Media Coverage

Heather Keirnan, vice president of operations for Northwestern Medicine Immediate Care, recalled the early days of the pandemic when doctors didn’t have enough COVID-19 tests to give to the onslaught of people showing symptoms of the virus. Without any diagnostic clarity, people with a cough or sore throat stayed home for two weeks, until the symptoms abated, never sure if they actually contracted the virus.

Dora Castro-Ahillen, child life service manager at Northwestern Medicine Central DuPage Hospital, said children with autism or sensory processing disorders may benefit from a vaccination rehearsal of sorts. “It’s important to know what are some of the things they are going to feel, smell, hear — anything that helps them prepare,” Castro-Ahillen said.

While patients often ask Murad Alam, a professor and vice chair of dermatology at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, if something bad will happen if they decide to discontinue treatments, the answer, he said, is “a very unequivocal and certain no.”

Even as the pandemic’s “constant barrage of large and small daily stressors is taking a toll on many if not the majority of our population,” Nancy Molitor, a clinical psychologist at Northwestern University’s Feinberg School of Medicine, said the end of the pandemic also comes with its own mental health issues. “I am already talking to patients who have forms of ‘reentry anxiety,’ ” Molitor said.

[VIDEO] Dr. Sajal Tanna tries to counsel family and friends in India from Chicago. Just a few months ago, India’s ruling party declared the pandemic was over — now the situation is worse than ever.

Featuring: Sajal Tanna, MD, MPH, infectious diseases at Northwestern Memorial Hospital

Dr. Clyde Yancy, chief of cardiology of Northwestern’s Department of Medicine, said the ban is the first step in a larger initiative. “The goal really is to reduce the burden of tobacco in communities that are quite vulnerable, that are at risk and that have already suffered a disproportionate burden due to their exposure to tobacco,” said Yancy, who is also the vice dean of diversity and inclusion at Northwestern.

Delivering vaccines directly to students and their families at neighborhood schools will also bolster the public health goal of reaching members of underserved communities who are vaccine hesitant or have had trouble securing the shots from other providers, said Dr. Robert Murphy, executive director of the Institute for Global Health at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine. “Opening up schools as vaccine sites is a great idea, especially when we need to try to get eligible students vaccinated by the fall,” Murphy said.

Emerging into the light after a year locked inside is proving to be a difficult transition for some people. Jacqueline Gollan, a professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences at Northwestern University, says adjusting to the new normal, whatever it may be, is going to take time… “Even though a person may be vaccinated, they still may find it difficult to let go of that fear because they’re overestimating the risk and probability.”

Going home comes from “a need to seek ways to optimize certainty during an uncertain time. The goal is to obtain safety and security,” says Jacqueline K. Gollan, professor of psychiatry and behavioral science at Northwestern Medicine in Chicago. Moving home is a coping mechanism provoked by a biological reaction to the uncertainty of the pandemic—a reaction to the activation of the sympathetic nervous system and the subsequent release of stress hormones.

“Caregivers are reporting that the pandemic and school closures have taken a substantial emotional toll on their children and adolescents,” said lead author Tali Raviv, Ph.D., a clinical psychologist at Ann & Robert H. Lurie Children’s Hospital of Chicago Center for Childhood Resilience and Associate Professor of Psychiatry and Behavioral Sciences at Northwestern University Feinberg School of Medicine, in a statement.