Although the COVID-19 pandemic continues to affect the nation, only 30% of California adults said in July that they “always” wore a mask when they left their homes, according to a new UCLA survey. This is a significant decrease from the 54% who “always” wore a face covering in February and March.
 
And now most California adults (51%) said they “sometimes” or “never” use a mask, compared to 48% who said they “always” or “usually” do.
 

The UCLA Fielding School of Public Health has received nearly $1.5 million in federal funding designed to support the school’s graduate students, in large part to reinforce the importance of the United States’ public health workforce.

Roshan Kalghatgi was shocked when his 73-year-old mother tested positive for the coronavirus in July, nearly 2½ years into the pandemic.

“I thought it was a fluke,” the Redwood City resident said. “I made them do it again.”

You might say that Kristen Choi (M.S. ’18) backed into nursing. “I sort of chose it last-minute during my last year of high school,” she admits, “because I wanted a job that would combine math and science with meaningful human relationships.”

On September 17 at UCLA’s Dickson Court, the UCLA Fielding School of Public Health hosted a Graduation Celebration to honor the school’s Classes of 2020 and 2021. The ceremony featured more than 60 UCLA Fielding graduates who earned Master of Public Health, Master of Science, and Doctor of Philosophy degrees in 2020 and 2021. The status of COVID-19 at the time did not allow for traditional graduation ceremonies to be held.

Tears are streaming down Nakeya Bell’s face as she listens to students in her IQ Squad program, Amari Haysbert and Jenalyn Phanh, open up about their trauma.

At just 18 years old, Haysbert and Phanh are both young women of color who say their lives were upended by unstable familial structures, housing insecurity and COVID-19 while attending high school.

In 1998, Noe Ramirez crossed into the United States from Mexico, hoping to earn enough to buy a new taxi to replace the sputtering cab he drove in Mexico City. The part-time musician found construction work in Houston, playing guitar on the weekends.

One morning as he rode his bike to work, he was hit by a drunk driver. The driver fled, leaving him bleeding on the street, his spinal cord crushed. After being hospitalized, he was taken in by a local shelter for undocumented migrants, receiving medical care through a county program for low-income residents.

California voters will decide in November whether to uphold or block a law Gov. Gavin Newsom signed in 2020 that banned the sale of certain flavored tobacco products, an effort by anti-tobacco advocates to stop a youth vaping crisis and weaken the industry’s influence in the state.

Research co-authored by UCLA Fielding School of Public Health faculty and staff illustrates the disproportionate impact of COVID-19 on ethnic communities in the United States over the past three years, and the need to improve understanding of how the pandemic rippled through those same groups.

UCLA is launching the Initiative to Study Hate, an ambitious social impact project that brings together a broad consortium of scholars to understand and ultimately mitigate hate in its multiple forms.

Supported by a $3 million gift from an anonymous donor, researchers will undertake 23 projects this year. The three-year pilot spans topics that examine the neurobiology of hate, the impact of social media hate speech on kids, the dehumanization of unhoused individuals, racial discrimination in health care settings and more.