Managing Mass Fatalities during COVID-19: Lessons for Promoting Community Resilience during Global Pandemics

Impact of the COVID-19 Pandemic on Funerals: Experiences of Participants in the 2020 Dying2Learn Massive Open Online Course

A Massive-Open-Online-Course (MOOC) on death and dying (Dying2Learn) was offered in 2020, designed to build conversations about death as a natural part of life. In week 1, the content focused on how today's society engages with death through the language we use, humour, public mourning and funerals. This study investigated 2020 MOOC participants' responses to an online activity reflecting on funerals and memorials during the time of COVID-19. From this activity, n = 204 responses were analysed qualitatively. Themes included the positives and negatives of virtual funeral attendance (e.g. opportunity to have a way to participate when travel barriers existed, versus a sense of impersonal voyeurism); and the challenges related to the inability to physically comfort the bereaved due to physical distancing requirements. Comments made as part of this MOOC activity provide a unique insight into the community's experience of funeral changes necessitated by COVID-19, with important implications for the grieving process.

Thriving Despite the Odds: Digital Capital and Reimagined Life Projects Among Mexican College Students During COVID-19

During the pandemic, Mexico experienced one of the longest periods of school closures in Latin America. After the first year of COVID-19, thousands of college students dropped out of school, which has been partially attributed to difficulties in adapting to online learning. This study examines how some college students in Mexico coped with and overcame these challenges. Our research draws on journals of and in-depth interviews with Mexican college students who participated in the Pandemic Journaling Project-a combined online journaling platform and research study. Participant accounts describe challenges students experienced navigating the rapid roll-out of online education. However, over time, many of the students in our study cultivated a renewed sense of purpose in their educational activities. They attributed this shift in perspective to their ability to carve out new approaches to social support, the development of professional capacities, and insight into the potential for technology to promote a more inclusive society. Our work shows how students' ability to integrate digital competencies into their broader life projects and aspirations for the future played an important role in college perseverance and reducing mental health distress. Findings have important implications for the potential role of increased access to technological resources in mitigating social inequity and improving mental health outcomes among young adults.

Inequity after death: Exploring the equitable utilization of FEMA's COVID-19 funeral assistance funds

As of March 2021, the United States had nearly 1 million COVID-19 deaths. To aid families, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) established the Funeral Assistance Program. Using publicly available data, we examine the equitable utilization of FEMA's COVID-19 Funeral Assistance Program funding. Results show a significant relationship between FEMA COVID-19 Funeral Assistance Program funding and some, but not all, social vulnerability components. Specifically, counties with higher percentages of the population with disabilities and higher percentages of minorities receive lower amounts of funding per 100,000 residents. These findings suggest that FEMA's equity efforts are not fully materializing regarding the utilization of the FEMA COVID-19 Funeral Assistance Program funding among socially vulnerable groups. FEMA should broaden its social equity outreach and priorities for those not traditionally considered in social equity discussions, such as people with disabilities while continuing efforts toward traditional social equity.

Potential SARS-CoV-2 contamination of groundwater as a result of mass burial: A mini-review

The recent COVID-19 disease has highlighted the need for further research around the risk to human health and the environment because of mass burial of COVID-19 victims. Despite SARS-CoV-2 being an enveloped virus, which is highly susceptible to environmental conditions (temperature, solar/UV exposure). This review provides insight into the potential of SARS-CoV-2 to contaminate groundwater through burial sites, the impact of various types of burial practices on SARS-CoV-2 survival, and current knowledge gaps that need to be addressed to ensure that humans and ecosystems are adequately protected from SARS-CoV-2. Data available shows temperature is still likely to be the driving factor when it comes to survival and infectivity of SARS-CoV-2. Research conducted at cemetery sites globally using various bacteriophages (MS2, PRD1, faecal coliforms) and viruses (TGEV, MHV) as surrogates for pathogenic enteric viruses to study the fate and transport of these viruses showed considerable contamination of groundwater, particularly where there is a shallow vadose zone and heterogeneous structures are known to exist with very low residence times. In addition, changes in solution chemistry (e.g., decrease in ionic strength or increase in pH) during rainfall events produces large pulses of released colloids that can result in attached viruses becoming remobilised, with implications for groundwater contamination. Viruses cannot spread unaided through the vadose zone. Since groundwater is too deep to be in contact with the interred body and migration rates are very slow, except where preferential flow paths are known to exist, the groundwater table will not be significantly impacted by contamination from SARS-CoV-2. When burial takes place using scientifically defensible methods the possibility of infection will be highly improbable. Furthermore, the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic has helped us to prepare for other eventualities such as natural disasters where mass fatalities and subsequently burials may take place in a relatively short space of time.

