On January 5, 2020, the World Health Organization (WHO) reported on the outbreak of pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China. Two weeks later, a 35-year-old Washington resident checked into a local urgent care clinic with a 4-day cough and fever. Laboratory testing would confirm this individual as the first case of the novel coronavirus in the U.S., and on January 20, 2020, the Center for Disease Control (CDC) reported this case to the public. In the days and weeks to follow, Twitter, a social media platform with 450 million active monthly users as of 2020, provided many American residents the opportunity to share their thoughts on the developing pandemic online. Social media sites like Twitter are a prominent source of discourse surrounding contemporary political issues, allowing for direct communication between users in real-time. As more population centers around the world gain access to the internet, most democratic discussion, both nationally and internationally, will take place in online spaces. The activity of elected officials as private citizens in these online spaces is often overlooked. I find the ability of publics—which philosopher John Dewey defines as groups of people with shared needs—to communicate effectively and monitor the interests of political elites online to be lacking. To best align the interests of officials and citizens, and achieve transparency between publics and elected officials, we need an efficient way to measure and record these interests. Through this thesis, I found that natural language processing methods like sentiment analyses can provide an effective means of gauging the attitudes of politicians towards contemporary issues.

Since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, telemedicine usage in America has experienced extreme peaks as a method of maintaining social distancing for medical staff and patients. While there have been numerous significant positive effects from increasing this practice, there are also significant risks to be explored. Patients and physicians have been navigating new technology, new protocols, and new dynamics at a high rate. Doctors using telemedicine are required to rely more heavily on their judgment with less data than usual to support their hypotheses. This results in a wide variety of potential complications that can be detrimental to patients and physicians alike. Though negative outcomes are not nearly the majority, it is clear that for telemedicine to function at its fullest capacity, the limitations of its technology must be defined and communicated. A survey was distributed to physicians currently practicing telemedicine to understand more about the usage increase in telemedicine and the incidence rates of telemedicine-related complications. The results showed that although the impact of telemedicine has been largely positive, there certainly are risks that must be considered and prepared for. Thus, it is the responsibility of healthcare systems to ensure that their policies are current and appropriate in proportion to their usage of telemedicine to better protect and prepare patients and doctors for this new frontier of medicine.

When the Covid-19 virus began to spread worldwide in the spring of 2020, life across the globe changed rapidly. Government restrictions required people to move into prolonged social isolation and the resulting impact of this isolation on mental health has been profound (Brooks et al., 2020). Initial research has begun to be conducted to understand the scope of how social isolation and the pandemic have influenced people’s psychological well-being. Thus far there has been a marked increase in depression and anxiety disorders (Eyice Karabacak et al., 2021). Agoraphobia is an anxiety disorder that is characterized by fear and avoidance of certain settings. Undoubtedly, fear and avoidance of certain settings during the pandemic cannot be considered abnormal behavior as it is in line with a normative response to such a threatening phenomenon. This study investigates how normative avoidance of certain settings during the pandemic may have now evolved into fear of the settings themselves. In particular, it tested if the start of the pandemic is associated with the prevalence rate of Agoraphobia. This was done via a retrospective study that uses self-report data to examine whether participants presented symptoms of Agoraphobia prior to the start of the pandemic and if they currently exhibit symptoms of Agoraphobia. In addition to the study, the website designed to host this study also provided mental health resources to participants, in light of the documented increase in mental illness since the start of the pandemic (Brooks et al., 2020).

This Project Report documents the accomplishments of an extraordinary group of students, faculty, and staff at the Arizona state University, who participated in a year-long, multidisciplinary, first-of-its-kind academic endeavor entitled “The Making of a COVID Lab.” The lab that is the focus of this project is the ASU Biodesign Clinical Testing Laboratory, known simply as the ABCTL.