Jessica Shapiro
Jessica Shapiro - Class of 2022
Summer of 2020
An aspiring pediatric surgeon, Jessica Shapiro had planned to find a research project addressing cancer in children, but the coronavirus changed that. With the pandemic raging, Shapiro turned her focus to the ways that COVID-19, the disease the coronavirus causes, upends the lives of adult cancer patients.
She issued a 13-question survey that asks people who have cancer, and those who have had it, how anxious they are about activities such as grocery shopping or going to the hospital for their treatments. It also asks caregivers how nervous they are about bringing the patients they are caring for to the hospital or for their treatments.
Shapiro is tabulating the results from 575 answered surveys.
“They can see that they are not alone in feeling very concerned,” she said. “It can also show the general population that this is how nervous they are, and to show how we can help them.”