This week on the Best of Our Knowledge, we’ll talk about a new survey from The Princeton Review about how top colleges are planning on reopening for the Fall.
We’ll also visit a university campus on a very different looking move-in day, talk about two very different methods of testing for the coronavirus, and spend an Academic Minute reliving the Black Death.
Each year, The Princeton Review publishes its rankings of the best colleges in the country. The new survey on higher education in the COVID-19 era is an added part of that review. With some high profile institutions rapidly closing just after opening for the new school year, we wanted to take a closer look at the reopening process for higher education.
Here to talk about them is Robert Franek, the Editor-In-Chief at The Princeton Review. We asked when they took this new survey and who they spoke to.
Within weeks of the declaration of the COVID-19 pandemic, literally hundreds of test kits for the detection of antibodies to the novel coronavirus have flooded the market. Just as quickly, the accuracy of some of these procedures has been called into question.
A paper, appearing in the August 2020 issue of the journal Clinical Chemistry, examined several of these assays in an attempt to validate their performance and validate the manufacturers’ claims. Two authors of that paper are Dr. Mei San Tang and Dr. Christopher Farnsworth from the Department of Pathology & Immunology at Washington University in St. Louis. We asked Dr. Tang what’s the difference between testing for the novel coronavirus itself, the so-called diagnostic tests, and serological, or antibody tests.
The coronavirus pandemic has certainly disrupted life for just about everyone. But cheer up, it ain’t the Black Death. That’s the topic of today’s Academic Minute.