Quoted: “It’s kind of like a family that’s involved with their children in sports,” said Richard Halopka, a University of Wisconsin-Extension agent from Clark County.
“Not having the state fair would be a big letdown. But, unfortunately, this year it’s a sign of the times,” Halopka said.
We have to wait another year to cheer on Wisconsin athletes in the summer Olympics, but at least we can ride one high from 2016. In those games in Rio, Jorgensen became the first American to win gold in Olympic Triathlon, after she had dominated the world triathlete circuit over the previous three years. Jorgensen, a Waukesha native, didn’t start doing triathlon until she was recruited by USA Triathlon as a collegiate runner and swimmer at the University of Wisconsin, then began training while she worked as a CPA in Milwaukee. Jorgensen retired from triathlon in 2017, had a baby and announced a new goal: pursuing Olympic gold in track and field and eventually marathon.
More than half of the $70 million in state agency spending cuts ordered by Gov. Tony Evers will be to University of Wisconsin campuses in the first move to stabilize state finances during the coronavirus pandemic.
Quoted: Kristen Krokowski, a commercial horticulture educator at the University of Wisconsin-Extension in Waukesha, wrote the guidelines and recommendations for farmers markets in Wisconsin during the coronavirus pandemic.
Farmers markets were never prohibited under Evers’ safer-at-home order because the sale of food is considered an essential business. Regardless, that order is no longer in place.
“It’s all guidance now because there are no rules,” Krokowski said.
Quoted: University of Wisconsin-Madison economist Noah Williams said the economic downturn would likely be sustained. He said lawmakers should consider ways to bring people back to work, such as by offering cash bonuses to those who quickly find jobs and are taken off the unemployment rolls.
April’s 14% unemployment rate is likely an underestimate, Williams said. It could be closer to 18%.
“We’re seeing very high levels of unemployment,” he said. “It doesn’t seem out of line with national averages, although other states have certainly done better.
Quoted: Oguzhan Alagoz, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and an infectious disease modeling expert, said the increases Wisconsin is seeing are likely driven by many factors, like increased testing availability.
Alagoz said early mobility data shows people are taking precautions despite moving more.
“With current levels of movement, if people didn’t wear masks, if people were behaving as they were pre-March 10, believe me, we would have seen a double, triple, exponential increase in the number of cases,” Alagoz said.
Noted: Madison is both a college town and the state capital. State Street, which extends from the capitol to the University of Wisconsin, is usually jam-packed with people on the weekends. COVID-19 changed all that. Students were sent home to finish their semester online. Restaurants and bars have been closed. No farmers market on Capitol Square on Saturdays. The capitol building itself has been locked for weeks.
Noted: “The Coyotes of Carthage” (Ecco), by Steven Wright. In a UW-Madison law professor’s satirical debut, a political operative tries to save his career by masterminding a dark money campaign for corporate mining interests.
Quoted: Asked if there is any precedent for two parties holding such very different modes of convention, political scientist Byron Shafer paused before reaching back to the year 1872, when the much-weakened post-Civil War Democratic Party simply endorsed another party’s presidential candidate at its six-hour convention (the shortest ever) without even adopting its own platform.
“There is no sensible prior analog” to the contrasting conventions that may be held in 2020, said Shafer, a retired University of Wisconsin-Madison professor who writes about conventions. “If the Democrats are all virtual and the Republicans are all live (and in person), we really don’t have anything to compare that to.”
Noted: The CDC recommends the public wear cloth masks and not use masks meant for health professionals, including N95 masks. Given that you have “significant underlying conditions,” it’s important that you keep yourself safe and consult your doctor on how best to do that.
It’s safer to avoid public restrooms. If you must use one, be sure you have your mask on when you are inside. If you are not the only occupant, keep six or more feet from others. Avoid touching surfaces including doors, faucet handles, pump soap, etc. If you can wash your hands safely and properly inside the restroom, it’s still a good idea to use alcohol rub to disinfect your hands once you get outside the bathroom. Avoid touching your face unless your hands are clean.
— Ajay K. Sethi, associate professor, population health sciences, University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Nasia Safdar, an infectious disease expert with the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said factors such as improved weather and the end of at-home schooling in some districts have likely contributed to a general trend of increased movement.
“I think there were things that helped people stay put in the beginning of this, which is that there was a lot of fear and uncertainty and the weather wasn’t great,” she said. “I’m sure people are experiencing some cabin fever despite their best intentions.”