Key Influencing Factors and Optimization Strategy of Epidemic Resilience in Urban Communities-A Case Study of Nanjing, China

COVID-19 has posed a significantly severe impact on both people’s lives and the global economic development. Increasing the community epidemic resilience will considerably improve the national public health emergency response capacity from bottom to top. This study identifies the influencing factors of community epidemic resilience through systematic literature review under the 4R framework, then obtains the relationships of influencing factors through Interpretive structural model, and finally assesses the performance of epidemic resilience using PROMETHEE II method through empirical cases in Nanjing, China. The results show that: (1) Eight factors influencing the epidemic resilience of community are identified, and the economic level plays the root role; (2) Community epidemic resilience can be improved from robustness, rapidity, redundancy and resourcefulness aspects; (3) Through the empirical analysis, the epidemic resilience ranking of community can be displayed (Community D > T > S > F); (4) Additionally, the performance and sensitivity analysis of influencing factors in each community can be demonstrated. (5) Finally, four implications are proposed, namely, allocating public resources rationally, significantly increasing the economic level, ensuring the accuracy of information delivery and conducting disaster learning.

Assessing the Capability of Government Information Intervention and Socioeconomic Factors of Information Sharing during the COVID-19 Pandemic: A Cross-Country Study Using Big Data Analytics

(1) Background: This study introduces a novel computational approach to examine government capabilities in information intervention for risk management, influential agents in a global information network, and the socioeconomic factors of information-sharing behaviors of the public across regions during the COVID-19 pandemic. (2) Methods: Citation network analysis was employed to gauge the online visibility of governmental health institutions across regions. A bipartite exponential random graph modeling (ERGM) procedure was conducted to measure network dynamics. (3) Results: COVID-19 response agencies in Europe had the highest web impact, whereas health agencies in North America had the lowest. Various stakeholders, such as businesses, non-profit organizations, governments, and educational institutions played a key role in sharing the COVID-19 response by agencies' information given on their websites. Income inequality and GDP per capita were associated with the high online visibility of governmental health agencies. Other factors, such as population size, an aging population, death rate, and case percentage, did not contribute to the agencies' online visibility, suggesting that demographic characteristics and health status are not predictors of sharing government resources. (4) Conclusions: A combination of citation network analysis and ERGM helps reveal information flow dynamics and understand the socioeconomic consequences of sharing the government's COVID-19 information during the pandemic.

Policy preferences in response to negative economic prospects of COVID-19: A survey-experiment among local politicians in four European countries

This study investigates how the negative economic prospects of the COVID-19 pandemic affect local government politicians' policy preferences in the Netherlands, the United Kingdom, Switzerland, and Spain. The study examines to what extent politicians prefer increasing the role of government (directive state), transferring public tasks to private sector organizations (hollow state), transferring public tasks to third sector organizations (communitarian state), or downsizing and reducing the role of government without transferring tasks (coping state). The experiment primes decision-makers on the pandemic's negative financial and economic prospects vis-à-vis its impact on health and well-being. When negative economic prospects are emphasized, the study finds decreased preferences for a directive state and increased preferences for a coping state. The study concludes that how decision-makers interpret the nature of a crisis determines their preferred response: An emphasis on the negative economic prospects of the COVID-19 pandemic is likely to increase preferences for renewed policies of austerity.

A review of COVID-19's impact on modern medical systems from a health organization management perspective

The novel SARS-CoV-2 (COVID-19) disrupted many facets of the healthcare industry throughout the pandemic and has likely permanently altered modern healthcare delivery. It has been shown that existing healthcare infrastructure influenced national responses to COVID-19, but the current implications and resultant sequelae of the pandemic on the organizational framework of healthcare remains largely unknown. This paper aims to review how aspects of contemporary medical systems - the physical environment of care delivery, global healthcare supply chains, workforce structures, information and communication systems, scientific collaboration, as well as policy frameworks - evolved in the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic.

