In one of the first campus-wide emails of the new year, UW-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank shared some new, slightly odd wisdom for the semester ahead: “Pool your drool.”
Officials at the University of Wisconsin-Madison have launched their new saliva-based COVID-19 testing program which, once in full swing next week, will take the campus from conducting around 12,000 tests per week to 82,000.
“I think the combination of both the testing strategy and the technology will, allow us to be more responsive. And, and then, therefore, you will contain the spread, if it should, if we should start to experience it,” said Jake Baggot, Executive Director of University Health Services.
Undergraduate students living in certain areas downtown will be required to be tested twice per week using a new saliva testing method, and access to university buildings will be restricted to those who can prove they are up-to-date on their tests and have not tested positive.
Quoted: Committee co-chairman Dr. Jonathan Temte of the University of Wisconsin-Madison agreed.
“Our recommendation should be based on the scientific evidence, the ethical pinnings, and the feasibility,” Temte said. “And on all three accounts, one would say, absolutely. If we are saying we’re going to punish these people yet again — because they are being punished for their crimes at this point in time — this constitutes kind of a double punishment and treating them very, very differently and I’m very uncomfortable with that.”
Quoted: Dietram Scheufele, the Taylor-Bascom chair in science communication at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said that scientists already must counter misinformation on Covid-19 vaccines. Manipulated data only makes that job harder, he said.
“It’s probably the worst possible time to deal with something like this,” he said.
Oak was finishing up her time at UW-Madison, working to become a physical therapist. She was completing a rotation at the time in New Orleans, Louisiana — a week before moving to New York.
The University of Wisconsin men’s hockey team had a few stars in the 1970s, the decade when it came of age. In retrospect, none was as big as Mark Johnson.
Not all of Biden’s economic agenda hinges on Congress. He has asked the requisite agencies to extend the federal moratorium on evictions and foreclosures through March 31, and the pause on federal student loan payments through Sept. 30. But there’s ultimately a limit to what the Executive Branch can do on its own. “There’s no set of buttons and levers the President can push and pull to generate the optimum mix of economic growth, unemployment and inflation,” says Kenneth Mayer, a University of Wisconsin–Madison professor who studies Executive Orders.
Jonathan Senchyne, an associate professor of book history and print culture at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he thinks a price might have been listed because this type of book would have been put on display at a holiday fair.
Laura Dresser, a labor economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said at that hiring pace, it’ll be a long time before Wisconsin makes up the hundreds of thousands of jobs lost in April.
Biden was able to make so many changes so quickly because of the precedent set by his predecessor, Donald Trump, says University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor Kenneth Mayer, author of the book “With the Stroke of a Pen: Executive Orders and Presidential Power.”
“Every president looks for ways to use the powers of the office to accomplish their goals, and Trump was unusually aggressive about it, finding things that really broke the norms,” such as declaring a national emergency on the border to redirect money to build a wall Congress refused to fund, he said.
“That was one very specific step that Biden thought would be important to take to symbolize to the world community that we’re back in the climate change game in terms of negotiations with the rest of the world,” said Stephen Vavrus, a climate scientist with the University of Wisconsin – Madison.
With Wisconsin getting just 70,000 first doses of vaccine each week, the committee acknowledged the challenge in making so many people eligible but didn’t address how to manage the expected large demand for a small supply. “To achieve that group is nearly an impossible task in short order,” said Dr. Jonathan Temte, associate dean of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. “We’re looking at months.”