Thomas Oliver, a health policy expert, also at UW-Madison, said the increased movement in Wisconsin and mixed messaging sent by the patchwork of rules from authorities at all levels is concerning.
“It was inevitable you would see slipping adherence to the recommended guidelines regardless, but now we have so many contradictory and competing guidelines,” he said.
Oguzhan Alagoz, an expert in infectious disease modeling at UW-Madison, said the pictures he saw after the court order of unmasked people standing close together inside bars is troubling and likely to lead to more cases.
If it wasn’t apparent earlier this spring, it should be clear by now that college presidents, chancellors and athletic directors are prepared to do all they can to play college football games in 2020.
Quoted: “If the state wanted to really do a vote-by-mail system like those five states out West do, it would require lots of printing and postage costs upfront, millions of dollars,” said Barry Burden, UW-Madison political science professor. “Because all those states automatically send ballots to all their registered voters. That would be about 3.3 million ballots in Wisconsin.”
University of Wisconsin officials are on schedule to address the contracts of winter sports coaches during the athletic board’s June 12 meeting.
Noted: Weeks passed without the expected surge of new patients. UW Health established two special units for people hospitalized with COVID-19, but no patients arrived. Staff waited.
“None of us have done this before,” said Ann Sheehy, a doctor there for 15 of her 46 years. “We had to create new processes.”
Sheehy helped build a large backup team of doctors and other clinic staff who don’t normally practice in the hospital but are certified to do so. They were offered special training and the chance to shadow hospital staff in preparation for COVID-19 duty.
Noted: Since there are no veterinary clinics in those areas, the Wisconsin Humane Society is working with the University of Wisconsin School of Veterinary Medicine to offer tele-medicine appointments for sick and injured animals owned by Pets For Life participants, said Speed.
Widespread testing and temperature checks. Socially distanced classes and labs. Isolation protocols. Contact tracing and cellphone tracking devices. Hybrid in-person and online classes. Modified academic calendars.
Although University of Wisconsin officials still hope the UW football team will play its full 2020 schedule despite the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, they continue to work with season ticket holders unsure about attending games in the fall.
Noted: After he left the military Bakko earned a geology degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and then joined the Wisconsin Army National Guard’s 105th Cavalry Regiment, serving from 2010 to 2016.
Noted: Although Halleman is a web developer by trade — he currently works at Watermark Insight in Milwaukee’s Third Ward — his time at UW-Madison was spent majoring in Spanish and international studies. Still, he said the pandemic motivated him to use the coding skills he picked up in his mid-20s to help others.
In their final weeks of medical school at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, Jandal and his peers had seen the world turned upside down.
Quoted: Nasia Safdar, an infectious disease expert with the University of Wisconsin-Madison and medical director of infection control at UW Health, said the study addresses an important question, but cannot eliminate the possibility that other activities during the same time period might have been the real cause of cases.
“They did a pretty careful assessment of traffic during the period of interest, but these challenges remain with these kinds of studies,” Safdar said. “It’s association, but not causation.”
Oguzhan Alagoz, an expert in infectious disease modeling at UW-Madison, said he thinks a slight bump in COVID-19 cases after the election may be attributable to in-person voting.
Elections expert Barry Burden said he thought the partisan differences that voters expressed in the poll over voting-by-mail reflected the political debate that surfaced between the parties over the April election in Wisconsin, with Democratic politicians pushing for an all-mail election and Republican politicians opposing changes in the timing or conduct of the election.
President Donald Trump’s attacks on voting by-mail also fed the partisan debate.
But Burden expressed skepticism that the gap between how Democrats and Republicans choose to vote in November — whether by mail or in-person — will be as large as the poll suggests.
“It doesn’t reflect what we saw in the April 7 election (when) there was consistent but I would say modest differences between liberal and conservative voters in how they used mail ballots,” said Burden, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies the way elections are administered.
From Rebecca M. Blank is chancellor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and chair of the Council of Presidents of the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities, a research, policy, and advocacy organization. Peter McPherson is president of APLU and former president of Michigan State University.
Quoted: How science, and those who communicate it, deal with changing sets of facts is an important question in a pandemic. Uncertainty must be clearly demonstrated and explained — or used in bad faith, according to Richard Keller, a professor of science history at UW-Madison.
