Author: gbump

“We have learned so much in the past year and we have so much more data to guide our decisions going forward,” said UW Health pediatric infectious diseases specialist Dr. Gregory DeMuri. “Now that we have this information, it is our job to use what we’ve learned. If we do that, kids can return to school and near-normal activities.”

In Wisconsin, we try to adjust our deer population up or down by releasing fewer, or more quotas for antlerless deer, because that’s where you get the population control,” Tim Van Deelen, UW-Madison Prof. of Forestry and Wildlife Ecology said.

Local health officials continue encouraging vaccination. “We’ll see severe disease in people who are not vaccinated, and I think we’ll see amplification and movement of the virus in those individuals to begin with. Because of that, it’s likely there will be continued spread and transmission of Delta,” UW-Health’s Dr. Nasia Safdar.

A day after the CDC announced new mask guidance based on new research that shows infected, vaccinated people could spread the Delta variant of the coronavirus to unvaccinated people, researchers at UW-Madison say that type of spread is likely happening here, too. Professors Dave and Shelby O’Connor say that the new research shows vaccinated people who experience a breakthrough infection of the Delta variant carry high loads of virus deep within their noses.

Howard Schweber, a political law professor at UW-Madison, pointed to the conservative Heritage Foundation’s tracking of voter fraud cases, noting it had found a total of 47 cases going back to 2004.”It’s almost impossible for me to express how absurd the search for culprits in voting fraud is,” Schweber said.

With several professional athletes taking a break to place their mental health as a priority, UW Health’s Distinguished Sports Pscyhologist Dr. Shilagh Mirgain encourages fans and family to remain supportive. “She’s human. She’s really showing that the weight of that pressure can really undermine people’s performance. And she really did what was best for her, prioritizing her mental health by pulling out of this competition,” explained Dr. Mirgain.

UW Health’s Dr. Jeff Pothof says that new research shows how alarmingly that Delta variant spreads. “We have studies that show in folks unvaccinated, their viral load can be 1,000 times greater than what we saw with normal COVID,” he said.

UW Madison Professor and Director of Money, Relationships and Equality Initiative Christin Whelan, researches these kinds of societal trends.“Every job has a uniform, but when you are an athlete, what you want to be able to do is be skilled, be strong, be powerful,” Whelan said.

UW Health’s Dr. Jeff Pothof said the Delta variant is one factor driving the change in guidance, as there are more breakthrough cases. The CDC now believes vaccinated people may spread the variant just as easy as vaccinated people.

Dr. Shilagh Mirgain, a distinguished sports psychologist at the UW, said performance anxiety is often a part of high-level competition. “For many people it can actually fuel them to show up their best to give it their all. But they can reach a tipping point,” she said.