Outbreaks of respiratory infections have impact on schools. The present article draws upon sources from the school archives of the former teachers' seminary Muristalden in the city of Bern in Switzerland. The aim is to ascertain how the various pandemic waves 1918/1919 affected school operations and the people living at Muristalden. During the…

The growing multidisciplinary historiographic interest in the study of the misnamed "Spanish flu", which caused 50 to 100 million deaths in the world and between 260,000 and 270,000 in Spain, has not spread to the History of Education. The main objective of this article is to provide an initial approach to the analysis of certain aspects…

Background: We evaluate the public health surveillance program, Screen, Test, and Protect (STP) designed to control and prevent COVID-19 at a large academic university in the United States. Methods: STP was established at the University of Florida in May 2020. This report details STP's full-time workforce, centralized database, and testing and…

This article aims to map the news and debates that circulated in the press in the context of the outbreak of the Spanish flu in the cities of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo (Brazil) in the years 1918-1919. We are interested in reflecting on the criticisms and alternatives glimpsed regarding education and care for the population. In Brazil, the…

To educate students while mitigating the spread of COVID-19 during the fall of 2020, schools across the country used different operational approaches, ranging from fully remote instruction to fully in-person instruction with various "hybrid" approaches in between. This report was prepared for the Pennsylvania Department of Education…

We explore ways in which statistics can be used to understand disease spread and support decision-making by governments. "Past performance does not guarantee future results"--we hope. We discuss and show examples from the National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded COVID-Inspired Data Science Education through Epidemiology (CIDSEE) project.…

The COVID-19 pandemic struck during a period of extreme polarization in American politics. Unsurprisingly, responses to it quickly became politicized despite increasingly clear findings from scientific and public health communities about the most effective approaches for limiting its spread. We ask how the politicization affected pandemic response…

This paper focuses on the ethical position of the mask within the contemporary moment of COVID-19 and against the Levinasian concept of face. Drawing from autoethnographic, theoretical, and political discourses, this paper attempts to create an historical and social exploration of Mike Pence's public eschewing of his mask in early 2020 as a means…

Taking fear as the core emotion in the experience of major disasters and echoing French historian Jean Delumeau's classic thesis on the social and cultural construction of coping strategies against it, this article outlines some lessons and prospects from the (complex but also distinctive) regime of experiences and behaviours historically…

In this article, we begin by discussing approximately thirty picture books dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic published digitally in the United States, the United Kingdom, Australia, and other English-speaking countries in the first six months of 2020. The worldwide impact of COVID-19 resulted in the rapid global digital publication of numerous…

This article describes the changing linguistic landscape on the North Shore of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, during the first three months of the COVID-19 pandemic. I present an account of the visual representation of change along the area's parks and trails, which remained open for socially-distanced exercise during the province's…

"Shifting Sands: Confounded Errors" focuses on failures by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and the National Institutes of Health (NIH) to consider empirical evidence available in the public domain early in the pandemic. The report finds compelling circumstantial evidence that lockdowns and masking mandates…

This essay reflects the spirit of our times, at least in North America. Reentering a generative world in lockdown is juxtaposed with the gains and losses in our communities. "For All Eternity," my poem, is about the generative cycle of rebirth and death and the forces that move us from decay to regeneration. As the coronavirus pandemic…

The coronavirus crisis has appeared like some vast, cruel sociological experiment. It has confined people to their homes, radically disturbed their taken-for-granted knowledge and beliefs, and forced them to alter behaviors once casually, even unthinkingly, employed in their everyday personal, working, and social lives. What has been learned? How…

This paper examines translation and transcultural remembrance of the 1918-19 Great Influenza or the more often yet mistakenly called "Spanish flu" for lessons to combat COVID-19 in Chinese online media. It presents a case study of "covert transediting" in the "Shanghai Observer," i.e., a journalistic opinion that…