“Scientists are comfortable with uncertainty — they don’t like it, they want to be certain — but they recognize that you’ll never be completely certain,” Keller says. “There’s a degree of comfort with uncertainty the general public doesn’t have. We want to know what we should likely do, what we have to do.”
The University of Wisconsin-Madison, which boasts an endowment of $3 billion, announced this week that it will accept $10 million in federal coronavirus relief. Wealthy universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton have rejected millions of dollars in taxpayer funds in April after facing pressure from President Donald Trump and the public.
Quoted: “This may sound small at first, but it is the largest drop since World War II, as emissions have generally increased year-over-year, even during recessions,” Ankur Desai, a professor of atmospheric sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told USA TODAY.
The University of Wisconsin pulled off an awesome move for recent graduates.
With everybody needing to take online classes because of the coronavirus pandemic, students were robbed of the chance to enjoy a proper commencement.
The University of Wisconsin Madison is sitting on an endowment worth $3 billion and also will receive nearly $10 million in federal aid to help with profit losses from coronavirus — but it’s still not enough to handle an estimated $120 million budget shortfall looming for the flagship state university.
Quoted: These conditions are important to help understand who is most vulnerable to the disease and how to take protective measures, according to Dr. Patrick Remington, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
But Remington cautioned against “othering” people, thinking that COVID-19 is a problem affecting someone else.
“Remember, most Americans have comorbidities,” said Remington, a former CDC epidemiologist and now the director of the Preventive Medicine Residency Program at Madison. “I wouldn’t want anyone to think this is another person’s disease.”
University of Wisconsin System President Ray Cross says campuses will provide extensive COVID-19 testing for students, faculty and staff in hopes that campuses can resume in-person classes this fall.
Noted: Around 40% of all workers could theoretically earn more while unemployed than going back to work, according to an analysis by Noah Williams, director of the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Graduates and their loved ones tuned into the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s first ever virtual commencement ceremony Saturday.
This weekend I will graduate in my living room. I will turn my tassel for a Zoom audience full of loved ones and drink a bottle of champagne in honor of my ancestors. Then, I will assure everyone looking on that despite drastic changes in our reality, I am eternally grateful for the journey that led me to this point. We will dance and sing in our respective homes and get tipsy enough that the distance that separates us will shrink. And I will end the night as a 2020 graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: To get started, McGinnis turned to the website of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s face shield project. It offered nearly everything his team needed, including a list of materials to make face shields and a pattern to use for assembly.
This was the weekend it begins: The celebratory season in which thousands of proud family members traditionally descend on campuses statewide to witness and revel in what for most is the academic accomplishment of a lifetime.
But this year, the campuses are largely empty.
It appears the University of Wisconsin’s Barry Alvarez, Paul Chryst and Greg Gard are going to have to take one for the team.
The UW athletic department is implementing a “compensation and work reduction plan” in an effort to offset the losses brought on by the COVID-19 pandemic, a move that includes voluntary pay cuts for top-earning personnel such as Alvarez, the athletic director; Chryst, the head football coach; and Gard, the head men’s basketball coach.
In a special meeting Thursday of the University of Wisconsin Board of Regents, two board members whose terms expired on May 1 participated and voted in board proceedings.
Noted: American Girl’s lead designer for the Girl of the Year series, Rebecca DeKuiper, lived near Monona Terrace in 2014, and Walkowicz’s attorney believes she and other American Girl employees attended Walkowicz’s talk and were inspired to use Walkowicz as the basis for a new doll.
In October 2016, Walkowicz was back in Madison taking part in Space Place at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and led activities for parents, and did more outreach in Trempealeau and LaCrosse.
The University of Wisconsin Board of Regents on Thursday held a special meeting Thursday, voting to waive test score requirements for incoming freshman, discussing campus reopening plans and providing an update to the search for the next UW System president.
On any list of the top 50 sports moments in the United States over the past 50 years, Miracle On Ice will inevitably be near the top, if not No. 1.
Quoted: “The question I have is why they should be going to court at all,” University of Wisconsin Law School constitutional law professor David Schwartz said. “(GOP lawmakers) are asking the court to basically rewrite this law — to turn it into something much narrower than it is.”
When Soyeon Shim was young, she wanted to be a teacher.
“I’d come home and gather all the kids in the neighborhood and play like we were at school and I was the teacher,” she says.
