Yahoo Finance’s Julie Hyman, Brian Sozzi, and Myles Udland discuss COVID-19 and hospital staffing outlook with Dr. Patricia Pittman, director of the Fitzhugh Mullan Institute of Health Workforce Equity and George Washington University Professor of Health Policy at the Milken Institute School of Public Health. Watch the full interview here. 

Ed Salsberg was recently featured in this Nature article by Dyani Lewis where he discusses how a national or regional health workers could service different communities and bolster contact tracing efforts as COVID-19 hotspots occur.

When Ebola ripped through communities in West Africa between 2014 and 2016, Tolbert Nyenswah saw at first hand how health workers extinguished the epidemic by finding and quarantining contacts of those who caught the disease. The former director of Liberia’s public-health institute thought contact-tracers would again rise to the challenge this year, keeping COVID-19 in check as it swept the globe. “Contact-tracing is one of the greatest tools that countries should deploy and use effectively to contain the outbreak,” he says.
But nine months after the World Health Organization (WHO) declared COVID-19 a pandemic, few countries are wielding contact-tracing effectively. “By now, what I was expecting is that 100% of people coming in contact with COVID-19 would have been traced,” says Nyenswah, now an infectious-diseases researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health in Baltimore, Maryland.

​Read the full article here. 

​As COVID-19 cases continue to surge across the U.S., the country is projected to face a staffing shortage in the healthcare industry in the next 30 days. Yahoo Finance’s Brian Sozzi, Myles Udland, and Julie Hyman discuss with Dr. Patricia Pittman of Fitzhugh Mullan Professor of Health Workforce Equity. 

Contact tracers have struggled for months to manage the massive undertaking of effectively tracking and stopping the chain of coronavirus infections in the region. Now they face a new challenge: bracing for a possible explosion of cases during the holiday season with only their existing slate of resources.

As the pandemic has stretched into its ninth month and fatigue with coronavirus-related restrictions has set in, cases in the D.C. region have soared to levels not seen since the spring.
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DCist/WAMU reporters spoke with local officials and public health experts throughout the region to review what they are learning about how COVID-19 is spreading through communities, and to understand how effective local contact tracing efforts have been up to this point in the pandemic. Read full article. 

Mullan Institute director, Dr. Patricia (Polly) Pittman was quoted in an article by the Associated Press that also appeared in The Washington Post. 

Public health programs in the United States have seen a surge in enrollment as the coronavirus has swept through the country, killing more than 247,000 people. As state and local public health departments struggle with unprecedented challenges — slashed budgets, surging demand, staff departures and even threats to workers’ safety —- a new generation is entering the field. Read full article.