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We see all the aftermath that Covid left even in today's date nothing is as it used to be. We are still recovering which has led us to adapt to what has happened. As many restaurants opened back up everyone uses precautions to protect the worker and customer.

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Executive and Continuing Professional Education

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by Katherine J. Igoe

Ensuring health and safety in the workplace is already a critically important issue; organizations that invest in occupational safety perform better, reduce turnover, and help workers do their jobs more effectively. But COVID-19 has forced companies to act quickly and decisively to keep workers safe. As employers endeavor to slow the spread of the virus while keeping a supportive and productive work environment, they've had to adapt new business processes and address existing structures that are lacking.

"COVID-19 has stressed the system. All the flaws that have been in place are totally exposed and have come to the forefront of our daily conversations," says Jack Dennerlein, adjunct professor of ergonomics and safety in the Department of Environmental Health and co-director of Work Health and Well-being: Achieving Worker Health at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. From distancing procedures to the availability of remote work, the pandemic has metaphorically ripped off the mask covering the flaws in organizations' working conditions. How has COVID-19 changed the standards of worker safety and health, and how can employers adapt to these changes?

Total Worker Health and Its Impact in the Workplace

Total Worker Health (TWH) aims to address, reactively and proactively, the challenges of worker safety, health, and well-being. At its core, it measures and assesses what a worker experiences, collects data to understand what to change, provides approaches on how to modify an environment, and encourages collaboration across traditional organizational boundaries to ensure a safe workplace. It's both an acknowledgement of workers' existing health, and initiatives to keep them healthy.

"These two general fields - protecting and promoting health - work together in a single workplace. It makes sense to think about this as an integrated effort instead of two siloed efforts that act in parallel," says Nico Pronk, adjunct professor of social and behavioral sciences, president of the HealthPartners Institute, chief science officer at HealthPartners, Inc., and co-director of Work Health and Well-being: Achieving Worker Health.

As an example, he explains, "If you have diabetes, your eyesight might be diminished, and you might end up with an injury because your work is putting you at risk." Critically, though, TWH focuses more on an organization's framework rather than solely on an individual: "the conditions of work rather than on the behaviors of the work. You set the environment - physical, social, economic - which shapes how the workplace is organized. Within that, these factors start to drive the behavior of the individuals within it."

COVID-19 has fundamentally uprooted assumptions about worker safety, health, and well-being and been an accelerant of addressing these issues. The pandemic has also highlighted classic social issues that workers face, like childcare, sick leave, and disability issues, and underlined safety concerns in health care environments where professionals need to treat patients. The absence of TWH - where workers don't feel safe in their workplace - is also much more visible. Implementing TWH effectively helps make organizations more resilient during this time.

Even though COVID-19 can be used as a leverage point, Dennerlein notes, "We should be doing it for the good of the people, not just because of COVID-19. If we want this country to be productive, we have to invest in the health and safety of our workforce." Adds Pronk, "What if you didn't get sick? What if you didn't get injured? The benefits come back in spades. You cannot be successful if you don't have healthy workers, but that recognition is still hardly there."

"Protecting and promoting health work together in a single workplace. It makes sense to think about this as an integrated effort instead of two siloed efforts that act in parallel."

Applying and Adapting Total Worker Health During the COVID-19 Pandemic

While the values of TWH may not change, the implementation has evolved to protect workers against COVID-19. In a paper titled " An Integrative Total Worker Health Framework for Keeping Workers Safe and Healthy During the COVID-19 Pandemic," Dennerlein, Erika Sabbath, Susan Peters, and Glorian Sorensen outlined six key characteristics that are essential for applying TWH in this context:

Focusing on working conditions for infection control and supportive environments for increased psychological demands

Utilizing participatory approaches involving workers in identifying daily challenges and unique solutions

Employing comprehensive and collaborative efforts to increase system efficiencies

Committing as leaders to supporting workers through action and communications

Adhering to ethical and legal standards

Using data to guide actions and evaluate progress

In this way, organizations can address the unique demands (including physical, ethical, and legal) of counteracting COVID-19 alongside the needs of workers to complete their tasks in a safe space, while using data and feedback to make changes.

According to the researchers, the most challenging aspect of using a TWH framework is getting top-level support. "Overall organization engagement towards this shared vision of a goal is critical - some key performance indicator for the institution has to include TWH or recognizing its impact. You have to think about that at the systems level," says Dennerlein.

"If we want this country to be productive, we have to invest in the health and safety of our workforce."