For a girl growing up in South Korea, there weren’t many other options. “Teacher or nurse,” Shim says. “But in the back of my mind, I always wanted to be an entrepreneur.”
The leader of the University of Wisconsin System will unveil Thursday a three-part plan that radically re-imagines the network of schools that has been in place for a half-century.
Two months have passed since coronavirus first began major disruptions to American society, and the nation still lacks a clear timeline back to “normalcy.”
Noted: Pallen graduated from the University of Wisconsin with a degree in communications arts and advertising. Beer was always in his bloodline — and, occasionally, his car.
Noted: EatStreet, co-founded by Howard in a University of Wisconsin-Madison dorm room in 2010, has around 150 employees in its Madison headquarters. More than 15,000 restaurants in 250 cities are on the platform.
Quoted: “The fact that we are not seeing those from one community cropping up in the other community suggests that the stay-at-home orders are working,” said David O’Connor, a UW professor of pathology and laboratory medicine.
Quoted: Tash and Brown’s comments get an endorsement from Kathleen Bartzen Culver, who directs the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
A government loan doesn’t automatically cause a conflict of interest, she said. But “I would . . . ask what [a] local news organization will do to counteract any potential conflict.” Her suggestion: “Any news organization that takes funds should report on that and reassure readers that they will continue to see fair, hard-hitting reporting, including on the government’s approach to an economy wrecked by an epidemic.”
Quoted: That non-verbal communication is complicated if a mask covers half of your face. If others are unable to see your mouth, they’re left to guess how you’re feeling, said Dr. Shilagh Mirgain, a health psychologist with the University of Wisconsin’s School of Medicine and Public Health.
“When we don’t get that nonverbal feedback, we feel more distance from one another, [and] it makes the other person feel less safe,” she said.
Quoted: “In the end of the day, there is only the same number of people wiping their, um, you know what,” said Troy Runge, the chair of the biological systems engineering department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “The presence of a minor party candidate can affect who wins an election,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and director of its elections research center. “My research on prior minor party candidates for president indicates that between 25% and 60% of their support is from people who would not have voted.”
Quoted: Director of the Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Sandra Newbury, who has been conducting research on how COVID-19 impacts animals, stressed that the news is no reason to panic.
“We really don’t want people to freak out in general,” Newbury said. “In fact, it looks like dogs are not very good hosts for the virus … Most dogs that have tested positive have been asymptomatic.”
Quoted: UW-Madison anticipated a freshmen class of roughly 7,300 students, nearly 3,700 of those students would be in state.
André Phillips, director of admissions and recruitment at UW-Madison, said they should be able to surpass the 7,300 students anticipated by at least 100.
“We’ll likely have several hundred students that we’ll work with throughout the month of May leading up to the June 1 deadline, and that’s pretty significant,” Phillips said.
Quoted: Song Gao, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has been aggregating cell phone data that shows how far Wisconsinites are traveling each day as a way to understand if residents are following the state’s “Safer At Home” order. Gao said residents’ mobility has been reduced significantly in the past month, especially in urban areas like Dane and Milwaukee counties.
But he has seen increased movement around Wisconsin starting last week
“I think this is also linked with last week’s events. Like people started getting (outside) and also last Friday, they also had some protests outside the state Capitol,” Gao said.
Quoted: “You’ve certainly seen in places that stopped isolation measures too early — what the flu pandemic did in those places,” said Dr. James Conway, an infectious disease expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and a self-described history buff.
New research from the University of Wisconsin-Madison suggests that contrary to government guidelines, asthma may not put a person at increased risk for severe COVID-19, but may, in fact, offer some protection against it.
Quoted: Jim Conway, an infectious disease expert and associate director for health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute, argued loosening restrictions regionally is a short-sighted idea.
“It’s like being in a swimming pool and having one area of the pool that it’s OK to pee in,” he said.
Conway said because the economy relies on travel in many sectors, there would be no way to ensure new cases weren’t brought to areas with few cases and few restrictions under a regional plan — especially in a state like Wisconsin with a lot of recreational tourism in rural areas.
University of Wisconsin officials do not expect to extend for the second time the deadline to buy season football tickets for 2020.
State campuses in Milwaukee and Madison unveiled more information on their plans to furlough employees this week, with the aim of mitigating the mounting financial fallout from the coronavirus outbreak.
