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A new online program brings together Brown School experts in public health, social work and public policy to help health and social service professionals respond to and prevent infectious disease outbreaks, focusing on the COVID-19 pandemic.

The Foundations of Pandemic Preparedness & Response is a five-part, 20-hour program that provides a self-paced, online curriculum and toolkit designed to build basic understanding and skills in epidemiology, surveillance and response, communication, mitigation and recovery, and public health and policy.

“Our goal is to provide professionals with the best possible evidence-based responses to the pandemic,” said Mary McKay, Neidorff Family and Centene Corporation Dean of the Brown School. She noted that Brown School faculty from a wide range of disciplines curated credible, open-source resources for participants from diverse sites that included trusted government sources, NGO websites, peer-reviewed papers and videos.

“We wanted to create a scaled-down set of information sources so participants don’t have to cull through everything that’s available,” McKay said. “We want them to share these resources.”

The online course, part of the school’s Open Classroom initiative, includes lectures, quizzes, assignments and self study. The five modules can be taken individually or as a package that leads to successful participants receiving a certificate of completion. 

Participants who complete the full program will be able to:

Enrollment in the full program costs $100. Participants may register for modules individually at a cost of $25 each. For Brown School stakeholders, such as students, alumni, faculty or field instructors, the cost is $60 for the full program and $15 per module.

The Brown School offers accredited programs in social work and public health and is an approved provider of social work CEUs in Missouri and Illinois; this program is eligible for self-study units. Mental health license holders from other disciplines and states should consult their licensing body about our program’s eligibility for license renewal.

Learn more and register for any or all of the modules. 

While COVID-19 has impacted all individuals, the impact has not been equal. In a new national Socioeconomic Impact of COVID-19 survey, the Social Policy Institute (SPI) at Washington University in St. Louis found that liquid assets increased the likelihood that an individual could practice social distancing.

Grinstein-Weiss

“Social distancing is a privilege that comes with resources and wealth, but wealth is not distributed equally in America,” said Michal Grinstein-Weiss, the Shanti K. Khinduka Distinguished Professor and director of the SPI. “Wealth gives individuals agency to make choices, like social distancing, that keep themselves and their families healthy.”

The SPI interviewed approximately 5,500 respondents from all 50 U.S. states from April 27 to May 12.

“Lower liquid assets leave people in a position of choosing income over social distance safety,” Grinstein-Weiss said. “As money increases, affordability to social distance increases.”

Survey respondents also revealed other significant loss and hardships as a result of the pandemic. The survey found that:

“While it’s too early to draw conclusions about long-term impacts of the virus, we know that it’s exacerbating situations for households already experiencing financial vulnerability, wealth inequalities and health inequities,” Grinstein-Weiss said.

The data was presented during a virtual event titled “The Impact of COVID-19 on the Racial, Gender, and Generational Wealth Gaps,” co-hosted with the Center for Household Financial Stability at the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis.

Data suggest that the pandemic may exacerbate underlying inequalities, Grinstein-Weiss said.

“Understanding the wealth gap is important, but more critically we need to design policies that enable people to build wealth as the economy recovers,” she said.

In late February 2020, Madisen Janssen, MSW ’20, began her work for the city of St. Louis, just a few months shy of her graduation from the Brown School. Little did she know the transformative experience that awaited her.
Janssen works in the office of Mayor Lyda Krewson, as the mayor’s liaison to the Board of Aldermen. She had worked in the job before as a fill-in, part of her Gephardt Public Service Fellowship, and a good fit for her concentration at the Brown School: domestic social and economic development, with a policy specialization. But her experience and classroom work could not have prepared her for the pandemic explosion that would rock St. Louis and nation only two weeks after she was sworn in.

“Everything happened very quickly,” she said. The first case of COVID-19 in St. Louis was reported March 16, and Mayor Krewson issued executive orders banning gatherings, at first of more than 1,000 people, then 50, then 10 to halt the spread of the virus.
Now her role is permanent one, and her duties include tracking virus data, aldermanic committee hearings, following the legislative process, and communicating updates to the mayor and her chief of staff. Providing information to aldermen on best practices and virus numbers as new developments occurred during the first stages of the crisis was a challenge.
“The aldermen had a lot of questions from businesses and other constituents,” she said. “It was amazing how quickly the situation could change,” Janssen said. “Communication has really been key.”

Janssen also assisted with the city’s spring budgeting process. The pandemic and its economic consequences have had a big impact on that budget.
“It’s a very good learning experience, and there’s always something new.”

Janssen says the Brown School prepared her for many of the skills she would need in the dynamic world of city politics, from policy classes to state-level lobbying experience in the field.
Janssen was a special education teacher before resuming her education, and while she had always been interested in politics and policy, never imagined it as a career path. That has changed.
“Ours is a unique city-government structure, and I like working in the legislative world,” she explained. “One of biggest surprises for me has been how many services city government provides every day,” she said. “The scope of city government and how it impacts our daily lives is much bigger than I realized before I began working in the Mayor’s office.”