The Practical Implications of Implementing Total Worker Health in a Pandemic

The researchers have worked with companies to take these theoretical constructs and translate them to practical insights in the workplace. "It took companies as much as six months to learn how to bring health and safety together. Health is in HR, safety is in Operations, and the two don't usually interact," Pronk says. Not rushing the organizations and giving them up to a year to develop an implementation plan was key.

After buy-in from leadership, the next step is to test these six characteristics using data and feedback. Previous studies show that program design principles or characteristics are correlated with good health outcomes. "The business units that scored the highest had the lowest number of health risks in their populations. The more they followed these characteristics, the healthier their group was," Pronk says. Following implementation, organizations would then be able to make changes and use a team-based approach to maintain awareness and continue to evaluate efficacy.

Thus, TWH can be effective, and not just in the short-term. Even after COVID-19 is no longer an immediate threat, the challenges of worker health and safety remain. "What are we doing to create a more resilient workforce? When we start thinking about the work of the future, workers are going to have to continually reinvent themselves, because work is constantly changing. COVID-19 was a big slap in the face for that. How do we all adapt?" says Dennerlein.

"We rely on the human element in the workforce so much because humans are problem-solvers. TWH tries to broaden that and realize what a great resource we have here. Why aren't we using that element better? Why aren't we weaving it more effectively into our organizations to help them make better decisions to affect the bottom line?"
Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health offers Work Health and Well-being: Achieving Worker Health, which provides the full set of skills needed to improve worker health, safety, and well-being in the workplace .

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How COVID-19 Has Changed the Standards of Worker Safety and Health - and How Organizations Can Adapt

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by Katherine J. Igoe Ensuring health and safety in the workplace is already a critically important issue; organizations that invest in occupational safety perform better, reduce turnover, and help workers do their jobs more effectively. But COVID-19 has forced companies to act quickly and decisively to keep workers safe.

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As we know Covid created lockdowns all around the world this led to many losing their jobs, many small companies were not able to pay bills to continue so many shut down permanently.

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Meal kit delivery services are also seeing a major surge in interest. Online grocers such as Kroger, Amazon pantry, Publix or traditional providers like Walmart, Tesco and D2C meal prep brands like HelloFresh and BlueApron are all witnessing a considerable increase in demand and order frequency.

PEOPLE ARE ORDERING MORE ONLINE, BUT STAYING CLOSE TO HOME

Restaurant foot traffic and online reservations may have dropped to zero, but in the US, UK, and Canada online orders for pickup and delivery are booming, with steady increases over the past 45 days, particularly for casual dining and quick-serve or fast food restaurants, where site visits and purchases have been increasing. As orders have increased, the share of carry-out versus delivery has remained fairly consistent, though people are traveling shorter distances to visit restaurants to pick up these orders.

PEOPLE HAVE CHANGED WHEN THEY ORDER

Not only are there more orders, but they're coming at different times. Orders are up by almost 12% on weekdays, with Tuesdays seeing the biggest gains and weekends seeing fewer orders as the notion of a "weekend" loses its meaning. Take-out orders are more common on weekends, while online orders are more likely to happen on weekdays. Time of day is also a major factor - dinner orders are only up 3% (and late night orders down 11%), while lunch orders have increased 18%.

NEW CUSTOMERS ORDER MORE

People are taking the opportunity to discover new restaurants and order delivery or take-out from restaurants that previously weren't part of their regular rotations. When these new customers place an order, they order 8% more than average, and tend towards higher-value items. Globally, people in the US, UK, and Canada are 1.3x more likely to order from a new restaurant on a weekend than a weekday.

PEOPLE ARE SPENDING MORE TIME WEIGHING OPTIONS

People are spending more time looking at different restaurant options before placing an order, going through 1.7x more sessions before adding an item to their basket and spending 31% more time per session. The majority of orders (63%) are made on phones, and phone orders are more likely to happen on weekends.

Age is a factor in how the orders are placed as well. Younger consumers are more likely to opt for take-out or curbside pickup, while older consumers, especially those with kids, are more likely to order in. Ordering in was also more common in areas more heavily hit by the virus.

VISITING RESTAURANTS

With social distancing in place, when people visit restaurants in-person, it's typically to pick up an order made online or order take-out. But despite many restaurants allowing pick-up and take-out options, the total number of orders has still slowed and people are making fewer visits to these restaurants (and are traveling shorter distances to get to them, as we saw above).

As orders have ramped up, so have wait times, leading consumers to look for options with shorter delivery times. For in-person visits, this means more cross-visitation, particularly when someone can see another, less crowded option nearby.

Foot traffic to fast food and casual dining restaurants has decreased 45% and 67%, respectively, since the start of lockdown efforts.