Confident futures: Community-based organizations as first responders and agents of change in the face of the Covid-19 pandemic

This comparative study of community organizations serving marginalized youth in New York City and Amsterdam utilized a novel ethnographic approach called reverse engineering to identify techniques for social change that are active in each organization, adaptable and translatable to other contexts. It found that youth-serving organizations led flexible responses to the crisis of COVID-19 as it affected those marginalized by race, immigrant status, housing instability, religion and gender. The organizations employed techniques that they had previously developed to cultivate youth well-being – among them connectivity, safe space, and creativity – to mount tailored responses to COVID-19 related crises. In New York City, these groups addressed crises of material survival resources (personal protective equipment, food, housing) whereas in Amsterdam, youth-serving organizations focused on social connections and emotional well-being as the government met more of participants’ material needs.

Ethical and sociocultural challenges in managing dead bodies during epidemics and natural disasters

Background

Catastrophic natural disasters and epidemics claim thousands of lives and have severe and lasting consequences, accompanied by human suffering. The Ebola epidemic of 2014–2016 and the current COVID-19 pandemic have revealed some of the practical and ethical complexities relating to the management of dead bodies. While frontline staff are tasked with saving lives, managing the bodies of those who die remains an under-resourced and overlooked issue, with numerous ethical and practical problems globally.

Methods

This scoping review of literature examines the management of dead bodies during epidemics and natural disasters. 82 articles were reviewed, of which only a small number were empirical studies focusing on ethical or sociocultural issues that emerge in the management of dead bodies.

Results

We have identified a wide range of ethical and sociocultural challenges, such as ensuring dignity for the deceased while protecting the living, honouring the cultural and religious rituals surrounding death, alleviating the suffering that accompanies grieving for the survivors and mitigating inequalities of resource allocation. It was revealed that several ethical and sociocultural issues arise at all stages of body management: notification, retrieving, identification, storage and burial of dead bodies.

Conclusion

While practical issues with managing dead bodies have been discussed in the global health literature and the ethical and sociocultural facets of handling the dead have been recognised, they are nonetheless not given adequate attention. Further research is needed to ensure care for the dead in epidemics and that natural disasters are informed by ethical best practice.

A Connected Community Approach: Citizens and Formal Institutions Working Together to Build Community-Centred Resilience

Urban resilience research is recognizing the need to complement a mainstream preoccupation with “hard” infrastructure (electrical grid, storm sewers, etc.) with attention to the “soft” (social) infrastructure issues that include the increased visibility of and role for civil society, moving from (top-down, paternalistic) government to (participatory) governance. Analyses of past shock events invariably point to the need for more concerted efforts in building effective governance and networked relations between civil society groupings and formal institutions before, during, and after crisis. However, the literature contains little advice on how to go about this. In this paper, we advance a Connected Community Approach (CCA) to building community resilience with a specific focus on the relationship between community and formal institutions. In the literature review that informs this work, we assess the current, limited models for connecting communities to formal institutions, as well as the emerging role of community-based organizations in this work, and we offer our own assessment of some of the key tensions, lacunae, and trends in the community resilience field. Principally, we explore the potential of the CCA model, as spearheaded by the East Scarborough Storefront and the Centre for Connected Communities in Toronto, Canada, as a promising approach for building the relational space between civil society and the state that is so often called for in the literature. The paper concludes with future directions for research and practice.

Social Vulnerability and Equity: The Disproportionate Impact of COVID-19

As the architect of racial disparity, racism shapes the vulnerability of communities. Socially vulnerable communities are less resilient in their ability to respond to and recover from natural and human-made disasters compared with resourced communities. This essay argues that racism exposes practices and structures in public administration that, along with the effects of COVID-19, have led to disproportionate infection and death rates of Black people. Using the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention's Social Vulnerability Index, the authors analyze the ways Black bodies occupy the most vulnerable communities, making them bear the brunt of COVID-19's impact. The findings suggest that existing disparities exacerbate COVID-19 outcomes for Black people. Targeted universalism is offered as an administrative framework to meet the needs of all people impacted by COVID-19.