News

The Pregnancy Clinical Domain Team co-led by Elaine Hill, PhD & Rena Patel, MD, MPH aims to leverage National COVID Cohort Collaborative data to gain insights into pressing COVID-19 questions around pregnancy. The goal is to understand incidence, timing, and severity in pregnant women, maternal and infant outcomes, and associated characteristics (clinical, demographic, environmental).

The team's first project has been approved to access data in the N3C Data Enclave: COVID-19 Incidence, Treatment, and Outcomes in Pregnant Women. This project seeks to understand associations between SARS-CoV-2 infection and treatment for COVID-19 with maternal and infant outcomes in the N3C cohort, and associations with maternal characteristics, including clinical and environmental factors, and COVID-19 severity among pregnant women. The project also aims to assess the likelihood of vertical transmission of SARS-CoV-2 from mother to infant and healthcare, and assess utilization during pregnant and postpartum periods among pregnant women.

Opioids have been blamed for the deaths of at least 400,000 U.S. residents in the past two decades—but research now shows that number could be much higher.

Researchers looked at data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention on about 630,000 people who died of drug overdoses between 1999 and 2016. They separated the deaths into two categories: those with and without a specific drug indicated.

For the first category, they analyzed how contributing causes of death (such as injuries and heart problems) and personal characteristics (such as age and gender) correlated with opioid involvement. They then used these analyses to calculate the probability of opioid involvement for each unidentified drug overdose, and they found that the number of opioid deaths is likely 28 percent higher than generally reported.

As policymakers try to restart the economy but also control COVID-19, data scientists at Cornell University and the University of Rochester are studying the impacts of social distancing. While social distancing has effectively slowed the spread of COVID-19, the measures have not reduced the total number of daily new cases.

"The effect is not as large as one would have hoped for going in," says lead author Aaron Wagner, professor of electrical and computer engineering at Cornell University. As a result, he says, the states now reopening businesses and relaxing restrictions "do not have much headroom" for error. "You're right on the edge of it starting to blow up again."

"Policy makers need to be aware of this," says co-author Elaine Hill, assistant professor of public health sciences at the University of Rochester. "We need more studies to identify the practices that can move us to a place where COVID-19 is actually contracting."

The study authors suggest that policymakers:

• Consider a carefully phased relaxation of social distancing, such as first targeting a limited number of businesses and economic activities where duration of human contact is limited: restaurants offering take-out meals, for example, rather than in-restaurant dining; or construction activity where it might be easier to maintain social distancing between workers.
• Allow enough time for models like the one used in this study to assess the effect of the targeted relaxations before extending them to other areas.
• Consider augmenting social distancing with other practices, such as universal use of face masks, or contact tracing.