Young Women Returning to School in Sub-Saharan Africa During the COVID-19 Pandemic

School closures during the COVID-19 pandemic have severely affected the lives of young people globally. This paper presents evidence on the return of young women to school in six sub-Saharan African countries during the pandemic. The analysis of representative survey data on women aged 15-25 indicates that in countries where restrictions on schools have been short-lived, both school re-opening and return to school have occurred broadly, with little variation across age, while female school attendance remains strongly depressed below pre-pandemic levels in countries where restrictions were still in place. Both women whose schools have remained closed and women who have already returned to school are less likely to have given birth or supplied labor during the pandemic than women who had already left school prior to COVID- 19, while women who have not returned to school exhibit a significantly higher birth rate than the latter. Further, women who have not returned to school are less likely to perform independent and paid work than women who had already left school prior to COVID-19, while they are just as likely to supply low-quality labor, indicating labor market scarring effects among the non-returning women

International travel in times of the COVID-19 pandemic: evidence from German school breaks

The COVID‐19 pandemic has triggered severe global restrictions on international travel with the intention of limiting the spread of SARS‐CoV‐2 across countries. This paper studies the effects of the partial relaxation of these travel restrictions in Europe during the summer months of 2020. It exploits the staggered start of the summer school breaks across German states as an ex‐ogenous shock to the travel opportunities of the population. While the school breaks also increased mobility within Germany, the event study regressions include disaggregated and time‐varying controls for domestic mobility and local COVID‐19‐related restrictions. The resulting intention‐to‐treat effects of the relaxed travel restrictions show a significant and sizable increase of the COVID‐19 incidence in German counties during the later weeks of the school breaks. The increase can be partly ascribed to a mandatory testing regime for travel returnees from risk areas

Limits of life and the habitability of Mars: The ESA space experiment BIOMEX on the ISS

BIOMEX (BIOlogy and Mars EXperiment) is an ESA/Roscosmos space exposure experiment housed within the exposure facility EXPOSE-R2 outside the Zvezda module on the International Space Station (ISS). The design of the multiuser facility supports—among others—the BIOMEX investigations into the stability and level of degradation of space-exposed biosignatures such as pigments, secondary metabolites, and cell surfaces in contact with a terrestrial and Mars analog mineral environment. In parallel, analysis on the viability of the investigated organisms has provided relevant data for evaluation of the habitability of Mars, for the limits of life, and for the likelihood of an interplanetary transfer of life (theory of lithopanspermia). In this project, lichens, archaea, bacteria, cyanobacteria, snow/permafrost algae, meristematic black fungi, and bryophytes from alpine and polar habitats were embedded, grown, and cultured on a mixture of martian and lunar regolith analogs or other terrestrial minerals. The organisms and regolith analogs and terrestrial mineral mixtures were then exposed to space and to simulated Mars-like conditions by way of the EXPOSE-R2 facility. In this special issue, we present the first set of data obtained in reference to our investigation into the habitability of Mars and limits of life. This project was initiated and implemented by the BIOMEX group, an international and interdisciplinary consortium of 30 institutes in 12 countries on 3 continents. Preflight tests for sample selection, results from ground-based simulation experiments, and the space experiments themselves are presented and include a complete overview of the scientific processes required for this space experiment and postflight analysis. The presented BIOMEX concept could be scaled up to future exposure experiments on the Moon and will serve as a pretest in low Earth orbit

Onset and maintenance of psychiatric disorders after serious accidents

The purpose of this study was to prospectively investigate the onset, course, and remission of psychiatric disorders in the first 6months after a serious accident for consecutive patients in a hospital emergency department. Participants were 58 patients aged 18-65 who were assessed shortly after attending a hospital emergency department and were followed up 6months afterwards. Patients were interviewed with regard to past and current psychiatric history using different instruments (e.g. SCID for DSM-IV). Prior to their accidents, 35% of all subjects had experienced one or more psychiatric disorders (lifetime prevalence). Shortly after the accident, the incidence of Acute Stress Disorder (7%), subsyndromal Acute Stress Disorder (12%), and adjustment disorder (1.5%) was increased as a reaction to the accident. At this time, 29% of all patients suffered from an acute psychiatric disorder. Six-months after the accident, 10% of the subjects met criteria for Major Depression, 6% for PTSD, 4% for subsyndromal PTSD, and 1.5% for Specific Phobia as newly developed disorders. The course of the psychiatric disorders shows that those patients who met criteria for any psychiatric diagnosis shortly after the accident ran a much higher risk for developing new or comorbid psychiatric disorders in the futur

D4.2 Reports on (1) The impact of family migration and family reunification of refugees and other migrants; (2) Secondary movements within the European Union

Family migration constitutes the largest migration inflow to OECD countries, accounting for almost half the immigration in recent years. Between 2014 and 2018, family migration increased in most countries, leading to worries about large migration flows in future years following the large numbers of asylum applications in E.U. countries during the mid-2010s. That led some countries to restrict family reunification programs, despite a lack of empirical estimates of the numbers of family migrants that could realistically be expected. This paper provides predictions of how large an increase in the number of immigrants through family reunification and reproduction can be expected. A common stereotype that policymakers and voters have in mind when considering migrants, especially asylum seekers and refugees, is that of a single, typically male, young person. Reality is more complex, with many migrations taking place as a core family. To establish a more representative picture closer to the facts, it is thus important to distinguish to what extent the structure of migrants' families is driven by family reunification and reproduction that only occurs after the arrival in the destination country, respectively. To assess these questions, we combine data from the IAB-BAMF-SOEP Survey of Refugees with fertility estimates from the Wittgenstein Centre for Demography and Global Human Capital and make predictions about family reunification and delayed fertility. We build thereby on the literature on fertility patterns of migrants and assume two different fertility scenarios: fertility under adaptation and fertility under socialization. We estimate that in general, for each asylum seeker and refugee, 0.19 family members can be expected to come to Germany through family reunification. In addition, between 0.20 to 0.47 new family members can be expected due to future fertility, depending on the scenario. We also provide further country and education specific predictions building on regression analysis. Our results imply that family reunification and delayed fertility can increase the asylum seeker and refugee stock in the destination countries, numbers are however lower than often expected