Preparing for Pandemic Response

Dramatic images in the nightly news capture the emotional state of the nation, but do they help us better understand the real felt impact of COVID-19?

Michael DeDonno, Ph.D., assistant professor in the College of Education and the Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine, is leading a team of researchers who collect and assess people’s firsthand responses to the pandemic. The goal is that rigorous data acquisition and analysis, rather than emotion-laden pictures, will lead to better decision-making about the challenges we face, now and in the future, DeDonno said.

The team of researchers will connect with citizens, healthcare workers and first responders through online surveys distributed by Facebook groups such as Florida COVID-19 Updates and Information, as well as professional organizations. When the team receives responses, they quickly write up summaries and dispatch them to media outlets, or do more detailed analyses, which they submit to rapid-response journals. Their goal is to swiftly publicize their findings to get real-time empirical evidence to policy- and decision-makers.

DeDonno started the project about a month ago, when he saw news clips of college students packing Florida’s beaches. “There was a lot of media attention about college students not taking this seriously, but I thought there could be something more empirical to uncover there,” DeDonno said.

The team collects information on how people are coping with the pandemic, if they’re complying with CDC recommendations, and which recommendations they find difficult to follow. The researchers are trying to better understand the factors that predict compliance within a community; how people are dealing with depression, anxiety and stress; and what trajectory we’re seeing over time.

DeDonno is also looking at grant funding as the world transitions from pandemic to a post-pandemic environment. “Many of our frontline professionals — nurses, law enforcement, physicians, EMTs — will come out of this pretty exhausted, with some degree of post-traumatic stress. We need to think about interventions and treatments,” DeDonno said.

He and his team, which includes Ximena Levy, MD, MPH, director of the FAU Clinical Research Unit, and Joy Longo, Ph.D., associate professor in the Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing, plan on playing a role in post-pandemic interventions. A methodologist and psychologist by training, DeDonno will design research studies to elicit better understanding of frontline professionals’ post-traumatic stress and determine feasible interventions, which could include partnerships linking FAU College of Medicine resident programs with hospitals as well as contributions from FAU’s psychiatry residency program and counselor education program.