The impact of the rapid spread of COVID-19 has been felt throughout the world. More than 180 countries have reported cases bringing the total number of those confirmed with the virus to nearly 15 million worldwide with a death toll of more than 615,000 and growing daily. The economic shock of the pandemic has reverberated globally as countries have implemented stay-at-home orders, closed schools and offices, and required only essential employees to report to work. Hospitals working at the frontline of the pandemic have been overwhelmed with widespread community-level transmissions while healthcare personnel have reported chronic shortage of PPE and testing kits. Governments have launched unprecedented public-health and economic responses from the United States’ Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act, which allocated $2 trillion, with possibly more appropriations to come, for assistance to workers, families and businesses, and expanded health provisions to the suspension of mortgage payments in Italy, Germany and the U.K., among other measures. Elected leaders face the difficult task of balancing the very real and enormous needs of residents of their countries while maintaining economic productivity in the midst of frayed safety nets.
The fallout from a deadly pandemic and a contracted global economy of this magnitude has revealed the deep fissures of existing and chronic inequalities in the world along the dimensions of race and class, immigrant status, job security, capacities of overburdened public health systems, limited ability for local economies to withstand shocks and risks, access to technology and digital divides, governance, emergency preparedness and coordination at multiple levels of government. A variety of clear policy failures have already been identified and increasingly debated. These failures likely played a critical factor in the lack of an early and comprehensive response by the U.S. and calls for an urgent need for better and more coordinated scientific intelligence and data sharing at the highest levels. These failures also point out deficiencies in public policy arenas to take on large scale, uncertain, and disruptive threats that have come to be increasingly associated with extreme weather patterns as a result of climate change, and global pandemics like COVID-19 and SARS. This course explored the big questions raised by the global pandemic through an interdisciplinary lens of critical inquiry and analytic frameworks that will bring in perspectives from the social sciences, humanities, and STEM fields.
Student Presentations
Implementing a Citywide Single-Payer Health Insurance Program to Improve Public Health in New York City
Sophia Lamsifer, Adelcy Sanchez & Louis Lee
COVID-19 and the Economy
Liam O’Connor, Kyle Seidenberg, Emily Harrilall & Vanessa Fuentes
Higher Education: 2+2 Policy Change
Cheryl Hege, Giorgi Karumidze & Marissa Cronin
A Tale of Two Community Districts: The Physical Environment and Its’ Relationship to COVID-19 in New York City
Raisa Lin Garden-Lucerna, Leonardo Perez & Olivier Plumer
Course Syllabus
Course Coordinators
William Solecki, Department of Geography and Environmental Science and Shyama Venkateswar, Director and Distinguished Lecturer, Public Policy Program
Guest Instructors
Yarimar Bonilla, Department of Africana, Puerto Rican and Latino Studies; Partha Deb, Department of Economics; Ruth Finkelstein, Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging & Department of Public Health; Peter Marcotullio, Department of Geography and Environmental Science; Ellen McCabe, School of Nursing; Sanford Schram, Department of Political Science; Catherine Voulgarides, Department of Special Education; Stephanie Woolhandler, Department of Public Health
