Nobel Laureate, First Responder, Health Professionals and Academics Examine Pandemic’s Impact on Health Policy, International Relations, Human Rights and More in the U.S. and Around the World
George W. Contreras, a paramedic who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, has borne witness to a great many deaths caused by COVID-19 over the last 11 months. He has seen far too many New Yorkers draw their last, painful breaths as he desperately tried to save them, while their anxious loved ones looked on in despair. He has turned his ambulance into a mobile funeral home, allowing grief-stricken families to say their last goodbyes on street corners in the middle of the night. The emotional toll has been immense. “It’s been very, very difficult for all of us, healthcare workers, EMS, the families, everyone,” he said.
As the months wore on and the death count rose, it became evident to Contreras, a 30-year veteran paramedic, that New York City — and the world — was living through a period that undoubtedly would impact public health policy, emergency management and emergency medical procedures for generations to come. He also realized he wanted to share this painful and hard-fought knowledge and frontline experience with his students in John Jay’s Security, Fire and Emergency Management graduate program. “I tell my students we are living history,” he said. “COVID-19 will be the new test case for studying pandemics from now on.”
He seized the moment, acted quickly and designed a new course, Public Health Emergency Management, using COVID-19 as the case study for how to mitigate, prepare, respond and recover from natural, technological and man-made disasters, while accounting for the human impact of such traumatic events. It is one of more than a dozen courses being taught during the Spring 2021 semester at colleges throughout The City University of New York that examine the COVID-19 pandemic from a wide-range of academic perspectives.
“CUNY campuses are imparting to students important lessons learned under the most dire and desperate of circumstances during this horrific and still ongoing global pandemic,” said Chancellor Félix V. Matos Rodríguez. “The hope is that these lessons will help to save lives in future crises and reconcile past injustices and inequities brought into stark relief by the pandemic. It is particularly fitting that these courses are being taught at CUNY, as many of our students come from some of the communities hardest hit by the pandemic.”
‘We All Need to do Our Small Part’
Contreras’s course looks at how public health and emergency management officials at every level — city, state, federal, global — are fighting the pandemic in real time. He has recorded interviews with local hospital and public sector emergency management officials, discussing their preparations and responses. As the pandemic continues to unfold, he plans on inviting these experts back to assess the efficacy of their decisions and policies. He will also examine the role the general public can play in helping to combat a public health crisis.
“We all need to do our small part so that the healthcare system isn’t overwhelmed, and we do that by washing our hands, wearing masks and keeping distant.” Contreras, a first-generation Ecuadorian American with aging parents, is fully aware of the mental and emotional toll that such practices can have, particularly on the elderly. “I don’t like the phrase ‘socially distancing,’” he added. “I call it ‘staying physically distant while maintaining social connectivity.’”
Finding Lessons in the Black Plague
This semester Macaulay Honors College students are taking a seminar, Science and Society: Through the Lens of Covid-19, with Dr. Harold Varmus, a co-recipient of the 1989 Nobel Prize for Medicine for researching the genetic basis of cancer. Varmus teaches a seminar each year that examines the interplay between the scientific community and society-at-large, but this semester he recalibrated the class to focus on the ways that governments, as well as public and scientific institutions, have responded to the ongoing COVID crisis.
“I want people to understand how the scientific enterprise works,” said Varmus, who has held several eminent positions in the scientific community including director of the National Cancer Institute, president of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center and director of the National Institutes of Health. “There are so many factors involved: How do you conduct scientific research? Why do we do clinical trials? What should the government be doing? States and localities have a lot of influence; how does that work?”
Using a multi-disciplinary approach to examine the history and practice of science, Varmus’ seminar draws on his own experience in federal science agencies, current political events, movies and novels to understand how people have reacted to previous pandemics as well as COVID-19. “You could go back to the Black Plague in 14th century Europe and see how writers like Boccaccio in The Decameron describe how people behaved in very similar ways to people today,” he said. “Some boarded themselves up in their homes, some people acted like the plague didn’t exist, some thought it was a hoax, some go off to the woods and told each other stories.”
