Dr. Patrick Remington, director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Preventive Medicine Residency Program, said it’s a natural reaction to start testing the waters and evaluating risk after a period of intense measures.
UW Health Chief Quality Officer Dr. Jeff Pothof said they have been ready and planning for an increase in COVID-19 patients and a surge, should there ever be one.
UW Health, UnityPoint Health-Meriter and SSM Health said Tuesday they are offering antibody testing, which they said is covered by insurance.
Rebalanced-Life Wellness Association, has hosted virtual support group meetings during the pandemic. The groups have included Alvin Thomas of UW-Madison’s School of Human Ecology, Logan Edwards from UW-Madison’s Department of Kinesiology, Dr. Jonas Lee from the UW School of Medicine and Public Health, and Darryl Davidson of the city of Milwaukee’s Health Department.
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.”
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.”
COVID-19 patients experience many symptoms: Fever, chills, muscle pain, loss of taste or smell, sore throat, cough. But one of the biggest concerns for Dr. Jeff Pothof, chief quality officer at UW Health, is shortness of breath.
With scientists and science itself seemingly under attack during the COVID-19 crisis, I find myself wondering what Dietram Scheufele thinks.
“It’s safe to say (the election) didn’t help,” said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control and prevention at UW Health, the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s medical arm. “But whether it actively hurt people, it’s very likely but not possible to really prove it.”
“So what I always enjoy about this study is that it means rural people and farm families are represented in important research,” said Bendixsen, co-investigator of the WISC study along with Drs. James Gern and Christine Seroogy with the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
The grant is part of a $2.2 million round of funding from the Wisconsin Partnership Program at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. Eleven of the grants went to community-led initiatives, and 10 went toward research partnerships.
“An epidemiologist is a scientist in search of a denominator,” said Dr. Patrick Remington, an epidemiologist and professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health.
Beth Sommerfeldt and Barb Uselman were happy to answer the call when they got it from UW Health to work on the COVID-19 hotline.
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.
UW Health in Madison is treating patients who are a lot sicker, said Dr. Joshua Ross, executive vice chair of the BerbeeWalsh Department of Emergency Medicine at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health.
Starting Tuesday, each adult patient will be allowed one visitor age 18 or older. One visitor age 12 and older will be allowed to accompany adult patients to outpatient clinic appointments.
Virtual health assessments at a Madison homeless shelter, support for students with medical conditions at Madison schools and research on ways to better test and track COVID-19 are among 21 projects receiving $2.2 million from a COVID-19 Response Grant Program at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
Quoted: “If you’re asking me as a public health official whether this increases the risk of transmission, the answer is definitive — yes,” said Dr. Patrick Remington, director of the University of Wisconsin Madison’s Preventative Medicine Residency Program. “That is a scientific fact, no matter how much protective equipment people wear.”
Quoted: “It’s quite common to project with a model sort of what would be expected in epidemiology,” said Patrick Remington, a former CDC epidemiologist and director of the Preventive Medicine Residency Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “What better way to predict than … to say, particularly early in an epidemic, what if we did nothing? The early transmission velocity in an epidemic, what if that were to continue throughout the course of the epidemic?
Nearly 2,000 colorful flowers were delivered Friday to healthcare workers at UW Health as a thank you from Hilldale and its landscaping firm, according to a news release.
While access to key supplies remains a limiting factor, UW Health expects to see further increases to their number of daily completed COVID-19 tests, according to a news release.
UW School of Medicine and Public Health (SMPH) is announcing a total of $2.2 million in awards given to researchers and community organizations who are working to lessen the impact of coronavirus in Wisconsin.
According to the health system, they have both increased the number of tests they can perform and reduced the turnaround time. UW Health says it doubled the tests it can perform in a day to 400 over the past ten days and expects to be able to run even more soon. It is also now to get results in hours, rather than days.
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: 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: 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.
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.
Local cardiologists are concerned that people are avoiding treatment for heart attacks during the coronavirus pandemic, potentially putting their lives at risk.
UW Health relies solely on its own in-house laboratories to process COVID-19 tests, though it is purchasing reagents, which are chemicals needed to identify the virus’s genetic material from a patient’s sample, from Promega, headquartered in Madison.
UW engineering professor, graduate student create website designed to match PPE producers with hospitals.
“We were surprised to learn that the COVID-19 pandemic in China did not seem to impact people with asthma as severely as we would’ve expected it to,” lead investigator Dr. Daniel Jackson of the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health said in a statement.
The conference created its first-ever Task Force for Emerging Infectious Diseases on March 7. The group, which includes a representative from each of the conference’s 14 member schools, meets weekly with Big Ten Commissioner Kevin Warren. Dr. Ann Sheehy, a faculty member from the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, represents UW-Madison.
Quoted: But James Conway, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute, called opening different regions of the state at different times “terrifying.”