DIFFERENT COUNTRY, SAME STORY

We see similar trends across the different regions. Canada still sees higher cross-visitation between different restaurants. In Germany consumers have a clear preference for casual dining, while US consumers prefer fast food.

RESTAURANTS ARE COMPETING WITH HOME COOKING

With people spending more time stuck at home and discouraged from going to restaurants, interest in home cooking has skyrocketed. We've seen spikes in searches and site traffic that compare in size to those normally seen around the Christmas season, when cooking for loved ones is much more common. But what people are looking for is considerably different.

Compared to the holidays, many lockdown chefs are looking for healthy cooking and simple one-pot meals that require less time and effort, that are also easily repeatable. There is also a significant segment of home chefs looking to invest more time into their cooking skills and experimenting with new baking and barbeque techniques.

Search interest cooking on weekdays has also been growing steadily during the lockdown with more and more consumers looking to cook a hearty dinner, especially in the UK and the US. Comparatively, Canadian home chefs appear to be more interested in brunch.

INTEREST IN MEAL KIT SERVICES IS ALSO ON THE RISE

Younger consumers are driving the bulk of this new interest in cooking. Nearly a third of cooking-related searches in the US and nearly half of searches in the UK come from consumers under the age of 45, particularly those with children under 15 in the household. And as interest in cooking has increased, so has interest in meal kit services. Meal kit interest has increased most significantly among people aged 18-24 in the US and Canada.

MOBILE IS STILL A FACTOR

Mobile devices are an important part of the research and order process for groceries, cooking advice, and meal kits. In the UK four out of 10 cooking-related searches occur on a mobile device.

VIDEO IS BECOMING VITAL TO BETTER COOKING

YouTube is another important medium home chefs are turning to for help on cooking-related queries, be it for watching cooking videos or getting tips around meal prep. About one third (31%) are also looking for videos by celebrity chefs and fitness experts for tips, spending an average of seven minutes per video/stream.

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The impact of COVID-19 on eating, restaurants and fast food chains

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Meal kit delivery services are also seeing a major surge in interest. Online grocers such as Kroger, Amazon pantry, Publix or traditional providers like Walmart, Tesco and D2C meal prep brands like HelloFresh and BlueApron are all witnessing a considerable increase in demand and order frequency.

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Many compare the Covid-19 pandemic to the Great Recession which occurred back in 2008 because of some similarities between the two. Deja vu?

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The University of Chicago Booth School of Business

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In just two weeks this past March, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed US employment off a cliff. New applications for jobless benefits surged 20 percent to 250,000 in the week ending March 14. Two weeks later, they topped 6 million, shattering the 1982 record of 1 million. By then, a recession was underway.

Researchers moved quickly to unravel what happened and seek out policy prescriptions, and University of Illinois's Alexander W. Bartik, Chicago Booth's Marianne Bertrand, University of Chicago PhD student Feng Lin, University of California at Berkeley's Jesse Rothstein, and UC Berkeley PhD candidate Matthew Unrath have joined in this task. Their research indicates that the COVID-19 recession has been in some ways strikingly different from other recent downturns, including the Great Recession.

For their analysis of the job market from the start of the pandemic through early July, the researchers used two monthly government surveys of households and employers. Those snapshot sources proved unsuitable for tracking the rapidly unfolding jobs shock, so they tapped into almost-real-time data collected by Homebase and Kronos, two companies that provide time-clock services to employers. The researchers also evaluated data on physical mobility from SafeGraph, which tracks mobile phones, to measure the effects of state shutdown orders.

"Altogether, our findings show that this recession has differed sharply from other recent downturns in its speed, the types of firms and workers it affected, workers' beliefs about its longevity and their likelihood of recall, as well as in the nature and size of the policy response," the researchers write.

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How the COVID-19 Recession Has Differed from the Great Recession

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In just two weeks this past March, the COVID-19 pandemic pushed US employment off a cliff. New applications for jobless benefits surged 20 percent to 250,000 in the week ending March 14. Two weeks later, they topped 6 million, shattering the 1982 record of 1 million. By then, a recession was underway.

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Unemployment played a huge role during the pandemic because of the lockdowns many lost their jobs.

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Unemployment rose higher in three months of COVID-19 than it did in two years of the Great Recession

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The experiences of several groups of workers in the COVID-19 outbreak vary notably from how they experienced the Great Recession.

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Covid -19 impact cause many countries around the U.S significant hardships. According to this article the U.S GDP fell by 8.9% in the second quarter of 2020

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When Covid-19 was announced consumers rushed to stock up on everything they could by doing so this led to shortages and price raising because demand was too high and was not enough supply.

