What exactly is a vaccine? Can vaccines prevent outbreaks? How effective does a vaccine need to be to help a population during an outbreak? Students will explore these questions and more in this lesson plan by first learning the biology behind vaccines. They will then use Science Buddies' SimPandemic, a free online tool, to model different vaccine parameters to understand how vaccines affect both individuals and populations during a COVID-19 outbreak.  Remote learning adaptation: This lesson plan can be conducted remotely. Students can work independently on the Explore section of the lesson plan using the Student Worksheet as a guide. The Engage and Reflect sections can either be dropped entirely, done in writing remotely, or be conducted over a video chat.

As producers of knowledge with a particular focus on social (in)justice, racial, gendered and transnational journeys, Guttman Community College scholar-activists have constructed a new digital canon that offers New Yorkers the opportunity to contribute testimonies of tumultuous times. Curated by Dr. Samuel Finesurrey, Guttman undergraduates Elsy Rosario, Tigida Fadiga, Luz Hidalgo, Phisarys Sidemion, and Sadaf Majeed and digitized by Guttman staff members Joanna Wisniewski, Ivan Mora, and Kristina Jiana Quiles, this collection democratizes the production of knowledge by empowering community college students, largely deriving from immigrant households, to shape the narratives told about their communities and their generation. Organized into five themes, with testimonies gathered in six languages, this archive documents a diverse set of New York experiences. Funded by the American Council of Learned Societies and the Mellon Foundation, this exhibition helps us rethink struggles and movements of the past and present, to unearth the human networks that carry all New Yorkers in difficult times.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"A new preprint reports one factor that might contribute to the deadliness of the COVID-19 pandemic: wearing shoes indoors. Researchers compared COVID-19 death rates between countries that follow the cultural practice of removing shoes indoors and those that do not and observed a distinct pattern. Those where removing shoes is customary showed a lower death rate on average. Interestingly, no significant differences were observed when countries were compared according to the number of COVID-19 cases. It could be that the lack of reliable, universal testing may obscure the true prevalence of the disease. More work is still needed to discount a number of confounding factors, such as differences in preventive measures enacted by different countries, but the correlation suggests that removing shoes indoors might help curb the devastation wrought by the COVID-19 pandemic..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.

This resource is a video abstract of a research paper created by Research Square on behalf of its authors. It provides a synopsis that's easy to understand, and can be used to introduce the topics it covers to students, researchers, and the general public. The video's transcript is also provided in full, with a portion provided below for preview:

"The world is combating an ongoing COVID-19 pandemic1-4. Health-care systems, society and the economy are impacted in an unprecedented way. It is unclear how many people have contracted the causative coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) unknowingly. Therefore, reported COVID-19 cases do not reflect the true scale of outbreak5-9. Natural herd immunity has been suggested as a potential exit strategy during COVID-19 outbreaks, which may arise when 50-67% of a community has been infected10. Here we present the prevalence and distribution of antibodies to SARS-CoV-2 in a healthy adult population of a highly affected country using a novel immunoassay, indicating that one month into the outbreak (i) the seroprevalence in the Netherlands is 2.7% with substantial regional variation, (ii) the hardest-hit areas show a seroprevalence of up to 9..."

The rest of the transcript, along with a link to the research itself, is available on the resource itself.