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Author: gbump

‘Frustrated and heartbroken’: Health care workers say Wisconsin’s COVID-19 spike is the result of people ignoring preventive steps

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said that colleagues who went to cottages during the summer began reporting that they’d seen towns where no one appeared to be wearing a mask.

Badgers men’s basketball: Putting together the 2020-21 schedule a complicated endeavor

Wisconsin State Journal

When asking University of Wisconsin men’s basketball coach Greg Gard how the process of putting together the 2020-21 schedule is going, timing is everything. “It’s fluid. That’s probably the most complete way to say it right now,” Gard said. “What maybe you view as where you are at 9 a.m. may change by 1 p.m., and maybe again by 5.”

Daily testing the key for ‘drastically different’ Big Ten football season

The Capital Times

“There won’t be tailgates taking place around our stadium. There won’t be Badgerville. The Union won’t look like Union South normally looks,” McIntosh said. “We’ll come back in the fall of 2021 in a big way and get back to normal, but we all need to participate … We feel good about our chance to play right now, but there’s no guarantee, so we all need to play a role.”

With COVID-19 hospitalizations up in Dane County, officials urge masks, staying home

Wisconsin State Journal

“We are perilously close” to the county’s peak of COVID-19 hospitalizations in April, said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control at UW Health. “It is vital at this point to preserve the capacity of the health care systems and, equally importantly, to protect the health care workforce.”

Wisconsin Struggles to Explain Sudden Covid-19 Spike

The Wall Street Journal

“When it’s not enforced, you’re seeing very low mask-wearing rates,” said Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer with UW Health, a health system that serves more than 600,000 patients each year. “When we do contact tracing, it’s not the people who have been wearing their mask and doing social distancing that we’re talking to.”

Cap Times Idea Fest: Scientists always on the lookout for the next pandemic

The Capital Times

“It’s hard to know what’s going to be the next pandemic,” said Kristen Bernard, a UW virologist who studies animal-borne viruses, like the one that turned the world on its head this year. Bernard spoke with Kelly Tyrrell, an award-winning science writer and director of UW-Madison’s research communications, in a one-on-one session for the Cap Times Ideafest on preparing for the next pandemic.

Felicia Campbell, Professor Who Studied Gambling and Pop Culture, Dies at 89

The New York Times

Ms. Campbell was born on April 18, 1931, in Cuba City, Wis. Her parents, Frank Churchill Florine, a pharmacist, and Irene (Bower) Florine ran Florine and Son’s Drugstore and Pharmacy, where their daughter worked as a soda jerk. After earning undergraduate and masters degrees in English at the University of Wisconsin, she joined the Marines because, she said later, she wanted to see if she could handle it.

New MSC director strives for ‘best possible Wisconsin experience’ for students of color

Badger Herald

“I personally know what it is like to be a high-achieving student of color in a predominantly white institution that is competitive,” Guzmán said. “All the students of color who are here are remarkable, high-achieving, smart kids. I have the experience, skills, passion and desire to do what I can to ensure that students of color are having the best possible Wisconsin experience.”

Companies Ditch Plans for Rapid Coronavirus Spit Tests at Home

The New York Times

Another saliva LAMP test is being tested by David O’Connor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Their technique bears many similarities to the Columbia test, including a color-based readout, but takes slightly longer and involves a couple of extra steps. Early trials of the test on volunteers in Wisconsin have gone well, Dr. O’Connor said, and one school district in Illinois is using the test to screen about 1,400 students and teachers on a weekly basis.

Deaths, hospitalizations and infections are surging, but some GOP lawmakers tell constituents not to worry about COVID-19

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel

“If these legislators were practicing medicine, they would be sued for malpractice,” Patrick Remington, a former Centers for Disease Control epidemiologist and director of the Preventive Medicine Residency Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said after reviewing the lawmakers’ statements.

Facts on ground in Wisconsin paint tighter contest between Trump, Biden

Washington Times

Both the Marquette University Law School and the University of Wisconsin-Madison Elections Research Center polls showed Mr. Trump moving within the margin of error in September, with just a 4-point lead for Mr. Biden among likely voters. That’s the tightest Marquette result since May and a 4-point improvement for the president in the University of Wisconsin poll since August — a period in which he also narrowed Mr. Biden’s lead among independents in the UW poll.

Hidden in Plain Sight: Has Evidence for Life on Venus Been in Our Grasp for 40 Years?

Scientific American

Other archived data could prove useful, too. Sousa-Silva is currently looking through old infrared telescope observations of Venus, hunting for additional overlooked evidence of phosphine. And Sanjay Limaye of the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who is a co-author of Mogul’s preprint paper, says old data from the Soviet Venera probes—while unlikely to have been sensitive enough to detect phosphine—may contain evidence for atomic phosphorus, which could hint at the presence of molecular phosphine, too. He notes, however, that the whereabouts of much of those data is unknown. Still, Limaye says, “somebody probably has some records.”

Compact Nuclear Fusion Reactor Is ‘Very Likely to Work,’ Studies Suggest

New York Times

“Reading these papers gives me the sense that they’re going to have the controlled thermonuclear fusion plasma that we all dream about,” said Cary Forest, a physicist at the University of Wisconsin who is not involved in the project. “But if I were to estimate where they’re going to be, I’d give them a factor of two that I give to all my grad students when they say how long something is going to take.”

Starship Robots Now Delivering Groceries for Save Mart in Modesto, CA

The Spoon

While this is the first U.S. grocery partnership for Starship, the company has been doing robotic grocery delivery in the U.K. for a while now. Here in the U.S., Starship is mostly known for its college campus food delivery, and has lined up a number of partnerships with higher-education institutions including George Mason University, University of Pittsburgh and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Colleges Use Targeted Lockdowns, Online Classes to Preserve Fall Semester

WSJ

Providence is among colleges taking drastic steps to try to slow the spread of Covid-19, essentially pressing pause to salvage the rest of their fall term for face-to-face instruction and campus activities. The University of Arizona urged students to shelter in place for two weeks, while the University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Colorado Boulder quarantined thousands of students and moved classes online for weeks, too.