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Nearly 15 percent of U.S. households-and nearly 18 percent of households with children-reported food insecurity early in the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a survey conducted via social media by researchers at NYU School of Global Public Health. The findings, published in Nutrition Journal, illustrate how the pandemic has worsened food insecurity, even among social media users who are more well-off than the general population.

Prior to the pandemic, approximately 11 percent of households in the United States were food insecure, lacking consistent access to enough food-both in quality and quantity-for an active, healthy life.

"Food security is not only about putting calories into our bodies, but also what we eat-and it is calorie-dense, nutrient-poor foods that are typically cheap and affordable. So while food insecurity can lead to hunger, over time it can also lead to obesity and other related metabolic dysregulation," said Niyati Parekh, professor of public health nutrition at NYU School of Global Public Health and the study's lead author.

The pandemic has significantly changed our food landscape, with high unemployment producing long lines at food banks, interruptions in supply chains leaving shelves empty, and lockdowns prompting some consumers to stockpile shelf-stable groceries. Moreover, school closures made it more difficult for the 30 million children who depend on the National School Lunch program to access low-cost or free meals.

Using Social Media to Measure Food Insecurity
To understand COVID-19's impact on food insecurity early in the pandemic, NYU researchers created and administered an online survey in mid-April 2020, recruiting participants through Facebook and Instagram. They surveyed more than 5,600 adults from across the country, 25 percent of whom had children at home, to assess their food insecurity using a six-item questionnaire developed by the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

The researchers found that 14.7 percent of participants reported having low or very low food security in their households; this grew to 17.5 percent among households with children. Those who were unemployed, had less than a bachelor's degree, and had lower incomes were more likely to be food insecure. Living in urban versus rural areas was not associated with food insecurity.

"Compared to the general U.S. population, our survey sample of social media users was predominantly white and had higher levels of education and income. Nonetheless, our findings illustrate a rise in food insecurity early in the pandemic, particularly among families with children," said Parekh.

Tackling Food Insecurity-With the Help of Technology
The researchers call for both short- and long-term approaches to address food insecurity, including policy changes like further expansion of food stamps. They are also in the process of developing an innovative tool to keep leftover food from going in the trash-and instead, getting it to families in need.

"Studies suggest that around one-third of all food globally is wasted, especially nutrient-dense foods such as fruits, vegetables, and dairy," said Parekh. "How can we divert food, particularly perishables, from being wasted and redirect it to those who are food insecure?"

Parekh and her colleagues in NYU's Public Health Nutrition research group are creating a mobile app called "Food2Share," designed as a digital marketplace to connect local restaurants with food-insecure individuals. Once the app is launched, people will be able to claim food from local restaurants willing to provide free or highly discounted food donated by other customers. The prototype of the app is described in the annual journal of the United Nations System Standing Committee on Nutrition.

"During the COVID-19 pandemic, when restaurants were forced to close, many owners rose to the challenge of providing food to those in need and to front-line responders through grassroots food-distribution initiatives," said Parekh, "Scaling up these initiatives and other food salvaging efforts using technology and applying them to the global context could help reduce the food insecurity we have witnessed during the crisis."

"Strategies to tackle food insecurity must be considered as an important part of emergency preparedness planning efforts moving forward," Parekh added.

Additional authors for the Nutrition Journal study include Shahmir Ali, Joyce O'Connor, Yesim Tozan, Abbey Jones, Ariadna Capasso, Joshua Foreman, and Ralph DiClemente of NYU School of Global Public Health. The UNSCN Nutrition 45 article was written by Parekh, O'Connor, and Ayhan Dogan, also of NYU School of Global Public Health.

About the NYU School of Global Public Health
At the NYU School of Global Public Health (NYU GPH), we are preparing the next generation of public health pioneers with the critical thinking skills, acumen, and entrepreneurial approaches necessary to reinvent the public health paradigm. Devoted to employing a nontraditional, interdisciplinary model, NYU GPH aims to improve health worldwide through a unique blend of global public health studies, research, and practice. The School is located in the heart of New York City and extends to NYU's global network on six continents. Innovation is at the core of our ambitious approach, thinking and teaching. For more, visit: publichealth.nyu.edu/

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COVID-19 Pandemic Exacerbated Food Insecurity, Especially in Families with Children

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Nearly 15 percent of U.S. households-and nearly 18 percent of households with children-reported food insecurity early in the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a survey conducted via social media by researchers at NYU School of Global Public Health.