In 1957, a novel strain of the flu spread around the world, the first global outbreak since the 1918 flu pandemic. More than one million people died, 116,000 of them in the United States. But schooling, shopping, and sporting events went on as normal, and the pandemic has largely faded from public memory.

New research from Yale SOM’s Heather Tookes and Matthew Spiegel finds that mask mandates, closing restaurants, and stay-at-home orders are all effective at saving lives, but other commonly used measures can actually worsen the spread of the pandemic.

Earlier this year, a team of Yale researchers showed that the concentration of COVID-19 RNA in sewage mirrors the spread of the disease through a population. In a new study, they find that testing sewage can serve as an early indicator of an outbreak relative to hospitalizations.

Efforts in the late 1960s to desegregate hospitals in the American South did not significantly contribute to improvements in the Black infant mortality rate, finds a new study co-authored by Dean Kerwin Charles.

Epidemiological models have played an influential role in governments’ responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. Yale SOM’s Edieal Pinker takes a look back at one of the most influential models and argues that such rigorous efforts at understanding the likely course of the disease, while imperfect, are critical to good decision making. 

We talked to Dr. Marcella Nunez-Smith, a Yale internist and an expert on the structural barriers to equitable treatment and health outcomes for people of color and other vulnerable populations.