Q&A with Lisa Gray

How badly has the COVID-19 pandemic affected kids’ mental health? Mental Health America of Greater Houston recently held “listening sessions” with students, parents, teachers and administrators in the 28 Houston-area school districts that work with its Center for School Behavioral Health — and what they heard was alarming.

According to Jamie Freeny, the center’s director, K-12 students are now more frequently dealing with grief, family stress and isolation. There’s more clinginess, more self-harm, more cyber-bullying, more suicidal ideation, disrupted sleep and acting out. Kids are more frequently being diagnosed with anxiety, depression and stress-based diseases such as shingles.

Freeny, who has doctorate in public health, did her Ph.D research on childhood trauma. Here, she talks with Lisa about specific ways parents and other adults can help kids who are struggling.

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To find doses, Houstonians are hitting the road. Why is it so much easier to find vaccine elsewhere? Dr. David Lakey, a member of Texas' vaccine allocation panel explains how the doses are divvied up around the state and why you might — or might not — want to take a drive for your shot. He spoke with us Wednesday from his office in Austin.

But first, Lisa chats with friend of the pod and former host of the Coronavirus Chronicle podcast, Ferrill Gibbs, who recently road-tripped to Jasper, Texas for the jab.

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As adults across the U.S. begin to be vaccinated against COVID, many parents have questions about their kids. When can we expect a vaccine approved for people under 16? What are the risks of COVID to healthy young people, including athletes? Should kids wear double masks? How does COVID affect kids of different ages differently? And now that Texas is open, can we relax a little for Spring Break? Today Lisa talks with Dr. Jim Versalovic, the interim pediatrician-in-chief of Texas Children’s Hospital.

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Ben Neuman is one of the world’s top experts on coronaviruses. He’s the Global Health Research Complex Chief Virologist at Texas A&M University. A funny and genial explainer of science, Dr. Ben got serious fast when Lisa started asking about reopening Texas and the end of Gov. Abbott's mask mandate.

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Could the winter storm have a Christmas-like effect on Houston’s COVID numbers? A&M epidemiologist Rebecca Fischer explains: "What is important to remember is that we’ve been here before. We still have a lot of infections happening every day — we’re not in the clear — and we may very well see another increase in cases as we move forward."

Fischer, an assistant professor of public health, works with A&M’s COVID Investigation Operations Center. She lives in Houston, but spoke to Lisa from her office in College Station.

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When will we get our old lives back? And what will “normal” even look like then?

This week, Lisa talks with Julie Swann, an expert in vaccine supply chains and logistics, and also a COVID modeler. At North Carolina State University, she’s head of the Department of Industrial Systems and Engineering, and in 2009, she advised the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention during the H1N1 pandemic.

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This week, too many Texans were stuck shivering inside our homes, wondering how our state’s electric system could fail so massively. Who’s to blame? And more important, how do we make sure this doesn’t happen again? Kaiba White deals with energy policy for Public Citizen Texas, a nonprofit that advocates for consumer issues. She spoke to us from her home in Austin, where her own pipes were frozen.

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Health policy is always a matter of life and death — and even more so during a pandemic. This week, health economist Vivian Ho grapples with some of our moment’s big questions:

How is Texas doing with its vaccine rollout? What’s baked into our state’s unusual choice to prioritize people over 65 or with underlying conditions, rather than teachers and other frontline workers? How fair has it been so far? And what does it mean that even the Centers for Disease Control and Protection’s data isn’t good enough to answer basic questions about reopening safely?

At Rice University, Ho is the James A. Baker III Institute Chair in Health Economics, and she directs the Baker Institute’s Center for Health and Biosciences. She is also a professor at Baylor College of Medicine, and was recently elected to the National Academy of Medicine, one of the highest honors in the field.

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At the beginning of the U.S. COVID outbreak, Peter Hotez was carefully nonpartisan, appearing on both Fox News and MSNBC. But as his horror grew about the lack of a national response to the pandemic, he sharply criticized the Trump administration.

Now, it’s the Biden administration’s turn. In a Tuesday op-ed in the Washington Post, Hotez explained why new variants of SARS-COV-2 require Biden to radically step up his vaccine game. Here Hotez explains how we could do that — and what he believes the U.S. must do to get vaccine into more arms.

Peter Hotez is a professor and dean of the National School of Tropical Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, and co-director of the Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Development.

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What’s going on with vaccine distribution in Texas? If you qualify, what’s the best way to get an appointment? Who’s next in line? And how long can the rest of us expect to wait?

Dr. David Lakey is a member of the Texas COVID-19 Expert Vaccine Allocation Panel — the scientific group that advises the Texas Commissioner on Health about who should get a vaccine when. A former Texas Commissioner on Health himself, he’s an expert on disease outbreaks, and vice chancellor for health affairs and chief medical officer of the University of Texas System.

Wednesday evening, from his office in Austin, he answered questions from our listeners and Lisa.

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