Items

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  2020-04-20

  Experiencing Covid in West Philadelphia

  As lock down and social-distancing mandates were initiated in the spring of 2020, I was living in a tiny apartment in West Philadelphia. At the time, I was finishing my dissertation, which is a historical account about the ways in which another pandemic, HIV/AIDS, impacted the lives of children born with the disease, their families, and the healthcare workers that cared for them. Given that my entire life – work and personal – was crammed into a roughly 400 square foot apartment, I began taking long walks through the area of West Philly where I lived. These walks were mostly meant to help my mental health – sometimes they worked, other times they did not – and to relieve my cabin fever. From roughly March through June of 2020, I began taking photos of pandemic-related things that appeared on my walks. Save for my photo of the empty Target pharmacy shelves, the pictures – along with my journal entries and a small collection of pandemic-related ephemera – were an effort to document how the pandemic impacted my small part of the world. I also took them as a way to help me remember this era-defining event.
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  2020-06-28

  Cover of The Advocate magazine references the AIDS epidemic to draw attention to another lacking government response

  This cover of The Advocate’s latest issue draws attention to the AIDS epidemic. Criticisms about the lacking government response are especially poignant for LGBTQ+ people who lives through the AIDS pandemic.
• 2020-06-12

  Edward M. Kennedy Institute Webinar - Dual Pandemics: Global Youth Perspectives on Fighting HIV & COVID-19

  Webinar hosted by the Edward M. Kennedy Institute for the United States Senate focused on the CoVid-19 pandemic and the continued struggle against HIV/AIDS. Program focuses on youth perspectives, highlighting voices of HIV-positive youth advocates in the United States and Uganda. Participants discuss how the current pandemic has affected them, and how they relate to it both as young people who are also living with HIV.
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  2020-04-20

  Etymology & Solving Problems the Pandemic Has Brought to Light

  Etymology and the way words have changed over time has always fascinated me, and the COVID-19 pandemic certainly has contributed and will contribute to how many words are interpreted in society. An example of this that has crossed my mind numerous times in the past few weeks is the word ‘quarantine’. Before the pandemic, I always envisioned ‘quarantine’ as being locked in a bright, spacious room in a hospital after getting off an airplane because I had some infectious disease. It always felt lonely, frightening, and uncertain to me. Who would’ve known that quarantine could also mean feeling those same emotions in our own homes? The word itself has become so commonplace and normal to hear because of what is currently happening. I’ve heard some people call quarantine “the q” and many other casual names as an attempt to nickname and accept the situation we are all in, which is only normal. After this pandemic is over, our perspective of the word ‘quarantine’ will be much less serious, as I was describing earlier with the dying of an infectious disease alone in a scary hospital room, and this may not be a good thing. There are already people not taking social distancing measures seriously at all, i.e. those who are currently protesting them, those who are leaving their houses to spend time with others without leaving six feet between them, and many more. If the novel coronavirus returns in the years to come or another disease that requires quarantine measures, especially stricter measures, spreads, then I fear that many won’t take these future quarantines as seriously. However, it is completely possible that the exact opposite will happen, but in order for people to learn from this pandemic, factual information, not disease, needs to be spread. Just like many other global issues, a solution to the course this pandemic has taken not being repeated again in the years to come is education, factual information, and learning from the mistakes we’ve made. Personally, this pandemic has further solidified my dream of becoming a biomedical engineer. I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how hard I’d be working if I were only a few years older, but I don’t really have the tools at my disposal right now to do what I’d want to do, which makes me sad. I am coming up with a lot of my own ideas about devices, inventions, and improvements I’d like to make in the future, though. I was talking to my mentor and biggest inspiration on Friday about how this pandemic will change the future of the medical field, including the biomedical engineering field, and how I am going to be able to experience it firsthand. My biggest dream in life has always been to open my own research and development laboratory that is ideally nonprofit and would focus on helping those in third world countries and those who are usually underrepresented in the medical field like minorities. I’ve always been inspired by the HIV/AIDS pandemic and the mistreatment people in the LGBTQ+ community received by medical professionals. It is sickening to me to watch something similar happen before my own eyes, as Black people and Latino people are dying at disproportionately higher rates than other races, and the treatment they receive in medical situations is known to be equal to that of their White counterparts. Again, the only way to solve this problem is through education and awareness, but I hope my future lab will be able to contribute.
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  2020-03-18

  Message from Rabbi Josh at Congregation Bet Haverim in Atlanta, Georgia

  This message was posted by Rabbi Joshua Lesser of Congregation Bet Haverim in Atlanta, Georgia, a Reconstructionist synagogue founded by LGBTQ+ Jews in the 1980s, during the AIDS epidemic. The message offers spiritual guidance and grounding in the synagogue's history of compassion toward people who were marginalized during the HIV epidemic that ravaged and stigmatized the Gay community at the time of the synagogue's founding.