“Most of the 1.6 million frontline substance use disorder (SUD) therapists in this country do not provide clinical services guided by data gathered from technology tools. Instead, they rely on the same 1930’s skills—personal judgment and intuition,” said David Patterson Silver Wolf, director of the Community Academic Partnership on Addiction (CAPA) and chief research officer at the CAPA Clinic.

“Rather than incorporating tools that assist treatment decisions based on essential real-time quantitative data, patients must hope that their treatment team possess supernatural instincts or extraordinary practice wisdom tools. Unfortunately, most clinicians are just well-intentioned regular people who, without access to real-time data, make a lot of wrong guesses, bark up a lot of wrong trees, and obtain a too-large number of bad case outcomes.

“The scientific community’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic provides a powerful example of the importance of robust, real-time data.

“I’m hopeful the SUD field will rouse from its 90-year slumber and begin to appreciate the many benefits of having such data available when treating the cunning disease that is still currently claiming far more victims than the novel COVID-19 coronavirus.”

Read the full piece in Research on Social Work Practice.

​Is the spread of COVID-19 increasing, or decreasing? The answer differs by location, and the numbers can be confusing –even to experts. Now, a new resource from the Center for Health Economics and Policy(CHEP) at the university’s Institute for Public Health aims to help people understand which numbers are important and how they reflect whether the virus is under control.

“Understanding, Measuring and Controlling COVID-19 Spread in Missouri” uses data from the Show-Me State as an example, but the principles can be used anywhere. It also explains how to determine if the virus spread has diminished enough to meet guidelines issued by the federal and state governments for reopening various portions of the economy.

“The idea is to help people connect policies and behaviors to how COVID-19 is spread, and then hone in on the data that are best able to capture whether the virus is under control,” said Abigail Barker, research assistant professor at the Brown School and the faculty lead for data and methods at the Center for Health Economics and Policy at the Institute for Public Health.

“The hope is that local and state policymakers, as well as business leaders and others in decision-making roles, can use this information to connect policies and behaviors to the data describing how the virus spreads,” she said. “The information can be especially useful in suggesting ways to best monitor the situation at a local level, so that responses can be deployed at the local level.”

“As the state begins to allow businesses to reopen, and as people resume moving around and interacting more with others, it will be imperative that decision makers continue to monitor the spread of the COVID-19 virus and adjust policies accordingly.”

Barker’s co-authors on the report were Leah Kemper and Karen E. Joynt Maddox.

Suppression of the spread of COVID-19 is an attainable goal, and it can be done through strategies that ease social distancing guidelines, suggests a new model developed by researchers at Washington University in St. Louis and the Brookings Institution.

“Suppression means not just ‘flattening the curve’ by spreading out infections over time, but ongoing containment that prevents sustained spread and a large number of new cases,” said Ross Hammond, the Betty Bofinger Brown Associate Professor at the Brown School and collaborator on the TRACE (Testing Responses through Agent-based Computational Epidemiology) model. TRACE is a sophisticated computational simulation to inform policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States.

“Our analysis based on the TRACE model identifies promising intervention strategies to successfully suppress the spread of COVID-19 while allowing relaxation of many or all of the mass social distancing measures that have been in place across the country,” said Hammond, who is also a senior fellow in economic studies at the Brookings Institution.

“As states are reopening, many approaches involve widespread testing, coupled with contact tracing and selective quarantine,” Hammond added. “Yet key questions in designing such policies remain difficult to answer. How much testing capacity is really needed? How important is accuracy? How much capacity to trace contacts is needed? What is the most efficient way to use limited testing capacity? How might success depend on still-uncertain assumptions about the spread of the disease itself? What social distancing measures might still be needed to enhance containment?

“Getting the answers ‘right’ may be the difference between success or failure in containing COVID-19. The TRACE model was designed for this purpose.”

TRACE is not a forecasting model, Hammond pointed out.

It is intended instead as a policy laboratory to assist in the design of effective containment policies using testing and contact tracing, he said.

“By considering a very wide array of possible policy variations, capturing scenarios that encompass the extensive uncertainty still surrounding COVID-19, and providing specific quantitative inputs and outcomes, TRACE aims to be a practical tool to help decision-makers manage many of the implementation decisions they face in crafting a reopening strategy,” he said. “TRACE is an agent-based computational model, allowing it to include variations in age, activity pattern, infectivity and contact networks — all features that evidence so far suggests are important determinants of how COVID-19 spreads.”

One key strategy still includes limited social distancing.

However, Hammond said, the model shows that quarantining and self-isolation remain critical components that must stay uniformly consistent — possibly through strategies to entice and support such habits.

“All of the policies we simulated underscore the importance of sufficient adherence by individual citizens to quarantine, self-isolation or limited social distancing measures,” Hammond said. “This indicates that an important goal for policy may be to encourage adherence through consistent, widespread messaging and to make self-isolation financially and logistically feasible.

“The goal of reopening large parts of the country while suppressing COVID-19 and preventing a large second wave of infection may well be possible and not that far out of reach from our current capabilities,” he said. “But to do this, we will likely need to refocus and re-orient our current approach to make best use of limited resources, and we will need to tailor features of any specific policy implementation to local conditions to maximize chances of success.

“TRACE was designed to help facilitate this process, and we hope it will prove a valuable resource for decision-makers working to bring our country through this crisis.”