Patricio V. Marquez

Addressing Alcohol Use Disorders through Taxation: A Public Health and Economic Win-Win in the time of COVID-19

 “Taxes should be levied not with the idea of filling the public treasury at whatever cost to public morality and efficiency, but as method of reducing the consumption of alcohol”    
                                      ---Raymond B. Fosdick and Albert L.

Let’s not forget about Mental Health during COVID-19!

“Thus the first thing that plague brought to our town was exile…….It was undoubtedly the feeling of exile—that sensation of a void within which never left us, the irrational longing to hark back to the past or else to speed up the march of time, and those keen shafts of memory that stung like fire.”
Albert Camus (1957 Nobel Prize Laureate for Literature), The Plague

How to Prevent Jails and Prisons from Becoming New Hotspots for the Spread of COVID-19?

Recent newspaper articles have reported on the potential role of jails and prisons as “amplifiers” of the coronavirus pandemic (Ransom and Feuer 2020; Flagg and Neff 2020). For example, data from New York City jails show that 36 out of 1,000 inmates tested positive for the virus versus 4 out of 1,000 people in the city at large (The Legal Aid Society 2020).  Additional information indicates that 23 states across the United States have reported cases in correctional facilities (Coppola and Pettersson 2020).

Does Tobacco Smoking Increases the Risk of Coronavirus Disease (Covid-19) Severity? The Case of China

Since December 2019, when Covid-19 emerged in Wuhan city and subsequently spread across China causing varying degrees of illness, the virus has now infected 92,100 people in at least 70 countries.  Data reported from China provide insights into the biology, epidemiology, and clinical characteristics of Covid-19.  

Men are at higher risk of Covid-19