect outdoor radon concentration variability. No significant spatial association was detected across seasons for indoor and outdoor radon concentrations. Geographical location, proximity to faults, and housing construction material had no significant impact on outdoor and indoor radon concentration variations. When lognormal distributions were used to determine exceedance probability of the recommended reference radon concentration, they were smaller than 0.1%. While exhibiting high seasonal variability, the study shows that radon does not appear to be a public health concern in Lebanon.