Lessons in Women’s Action
Bertrade Ngo-Ngijol Banoum, the chair of Lehman College’s Africana Studies department, is exploring the collective action of Black women to combat the pandemic’s impact on human rights, gender and race in their communities in her newly created course Africana Women Lead Through the COVID-19 Crisis. Given the preexisting economic, education, housing and health inequities among communities of color, she wants her students to explore case studies of Black women around the world who have combatted these difficulties throughout the pandemic. “We hear a lot about how Black and Brown communities have been devastated,” she said. “But I want my students to see how in these same communities, women are often the first to respond to a crisis.
The Cameroonian-born Ngo-Ngijol Banoum was inspired to create this course last spring when she and Lehman Professor Mila Burns taught a joint lecture, “Women in African and Latin American Society,” with 100 students as the pandemic unfolded. In that course, she used the inspirational examples of three female African Nobel Peace Laureates who each overcame adversity to make a difference in their respective countries.
They include Leymah Gbowee, who started a nonviolent women’s peace movement that helped end the second Liberian civil war; Wangari Maathai, a Kenyan environmental activist who founded the Green Belt Movement to stop the deforestation in her country; and the former Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first democratically-elected African woman to lead a nation.
“If a woman can stop a war or be the president of a country, or start a movement to plant millions of trees, then women can do something with this COVID crisis, and many already are,” said Ngo-Ngijol Banoum.
Other COVID-related courses being taught at CUNY this semester include:
- Economics of a Pandemic –City College of New York
This course providing a multilayered analysis of a pandemic’s effects on economic and international relations policy. Students will seek answers to questions such as: How does a pandemic, like COVID-19, affect the economy, international relations and globalization? How do public health policies impact American households, workers and jobs?
- Disaster and Corona: Theory, Practice, and Current Events –Lehman College
This philosophy course examines how COVID-19 has disrupted many aspects of modern life, including scientific research, politics, education, economics, policing and media. Students will discuss how these disruptions have impacted their own lives.
- COVID-19: Public Health Perspectives – Brooklyn College and CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy
This course will be taught by multiple faculty from Brooklyn College’s Health and Nutrition Sciences department, as well as the CUNY Graduate School of Public Health & Health Policy. The rotating faculty will share expertise on various aspects of the COVID crisis, the history of pandemics and other related issues.
- Aging Policy and Politics– Hunter College
Taught by Ruth Finkelstein, the Rose Dobrof director of the Brookdale Center for Healthy Aging at Hunter College, the course will focus both on the politics of aging, generational conflicts and aging policy, with an emphasis on aspects of urban life that advocates believe should influence policy.
• Fundamentals of Human Nutrition – Queensborough Community College
This class will focus on immune system-enhancing diets and specific diet-related protocols once someone is diagnosed with COVID. The course will also address common pre-existing conditions, including obesity, type 2 diabetes and high blood pressure.
- Occupational Health and Safety in the Time of COVID– CUNY School of Labor and Urban Studies
Taught for both undergraduates and graduates, the course examines how labor movements have consistently sought protections for workplace injury, illness and death. This class will discuss occupational health and safety standards and what can be done to improve existing regulations and laws.
The City University of New York is the nation’s largest urban public university, a transformative engine of social mobility that is a critical component of the lifeblood of New York City. Founded in 1847 as the nation’s first free public institution of higher education, CUNY today has seven community colleges, 11 senior colleges and seven graduate or professional institutions spread across New York City’s five boroughs, serving 500,000 students of all ages and awarding 55,000 degrees each year. CUNY’s mix of quality and affordability propels almost six times as many low-income students into the middle class and beyond as all the Ivy League colleges combined. More than 80 percent of the University’s graduates stay in New York, contributing to all aspects of the city’s economic, civic and cultural life and diversifying the city’s workforce in every sector. CUNY’s graduates and faculty have received many prestigious honors, including 13 Nobel Prizes and 26 MacArthur “Genius” Grants. The University’s historic mission continues to this day: provide a first-rate public education to all students, regardless of means or background.
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