News Room

Colleges around the country who brought students back to campus are detecting thousands of COVID-19 infections. Every school is simultaneously serving as a chemistry, behavioral and data science lab during the campus reopening experiment. What are these experiments teaching us? Here are six key lessons learned so far from the fall semester that colleges can use to get it right in the spring.  

This spring, Chicago was one of the nation’s COVID-19 epicenters. Illinois' rural communities were largely spared any COVID-19 carnage, anxiously waiting for the impending surge of cases and deaths that never arrived. That wait is now over.

Brian Calfano sat down to talk with Julie Swan, a professor of industrial and systems engineering at North Carolina State as well as a CDC science advisor. The two talked about herd immunity, which is the point at which the public is protected from a virus because enough people are immune.

Recently, the White House released its COVID-19 vaccine distribution strategy through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the Department of Defense (DoD). The two departments, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), stated their plan provides a “playbook” for state and local public health programs on how to plan and operationalize a vaccination program for COVID-19.

A coronavirus vaccine looms on the horizon as politicians and school boards are allowing more students return to full classrooms. The confluence of these two events presents a question: Should the state require COVID-19 vaccines for school-age children?