At the same time as the University of Wisconsin-Madison prepares to welcome back students living in residence halls next week and students into classrooms Sept. 2, two Midwestern universities have reversed course and gone virtual because of COVID-19 outbreaks.
“Nothing is certain about this fall,” Blank said. “We’ll have a testing regime in place that allows us to monitor the rate of infection among different groups on campus. If the infections appear to be growing rather than stable, we will shut down activities on some or all parts of campus.”
But such tests face regulatory hurdles before they can be produced widely. Other rapid tests that are available now may need to be refined further before they can be “operationalized,” or used effectively in an actual setting, like a school, according to Dave O’Connor. He and colleagues in the AIDS Vaccine Reseach Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, have been piloting what is called a loop-mediated isothermal amplification (LAMP) test, which can be done on saliva, as part of the N.I.H. Rapid Acceleration of Diagnostics initiative. They’re running their project out of a minivan. “The first day we tested five or six people,” he told me. “Today we ran 80.”
Anew federal advisory board’s rejection of nearly all research proposals it reviewed involving fetal tissue has reignited the debate over such research, which opponents have tried several times to ban in Wisconsin.
Laurie and Scott Dubin, along with their daughter Lindsay, stood outside a rented RV last Saturday with a heap of luggage.
They were about to start the 2,000-mile drive from the San Francisco Bay Area to the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where Lindsay would start her freshman year at her dream school in the middle of a pandemic.
“I hope school isn’t canceled from Saturday until then,” Laurie Dubin had said earlier that week.
A developer is proposing to add housing above and behind a popular brewpub and restaurant on Regent Street near the UW-Madison campus.
Students say they’ve been seeing a lack of social distancing and a disregard of public health guidelines as many start to move back in to student housing.
Spurred on by widespread civil unrest in wake of George Floyd’s death, Madison activists organize to raise awareness, force changes to campus.
John Eason, a University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist who studies the effect of prisons on rural communities, argued that “it doesn’t matter who it is” that’s getting worse-hit by Covid-19 behind bars, given how many Black individuals are incarcerated. “If we don’t find a way to decarcerate, Black people are going to lose.”
Plans to play a truncated football season starting in early-to-mid January are gaining steam inside the Big Ten Conference.
The Badgers began initial preparations earlier this month for the 2020-21 season, a season that is up in the air because of the COVID-19 pandemic. NCAA senior vice president of basketball Dan Gavitt said earlier this week that a decision will be made by mid-September about whether the season will start on time.
It is certainly not a surprise to this editorial board that former Governor Tommy Thompson is seizing the opportunity of serving as President of the UW System to encourage greater investment in the UW to leverage the system in meeting the immediate and future needs of Wisconsin.
Eleanor Powell, a University of Wisconsin-Madison politics professor, said there were reasons to think that they would. She said Mr Biden had better relations with the community, had chosen Kamala Harris, a black woman, as his running mate, and would receive help from Barack and Michelle Obama.
Some of the discrepancies might have arisen at least partly because the brainstem is difficult to capture in brain images, says Brittany Travers, assistant professor of kinesiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. It is surrounded by major blood vessels and cerebrospinal fluid, which are in constant motion due to breathing and circulation and create ‘noise’ in images.
“After spending a billion dollars on his own candidacy in the primary, many in the party thought that would imply spending at least as much on the general election, if not more,” said Eleanor Neff Powell, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison with a focus on money in politics. “A billion dollars may be an unreasonable expectation, but he set — and in some ways expanded — those expectations during the primary, even if he didn’t outright say how much he planned to spend in the general.”
Quoted: “I think outbreaks like we saw at UNC are completely possible, really, at any campus,” Jeff Pothoff, UW Health’s chief quality officer, said. As reopen plans inch towards reality, he said students are the “wild cards.”
Biden’s last in-person campaign stop in Wisconsin was on the University of Wisconsin-Madison campus on Oct. 30, 2018, in the waning days of the midterm election. He has hosted virtual events and was supposed to accept the presidential nomination at the convention on Thursday, but due to COVID-19 will instead deliver his speech from his home in Delaware.
Quoted: “We were really, really close two years ago and then the number ticked up in Afghanistan and Pakistan,” said Sarah Paige, a former post-doctoral fellow from the University of Wisconsin-Madison who now works at the CORE Group Polio Project dedicated to eradicating the disease. In 2019, the number of polio cases rose to 94.
Noted: Harris briefly lived in Madison when she was young in the late 1960s. Her father, Donald Harris, was an associate professor of economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and her mother, Shyamala Gopalan Harris, was a breast cancer researcher there.
