Chancellor Félix Matos Rodríguez wrote an op-ed for AM NY titled “CUNY Graduate & Professional Education: Key to City’s Strength, Future.” Reflecting on the City’s expected challenges during the coming winter months due to the pandemic, he detailed recent noteworthy CUNY contributions to battling the disease and highlighted other areas of innovation such as climate change solutions. He wrote “while there is no doubt we face daunting challenges, one thing I am confident about is the role CUNY will play in the City’s recovery and renewal.”

The surprise decision to reopen the city’s public elementary schools drew relief from parents and encouraged CUNY experts and others concerned about the remote learning’s impact on K-12 students. Epidemiologist and CUNY Graduate School of Public Health and Health Policy professor Denis Nash spoke to the Daily News for an article titled “NYC schools’ low COVID-19 test rate shows disease likely not spreading in classrooms — but experts see limits on data.” Nash, a frequent media contributor on the topic, has advocated for a targeted approach to monitoring and controlling spread in schools. “Surveillance testing has turned up much fewer cases than anyone expected” in the schools, he said. To monitor schools for potential outbreaks, he urged the city to take advantage of “pool” testing, where multiple samples – like an entire class – can be analyzed in the same batch.

_____Nash also contributed to Gothamist for a pair of articles addressing the city’s surge of infections, “NYC Health Department Study Identifies Household Contact And Gatherings Of 10 Or More As Major Factors In Virus Transmission” and “Micro-clusters, Colored Zones, & Competing Positivity Rates: Why NYC School Reopenings And Shutdowns Have Become So Complicated.” In the first, Nash responded to a new study of New Yorkers by the City’s Health Department showing household contact and gatherings of 10 or more people as the two main drivers of coronavirus infections. He urged health officials to release the full results of the study as soon as possible, pointing out that risk factors have been changing and new findings could potentially identify "weak spots" in the City's prevention measures.

_____Nash also urged the city to issue stronger and clearer guidance about mask wearing in settings outside public spaces. In the second article, he weighed in on public discussion about an anticipated second wave of the virus and a post-Thanksgiving spike in cases. "I believe the second wave has started," he said.

_____Graduate Center and Brooklyn College education professor David Bloomfield also addressed issues raised by resumption of in-person education in a Daily News article titled “No requirement for COVID-19 vax for kids returning to in-person learning – yet.” He said the City and state have legal authority to mandate COVID-19 testing consent and vaccination, especially while parents who decline have the option to keep their children in remote learning.

An opinion piece in the Daily News titled "Jobs today, mobility tomorrow: CUNY is doing a better job churning out future tech workers, but serious racial and gender disparities remain,” highlighted a recent report from the Center for an Urban Future that found significant gains over the last decade in science, technology, engineering or math degrees at 19 or 20 CUNY institutions.

_____The total number of students on track to become full-time workers in those fields grew from 4,671 in 2010 to more than 9,000 last year. However, the report noted that while the increase in STEM degrees has spanned all demographic groups, degrees in those fields are still being awarded disproportionately to white and Asian men.

_____John Jay economics professor Michelle Holder highlighted the pandemic’s disparate economic impact on women and minorities, particularly loss of employment, in Morningstar and The Atlantic. "There are negative penalties in the labor market associated with gender and race that can't be explained by anything else," Holder told Morningstar. Speaking to The Atlantic, Holder pointed to the impact of decisions by many states not to open public schools for in-person instruction, leading to hundreds of thousands dropping out of the labor force to supervise children’s online learning. “Working mothers and single mothers are having a miserable time in this recovery,” Holder said, also noting that the recession has amplified deep racial disparities, with a large share of Black and Latino workers losing jobs and many leaving the labor force entirely.

_____The pandemic was also addressed by Queens College professor David Rivera, who spoke with PIX 11 about the health impacts of racism, primarily its college students, for a story titled “Emotional toll of racism impacts both mental and physical health.”

SPH experts continue to be active participants in the discourse about new developments on the vaccine front. Over the past week, professor Bruce Lee weighed in on a Healthline article titled “Moderna COVID-19 Vaccine 94 Percent Effective in Early Results: Why We Need More Info,” and a Forbes piece, “How Much Will A Covid-19 Vaccine Cost?,” which says individuals will have very low if any out of pocket costs, similar to the flu vaccine, to help encourage wide adoption.

_____“The ultimate value of this vaccine will really be determined by coverage,” says Lee. “If only a certain percentage of people get the vaccine, then we won't really have enough coverage to make a dent in the spread of the virus.” SPH distinguished scholar Lyndon Haviland wrote an opinion piece for The Hill titled “Rebuilding public trust will instill COVID-19 vaccine confidence.”

_____Richard Stein, a professor at the Graduate Center and senior editor with the International Journal of Clinical Practice, was one of several experts to raise concern over social media challenges to vaccine adoption in a Yahoo Finance article titled “Coronavirus Vaccine: As U.S. Plans To Inoculate, Social Media Becomes Key.” Stein said he is concerned that “unfortunately, there is a very realistic potential for various social media platforms to become a vehicle to propagate and amplify misinformation and, as a result, to make it more difficult for the vaccines to be adopted.”

An article in QNS titled “Queens Farm partners with Queens College for annual food drive to support CUNY students,” featured a collaborative initiative to run through the holiday season. The article cited a Healthy CUNY Survey finding that CUNY students’ level of worry about food insecurity in 2020 (during the pandemic) was three times higher than in 2018.

_____The Queens Farm food drive to help feed food insecure students, in partnership with Queens College's Knights Table Food Pantry, will run through Thursday, December 31.