Rats! Whether categorized as rodents, wildlife, vermin or pests, they have a profound impact on human populations in big cities — affecting wide-ranging aspects of residents’ lives from food to psychology to safety. In Chicago, which has been ranked the rattiest city in the United States for eight years by pest control company Orkin, experts are finding new solutions to educate about and hopefully eradicate the invasive species known as the sewer rat.
The holiday season is looking different this year with decreased mobility, and while some places are seeing a surge of cases post-Thanksgiving, some states across the Midwest have managed to prevent and mitigate the predicted danger through public health announcements and limited mobility and gatherings.
Pulitzer-prize winner Eric Eyre’s new book exposes how hard drug distributors work to keep eyes off of their numbers and how important it is for journalists to keep looking. In the small towns of America, it can literally mean life or death. The opinions expressed in this series are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect any official organizational stance. Cover graphic by Ruth Chang for Midstory.
As our researchers watched Ohio’s response to the pandemic, they wished to contribute meaningfully toward the next stage of disaster response and help to prepare our state for future crises. This risk assessment brief is a comprehensive look, county by county, of factors that put Ohio’s populations at risk for COVID-19, including socio-economic status, mobility, race, overcrowded housing and more.
Recently, reported cases of “re-infection”—people testing positive only months after a previous instance of COVID-19—have led to worries about how our immune system responds to COVID-19. We speak with Dr. Akiko Iwasaki, a professor of immunobiology from Yale School of Medicine, and Dr. Sydney Ramirez, a researcher at La Jolla Institute for Immunology, about our immune response and immunity to COVID-19.
