I never imagined when launching the UW Odyssey Project 17 years ago that a pandemic would shut down our face-to-face classes, postpone our exuberant May graduation, and leave our families at the poverty level and hurting badly.
Quoted: Dave Schroeder, an information technology strategist with the Division of Information Technology at UW-Madison, wrote in an email that controls like those outlined in the district’s email are “ways to use Zoom securely,” but added that “some of those can only be controlled by the person hosting the meeting.”
Think back to a month ago, when the sports world was first put on hold by the COVID-19 pandemic.
At the time, we were talking about pushing the start of the Major League Baseball season back a month, the NBA and NHL going straight to the playoffs after a short hiatus, postponing the NCAA men’s basketball tournament for awhile and resuming spring football practice when the students returned to campus from spring break.
Boy, were we naive or what?
Noted: Located within the city, the University of Wisconsin-Madison is also taking steps in its outdoor spaces to reduce the spread of the coronavirus.
UW-Madison spokesperson Meredith McGlone said the university has posted signs at outdoor locations, including Memorial Union, campus recreational fields and Picnic Point. Also, the university has removed some recreational equipment, like basketball hoops and volleyball nets.
“We understand everyone’s desire to spend some time outdoors staying active, especially as the weather is improving, but we share the concern about maintaining 6 feet social distancing while being outdoors and engaging in recreational activity,” McGlone said in a statement. “Now more than ever, Badgers need to look out for each other and for the most vulnerable members of our community.”
With sports on hold amid the COVID-19 coronavirus pandemic, J.J. Watt took to social media Thursday afternoon to provide a live weather update from Wisconsin.
Quoted: “From a public health perspective, this was counter to all good scientific evidence and advice right now for how to continue to curb the pandemic from having serious impacts in the state,” said Kristen Malecki, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “The fact that politics interfered with sound judgment and jeopardized public safety is something that should not be ignored.”
The University of Wisconsin will not allow seniors who competed in spring sports to pursue another season with the Badgers, the school announced Thursday.
Noted: Donny went to Brookfield East High School and the University of Wisconsin-Madison. He worked for multiple companies on the Chicago Board of Trade, before accepting his job in New York. He loved hiking and biking, and ran in several ultramarathons.
Noted: Plasma trials have received FDA approval and are already moving forward at medical centers including those affiliated with Johns Hopkins University and University of Wisconsin-Madison. The FDA has also approved the use of survivor plasma to treat patients on an experimental, compassionate basis.
Noted: Dávila graduated from the University of Wisconsin-Madison then served as a Spanish linguist in the U.S. Army before attending Marquette University Law School. He graduated the law school in 2011.
When a Saturn rocket lifted off from Kennedy Space Center half a century ago, it carried three astronauts and a lunar lander to take two of them to the moon’s surface.
When Journal Sentinel reporter Meg Jones went to visit former astronaut James Lovell to discuss the 50th anniversary of Apollo 13, she brought with her some special mementos.
Lovell moved to Milwaukee as a boy, graduated from Juneau High School and studied engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
The NCAA overreacted in restoring a year of eligibility to spring sports students amid the coronavirus-related shutdown, University of Wisconsin athletic director Barry Alvarez said.
Quoted: Disability groups have sued in New York and Washington, which are two of 14 states with such ventilator triage guidelines and have guidelines “similar” to those proposed in Wisconsin, said Dr. Norman Fost, a UW-Madison bioethicist. “There’s probably going to be a lawsuit (here),” he said.
Dane County prosecutors believe the deaths of a physician and her husband may have been the result of a conflict with their daughter’s boyfriend brought on by a disagreement over social distancing.
Marquette University leaders announced Wednesday that the campus will furlough some 250 people after April 17, a temporary leave that will continue indefinitely.
As the University of Wisconsin-Madison joined universities around the country in shutting down dorms, classrooms and event venues because of the coronavirus pandemic, Jennifer Morzfeld found herself wading through a barrage of emails.
In the midst of finding out about her coursework, the junior political science and international affairs student got one message in particular that left her with a pressing concern, one that thousands of college students now face.
Quoted: That makes the real estate markets difficult to predict for industry experts like Mark Eppli, director of the James A. Graaskamp Center for Real Estate at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“We have a lot of uncertainty and not a lot of data,” Eppli said.
Quoted: “I don’t think that for most people cat-to-human transmission is the most likely way that they would be infected, but I’d be very surprised if this was impossible,” said David O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Noted: For Alyssa Birkeland, a senior at the University of Wisconsin-Madison studying political science and business, volunteering as a poll worker was an easy decision.
“I felt like it was my duty to volunteer, and hopefully relieve the stress,” she said.
But Birkeland, 21, still worried about the risk of contracting the coronavirus as people flock to the polls.
“It’s definitely a little bit of a concern, but I’m probably one of the best people to be put in that position,” she said. “I rather it be me than someone else.”
UW Health has an automated instrument capable of processing about 1,200 COVID-19 tests a day, or roughly four times the number that its lab now typically does.