“It’s almost like the least common denominator will prevail if you do start to allow certain areas to open more liberally and have other areas still confined because you know there’s going to be travel and transit between those places. And as we saw in the Green Bay area it doesn’t take much for something to go from a small number of cases to exponentially exploding in just a few short days,” said Conway, who supports Evers’ plan.
“As the situation with COVID-19 continues to evolve, area hospitals are still in need of supplies and personal protective equipment (PPE) for non-direct caregivers and support staff, especially masks,” the hospitals said Wednesday in a statement.
“Providing safe treatment and care for all of our patients is always our top priority,” a release said. “Patient safety and care has driven many UW Health operational changes in the last two months to address the COVID-19 situation.”
UW Health continues to insist that no layoffs are planned for its hourly workers at the time, after another local medical system, SSM Health, announced it will furlough 2,000 employees to combat financial challenges caused by the pandemic.
The task force includes judges from a cross-section of counties throughout Wisconsin, along with medical consultants from the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, circuit court clerks, county corporation counsels, district attorneys, public defenders and county sheriffs.
Respiratory therapists at UW Health say they’ve never experienced anything like COVID-19 before.
Here’s the breakdown from Dr. Alana Sterkel, assistant director of the Communicable Disease Division of the Wisconsin State Laboratory of Hygiene at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She’s one of the people coordinating testing and distribution of collection supplies statewide.
Two weeks after the first Madison-area donor contributed plasma to treat COVID-19 patients at UW Hospital, 14 patients have been treated, with some showing significant improvement, a doctor said Friday.
The University of Wisconsin-Madison will receive $90,000 to be divided among three programs: an emergency student support fund; the Odyssey Project family fund focused on educational opportunities for local families in poverty; and UW’s Global Health Initiative, which is performing COVID-19 research and acting as a clearinghouse for information.
UW-Madison students appeared on Saturday to have listened to warnings not to attend the Mifflin Street Block Party for the sake of social distancing amid the COVID-19 pandemic, police said.
“In this pandemic, we really want to put as much space as possible between our providers and our patients,” said Dr. Tom Brazelton, medical director for telehealth at UW Health. “With COVID-19, the silver lining is that it’s really allowed the jump-starting of telemedicine.”
UW Health is accepting all patients with or without insurance during the coronavirus pandemic.
A UW Health Hospital spokesperson told NBC15 News that they are accepting all patients with or without insurance in their response to Covid19. They added that the hospital is not billing uninsured patients in relation to Covid19.
Plasma donor speaks out on donation experience.
In addition to restarting procedures, UW Health, SSM Health St. Mary’s Hospital and UnityPoint Health-Meriter said people should use their emergency rooms, which have seen declines in patient volumes for many conditions during the coronavirus outbreak, if needed.
Sue Wolfe said she was looking for a way to pay forward the warm messages of support health care professionals throughout the country have been receiving for their efforts combating COVID-19.
State is not currently in ventilator shortage, workgroup chair says guidelines are still necessary.
Noted: Aaron Olver is managing director of University Research Park in Madison. He is the former state Secretary of Commerce under former Gov. Jim Doyle.
At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, “I think we’re all rather underwhelmed” at what’s been seen among the few patients there who’ve tried it, said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control and prevention.
Quoted: “It’s tempting to attribute that higher-than-expected number of cases to the election, but I think we have to be cautious,” said Dr. Patrick Remington, a former CDC epidemiologist and director of the Preventive Medicine Residency Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It’s virtually impossible to know whether that relationship is cause and effect.”
Oguzhan Alagoz, a professor of industrial engineering and infectious disease modeling expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said he expected to see a spike in cases. But data from Milwaukee and Madison, he said, have shown only modest increases in coronavirus cases.
At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, “I think we’re all rather underwhelmed” at what’s been seen among the few patients there who’ve tried it, said Dr. Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control and prevention.
UW Health is expecting to lose between $350-400 million in revenue between March 15 and June 30, after postponing thousands of surgeries and procedures to prevent the spread of COVID-19.
“We worry that at some point that if we were to see a large surge, or if we had many large surges in the country, the supply of N95s may not keep up with how we need to use them,” said Dr. Jeff Pothof, the UW Health chief quality officer.
“We are now going to be able to offer testing to people who are symptomatic, but are not having severe symptoms, who may not necessarily be high risk,” UW Health Chief Quality Officer Dr. Jeff Pothof said. “It helps us understand the prevalence of the disease in the community, but two, it allows us to contact trace.”
A spokesperson for UW Health, Emily Kumlien, explained they avoided pay cuts for those employees to make sure everyone who’s treating COVID-19 patients were affected. She added that the health system will expand its flexing policy in response to work volume.
UW Hospital is sterilizing N-95 respirators just in case they need them for the future.
