Designed to complement formal course instruction, CSDE Workshops are offered in a shorter, more accessible format responsive to the specific demographic research needs of CSDE’s Trainees and Faculty Affiliates. This Spring quarter, CSDE is offering virtual Workshops on the topics below. Click on any Workshop to learn more and register:

• Microsoft Word for the Social Sciences – Phil Hurvitz (Monday April 20, 12:30-3:30 via Zoom)

In a recent published in The Seattle Times, Katherine Beckett from the UW’s Department of Law, Societies, and Justice (LSJ)  and CSDE Affiliate Anjum Hajat detail how a COVID-19 outbreak in prisons and jails could be a death sentence for those incarcerated—especially due to the expanding population of incarcerated elderly individuals and a severe lack of adequate health care in prisons. Additionally, a limited capacity for social distancing and a lack of access to cleaning materials including soap are each compounding factors that make the prison population severely vulnerable to the illness. Therefore, Beckett and Hajat urge leaders to immediately adopt “prevention efforts… to avoid needless deaths…in addition, immediate steps should be taken to release the most medically vulnerable people.”

Beckett and Hajat conclude, “Gov. Inslee has the authority to take these steps in an emergency…COVID-19 is, undoubtedly, such an emergency…the health and safety of some of our most vulnerable community members depends on our willingness to act now.”

CSDE Regional Affiliate David Swanson predicts that, without immediate action from leadership in Whatcom County to gather necessary resources, the coronavirus will surge to a massive peak in the county by April 25th.  His projections were published in the Northwest Citizen on March 30, updated on April 3 and then informed another article about hospitalizations, also in the Northwest Citizen on April 6.  Swanson calculated this forecast by using confirmed cases from the COVID-19 website set up at Johns Hopkins University. With these data, Swanson “constructed a simple, extrapolative geometric model that is used to forecast confirmed cumulative and new COVID-19 cases by day to April 25th.” This peak will result in potentially harmful local consequences, especially in overwhelming Washington’s health care systems. Swanson’s recent update depicting results of social distancing measures—demonstrates that the number of peak cases will be lower than the initial prediction.

Swanson deliberately used a simple geometric model to do the forecasts for Whatcom County because sophisticated ones require so much data that they typically are not usable for a small area finding itself in the initial surge of a pandemic. He felt it was vital that people living in counties and small towns have some idea of what they might be facing rather than remaining in the dark. As more data become available he plans to develop more sophisticated models to which the accuracy – or more generally, the utility – of the simple geometric model can compared. 

In publishing his predictions for The Northwest Citizen, Swanson writes “while these results are welcome news, keep in mind that the updated results will still heavily impact our healthcare system…moreover, this update suggests we can expect that 1.2 percent of the population of Whatcom County will have been infected by April 25^th.” Swanson will publish continual updates through the Northwest Citizen. Click the link below to see where you can find these updates. 

Workers from large corporations such as Instacart, Amazon, and Whole Foods are organizing strikes and protests for enhanced safety measures and sufficient pay to compensate for risky working conditions. In a recent New York Times article, CSDE Regional Affiliate Jake Rosenfeld provided expertise on the effectiveness of workers’ actions. Rosenfeld explains that organizing is generally unusual in declining economic times. Rosenfeld also suggest that he is “skeptical that these kinds of protests would achieve much without help from legislation or unions.”

The New York Times featured Rosenfeld in an additional article on organizing in which he states, “he was skeptical that workers could capitalize on the current anxiety and frustration absent favorable legislation that enables organizing, a more accommodating response from employers or more robust assistance from established institutions, like existing unions.”

The Population Health Initiative has launched a COVID-19 rapid response grant program to support the University of Washington research community in quickly responding to the vast array of population health-related challenges created by the COVID-19 pandemic. Awards of up to $20,000 each are available. The initiative will fund at least five grants, with one of the awards supported by the university’s Office of Global Affairs. The period of performance for these awards is four months. Applications are due on April 16, 2020. The purpose of this funding call is to rapidly accelerate, or jumpstart, novel research designed to better understand or mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on multiple facets of life. The call is broad in scope, and applications can propose interventions in areas including, but not limited to, the following:

• Basic research/understanding the fundamental mechanisms of the virus
• Basic research on population dynamics and social contexts influencing infection spread and containment
• Diagnostics
• Treatments
• Approaches to rapidly scaling production of personal protective or essential equipment like ventilators
• Preparing for effective mass immunization once a vaccine becomes available
• Economic and social impacts and recovery approaches, including addressing issues of equity
• Mental health impacts
• Risk communications/flow of information/impact of communicating interventions like social distancing/other communication

Project ideas can be proposed that will either (1) quickly bring to bear new knowledge, or (2) that will allow work on a larger, longer-term project to begin immediately as the project team continues to seek the necessary external funding for the bigger component.

Applicants are encouraged to propose projects involving interdisciplinary collaborations as the initiative views such partnerships as being critical to improving health and well-being.

Recent legislation, such as the Families First Coronavirus Response Act and the Coronavirus, Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, has provided some financial and tax relief. Student loan payments are automatically deferred until Sep. 30, 2020.  Anyone with almost any kind of federal student loans (with some exceptions) will have their payments automatically suspended for up to six months with no accrual of interest. These six months will, however, still count as progress towards forgiveness under Public Service Loan Forgiveness (PSLF) or any Income-Driven Repayment Plan, such as Pay As You Earn (PAYE), Revised Pay As You Earn (REPAYE) and Income-Based Repayment (IBR). This expands and extends the student loan interest accrual and payment freeze that has been in place since March 13, 2020. Please note that these benefits do not apply to private loans (i.e. loans that were refinanced with private financial institutions), FFEL loans held by private institutions, or loans made by the Department of Health.

For further information and FAQs, please click the link below.

This Friday, Stefanie DeLuca from Johns Hopkins University’s Sociology Department will present results from a study about upward income mobility and barriers to neighborhood choice. The premise of their research begins with the observation that low-income families in the US tend to live in neighborhoods that offer limited opportunities for upward income mobility. DeLuca and co-authors evaluate several explanations for this observed pattern. One explanation is that families prefer such neighborhoods for other reasons, such as affordability or proximity to jobs. An alternative explanation is that they do not move to high-opportunity areas due to various barriers. Their study employs a randomized controlled trial with housing voucher recipients in Seattle and King County. They conclude that redesigning affordable housing policies to provide customized assistance in housing search could reduce residential segregation and increase upward mobility substantially.

Register for Stefanie DeLuca’s Zoom Seminar HERE