The instrument has yet to be used for a single COVID-19 test.
UW Health’s lab, like others throughout the state, has been unable to get the chemicals, or reagents, needed to process specimens on the instrument.
Quoted: The University of Wisconsin-Madison joined the project last weekend and is expected to host one of the clinical trials.
The work in Madison will be led by William Hartman, UW Health assistant professor of anesthesiology. Hartman said Madison will be one of the clinical trial sites, though he could not say how many patients will participate.
“I think we can be very hopeful in that it has exhibited success with previous coronaviruses including SARS (Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome),” Hartman said, referring to the use of survivor plasma.
Quoted: Not only is social distancing impractical in prisons, they are places where “contagion is hard to avoid,” said Cecelia Klingele, an associate professor of law at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in criminal justice administration.
“People are given very little access in many prisons and jails to hygiene supplies from soap to toothpaste. Often, we ask prisoners to buy individual supplies,” she said. “There’s no easy access. They’re not washing their hands frequently and not bathing as much as we would hope.”
Quoted: James Conway, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute, said allowing people to gather at polling locations during Tuesday’s spring election will also damage the effectiveness of state leaders’ message to stay away from each other to blunt the spread of coronavirus.
“It just seems really irresponsible to make this one giant exception,” Conway said in an interview. “I was a little naive a week or so ago in thinking, ‘Oh, they’ve got to realize they’ve got to delay.’ … And then time has crept on and I’m like, really? I am very concerned.”
A second arrest was made by the University of Wisconsin-Madison Police Department in the double homicide at the UW Arboretum.
If your firm is fortunate to feel confident in your survival and has the liquidity, you should take this opportunity to pay your vendors early. This can make a huge difference in their short term cash flow and might very well be the determining factors in keeping them operating until the environment changes and/or other funding sources become available.
Written by Dan Olszewski, UW Entrepreneurship Center Director
When soldiers were training at Camp Randall in 1861 to fight in the Civil War, the founding director of the Wisconsin Historical Society gave them journals to write down their thoughts.
A century later when Freedom Riders, including many University of Wisconsin students, headed to Southern states to work in the civil rights movement, a group of UW grad students collected thousands of pages of contemporary documents that otherwise might have been lost.
Quoted: There are many options for reducing jail and prison populations, which in turn will reduce the risk of COVID-19 to the public, according to Cecelia Klingele, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Some prisoners have families willing to take them in, but others have nowhere to go, and the social service agencies that can help them are overloaded.
“These are hard questions,” Klingele said, “but they’re ones that we need to answer quickly.”
Police in Madison have made an arrest in the double homicide of a University of Wisconsin doctor and her husband.
Officials within the University of Wisconsin athletic department are preparing for the possibility that the COVID-19 pandemic could affect the 2020 college football season and other fall sports.
A University of Wisconsin doctor and her husband were killed Tuesday in an apparent homicide, police said.
Noted: Spencer’s career has included working as an engineer on transportation infrastructure including railroads, dams and bridges before he earned a law degree at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and opened a private practice that handles real estate and business cases and consumer protection, according to his campaign.
Quoted: Experts say the logistics will get tougher to solve. “There’s a lot of specifics about this situation that makes this particularly risky for food-insecure households,” said Judi Bartfeld, a food security researcher at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “So in many ways I think it’s a perfect storm.”
What began two weeks ago with a pair of scientists urging the use of plasma from recovered COVID-19 patients to rescue the sick has blown up into a national movement.
The COVID-19 shutdowns have taken away cornerstones of newspapers’ already-struggling revenue: business ads and events, said Mike Wagner, a journalism professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“When news organizations rely on events to advertise about and rely on events that they themselves host, and they’re in an environment where there are no more events, they lose a significant portion of their revenue model,” he said.
Wagner said the situation still has time to get worse.
“It feels like March 84th, but really, we’ve just been at this for a couple of weeks,” he said. “The real economic hits are still to come, and the fact that an organization like the Isthmus had to close down so early, suggests how fragile some news organizations see themselves financially.”
Noted: Conley started collecting art when he was in college at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where he studied art and economics. He was also a cartoonist for school publications.
Quoted: “I worry about additional heavy farm losses this year,” said Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “This is a tale of two proteins, one viral, the other human, getting close and familiar and interacting more strongly,” said Michael Sussman, a professor of biochemistry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: In the new-world realities brought on by COVID-19, the disease spread from the new coronavirus known as SARS-CoV-2, early childhood specialist Lorena Mancilla urges parents and guardians to be kind to themselves while figuring out what works.
“Children need regulated, healthy parents more than anything else during this period of social distancing and shelter-in-place orders,” she said. “Life happens. Schedules may not work. It’s okay. Do what you can to keep your children safe.”
The University of Wisconsin System is estimating its campuses will pay back nearly $80 million to students who left campuses as the coronavirus took hold in the state.
With the spread of the coronavirus wreaking havoc with college and professional sporting events, University of Wisconsin officials on Wednesday pushed back the deadline for fans to renew their football season tickets for the 2020 season.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison says the university is responding to an uptick in racism against Asian and Asian-Americans on campus as the coronavirus spreads.
Quoted: “We’ve had some children,” said Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control and prevention at UW Health in Madison. Safdar said she was not allowed to reveal the exact number of children who’ve come to her hospital with the disease, but said, “It’s very few.”
Wisconsin’s 3,000 nursing students slated to graduate this year — and join a workforce where they are desperately needed — are in limbo as hospitals across the state canceled students’ clinical rotations, making graduation unlikely
Community college transfer programs face challenges both at their home institutions and at the institutions to which students want to transfer. Add STEM to the equation and the challenges grow. Xueli Wang, a professor of higher education at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, explores those challenges and the way students meet them in On My Own: The Challenge and Promise of Building Equitable STEM Transfer Pathways (Harvard Education Press). The book follows 1,670 community college students for four years as they transfer to four-year institutions.
Quoted: “One thing to keep in mind, particularly during a crisis like this, is that state actors and governors in particular can often just act more swiftly and more nimbly than the federal government can,” University of Wisconsin Law School professor Miriam Seifter said.
Seifter studies administrative law and constitutional law; much of her recent work has focused on the powers of state leaders.
Noted: Neubauer graduated from University of Wisconsin-Madison and the University of Chicago Law School, clerked for a federal district judge and became a litigation partner at Foley & Lardner before being elected to the appeals court.
Scout, a golden retriever who was the family pet of WeatherTech CEO and founder David MacNeil, has died.
The world learned about Scout’s triumph over cancer thanks to the help of the University of Wisconsin’s School of Veterinary Medicine during the Super Bowl. On Sunday, Scout “crossed the rainbow bridge,” according to an Instagram post on a feed dedicated to his exploits.
Noted: Boswell bookseller Chris Lee recommends “The Coyotes of Carthage” (Ecco, out April 14), a novel by University of Wisconsin-Madison law professor Steven Wright. Lee called it a “hilarious assessment of dark money campaigns for corporate clients. … Ironies abound in this thing.”
Quoted: A 2015 study of influenza and credit card and mortgage defaults in 83 metro areas found the largest effects were for 90-day defaults, suggesting a flu outbreak has a “disproportionate impact on vulnerable borrowers who are already behind on their payments.”
“And that’s just a regular flu, not a pandemic where you actually are having people sent home before they’re sick,” said J. Michael Collins, one of the study’s authors and professor and director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
As midterms came to an end at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, freshman psychology major Eleanor Johnston stood between the double doors of Sandburg Hall scanning the street for her mother’s car.
John Erickson, the men’s basketball coach at the University of Wisconsin from 1959-67 and the first general manager of the Milwaukee Bucks, has passed away.
Erickson died Wednesday in Tulsa, Oklahoma. He was 92.
Noted: One in five Wisconsin workers holds “a poverty wage job with few benefits,” according to a 2018 report from the Center on Wisconsin Strategy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Social distancing would be a lot less inequality promoting if we had the infrastructure of strong medical care, insurance and housing supports for low-wage workers, but we don’t,” said Laura Dresser, a labor economist and the associate director of the Center on Wisconsin Strategy. “That means that this crisis tends to push the inequality along, instead of the crisis showing how connected we are and pulling us closer together.”
Noted: While at the University of Wisconsin, Brian met Mary while washing dishes at Barnard Residence Hall. The two were married for 62 years and have five children, 26 grandchildren and 28 great-grandchildren.
Coronavirus is something kids are likely to be asking about a lot. When it comes up, Travis Wright, an associate professor of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he recommends allowing the kids’ questions and concerns to guide the conversation. That way, you won’t inadvertently introduce fears that they didn’t already have.
Also quoted: “They can take over-the-counter medications and they will do just fine,” said Dr. Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer for UW Health. “I know people are worried about our kids. If we’ve got anything going for us, it doesn’t appear that COVID makes children too sick.”
Numerous universities across the state are asking students in residence halls to come back and clear them out quickly, with at least one — the University of Wisconsin-Madison — saying it might need the space for hospital overflow.
Quoted: “I think it could be an interesting test case for the rest of the country to examine,” University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist Barry Burden said of the “terrible trade-off” between holding the election as scheduled and putting it off.
University of Wisconsin-Madison Chancellor Rebecca Blank announced Tuesday that the campus will stay online for the rest of the spring semester, including finals.
Fitness centers are taking steps to combat the spread of coronavirus, but a UW Health doctor says that, for now, it’s safer to exercise outdoors or away from other people.
The virus isn’t found in sweat, so that’s not the problem. However, if someone in a gym has COVID-19, they could spread it through coughing, sneezing or touching a workout machine.
“There are so many surfaces they could contaminate,” said Jeff Pothof, safety officer for UW Health, which is an affiliate of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
The Sheboygan Lutheran boys basketball team’s coaches had the film already rolling for Randolph, its scheduled opponent in Saturday’s sectional final.
