Quoted: “We know that voter registration numbers have been lower this spring and summer than they would normally be in a presidential election year,” said Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor.
So this means some travelers will slip through the net. Skipping quarantine yet out in the community. Even if rapid (less accurate) tests miss some infected people, they can still have a significant impact on transmission says Dave O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dave O’Connor, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said tests can miss lots of people with low levels of the virus and yet have a profound impact on transmission.
Ajay Sethi, faculty director of the master of public health program and associate professor of population health sciences says the public and patients need to be thoughtful and careful when absorbing information about the coronavirus.
Ajay Sethi, Faculty Director of the Master of Public Health program at the UW SMPH says there’s a lot of false messages being circulated around COVID-19.
A UW Health employee is questioning a dress code policy, saying its implementation should be reexamined.
UW Health is reopening a salon that provides services to its cancer patients.
Noted: One approach focuses on improving teachers’ own mental health. Matthew Hirschberg and colleagues at the University of Wisconsin-Madison found that randomly assigning a group of aspiring teachers to a preservice course on mindfulness reduced those teachers’ implicit bias and fostered their provision of emotional, instructional, and organizational support to students. The 22-hour course emphasized kindness, compassion, and managing one’s emotions. Another mindfulness program, CARE for Teachers, saw similar results.
Noted: Madison365 spoke with three local experts: Public Health Madison Dane County data analyst Brittany Grogan, University of Wisconsin infectious disease epidemiologist Dr. Ajay Sethi, and Dr. Malia Jones, an associate scientist in health geography at the Applied Population Laboratory at the University of Wisconsin.
Many businesses are open. Mask orders have been implemented as cases are trending up. We are tracking the numbers, but many of you have questions about how we can protect ourselves and others. What can we do to slow the transmission of COVID-19?
The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has assembled a panel of experts from the University of Wisconsin’s Madison and Milwaukee campuses. They will periodically answer questions from readers.
Quoted: “I don’t think (the finding) was surprising, but it was good to see data that actually described it,” said Nasia Safdar, medical director of infection control and prevention at UW Health in Madison.
Noted: Other staples of everyday life, especially the resumption of school, may differ widely in cities and towns across the country. Without data to measure the effect of different educational methods on the spread of the virus, the U.S. will soon embark on what amounts to “uncontrolled experiments,” said Tony Goldberg, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW virologist and influenza expert Yoshihiro Kawaoka said that although he is confident COVID-19 will become endemic, he believes the lifestyle changes people have made should not become permanent.
“Once everyone gets vaccinated we should be able to go back to normal life,” he said, predicting that day might come “in three years, maybe four years.”
UW Health officials say they are ready to meet health care needs of the community if there is a potential surge of COVID-19 cases.
UW Health doctors say choosing not to wear a mask increases a person’s degree of exposure to the virus.
Quoted: It’s also critical for avoiding what Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, calls “prevention fatigue.” For example, if teachers at a school, who otherwise feel perfectly healthy, come to dread their twice-weekly swab, surveillance testing will quickly become unreliable. “They’ll say, ‘I feel fine’ and find a way to skip it,” O’Connor says. “We’re a nation of wusses, myself included.”
Noted: Research by Scott Sanders, a professor in the mechanical engineering and electrical and computer engineering departments at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has shown that in situations where people can social distance, three-layered masks are best, with cotton for the internal layer, a non-woven synthetic for the middle and an outer layer of polyester.
But even if there is leaking from the mask, some kind of barrier is better than nothing, said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at UW-Madison.
And, the masks should really be combined with social distancing, added Sethi, who is part of a team developing a model to forecast potential surges in hospitalizations in southern Wisconsin.
Quoted: Dr. Nasia Safdar, an infectious disease physician and the medical director for infection prevention at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, said it’s impossible at this point to establish a scientific correlation between evictions and COVID-19 spread and deaths; diagnosed coronavirus cases are up 150% in Milwaukee, for example, since the eviction moratorium ended.
What is not in doubt among public health experts, she said, is that evictions are dangerous during a pandemic. “A key tenet of prevention in a pandemic is to have the infrastructure that will minimize transmission from person to person,” Safdar said. “Any activity that breaks down that structure … makes containment of a pandemic exceedingly difficult.”
Written by Todd Newman, Assistant Professor of Life Sciences Communication, University of Wisconsin-Madison
Noted: William R. Hartman, MD, PhD, Department of Anesthesiology, is principal investigator for the UW COVID-19 Convalescent Plasma Program at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health in Madison.
A rapid heartbeat, chest tightness and dizziness are just some of the symptoms people have been complaining about since having to wear a mask. Maura Grasshoff, a behavioral health social worker for UW Health, said these are all signs of anxiety.
The goal is to seek new insights into the virus through antibody testing. Surveys on the pandemic’s impact on mental health and an analysis of health record information will be provided to participants.
As part of the initial response to the COVID-19 pandemic, nonessential medical procedures were postponed.
Sarah Anne Carter is the visiting executive director of the Center for Design and Material Culture and a visiting assistant professor of design studies at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Patients with severe or life-threatening COVID-19 have fared well so far in two clinical trials underway at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, according to preliminary results.
The university also launched three new COVID-19 clinical trials and began considering offers to host another nine. Since the coronavirus clinical trials began, 80% of all UW Health patients with COVID-19 have been enrolled in one.
The state Department of Health Services is partnering with UW-Madison’s Survey of the Health of Wisconsin to embark on a study of the prevalence of COVID-19 antibodies throughout the state. Past SHOW participants, from 10 randomly selected counties and the city of Milwaukee, will receive antibody testing quarterly over the next year.
Shiva Bidar, UW Health chief diversity officer and a Madison City Council member, confirmed that Wisconsin residents can come to their health facilities and receive care, no questions asked. “We’ll make sure they go where they need care and nobody’s asking them to pay up front for anything,” Bidar said. “We will figure out on the back end what we need to do to make sure that their bills are covered.”
Equipped with a laptop, legal pad and smartphone, Merta Maaneb de Macedo this week called a UW-Madison student whose roommate recently tested positive for COVID-19.
An infectious disease epidemiologist who teaches a course called “Conspiracies in Public Health,” Ajay Sethi has paid close attention to misinformation related to COVID-19.
“It’s for cases where people want to be able to see faces,” said Lennon Rodgers, director of the Grainger Engineering Design Innovation Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It could be a teacher talking to their students, seeing smiles, things like this that are important, some people say, for developmental reasons.”
Like so many other graduating seniors, Amy Shircel is disappointed to have missed out on an in-person commencement this past spring. At the same time, though, she understands far better than most why such a gathering could not happen. Shircel contracted COVID-19 in March.
A new UW-Madison study estimates 66,000 high school athletes across Wisconsin could be at risk for depression amid the pandemic.
The PSA encourages people to use their abilities to help stop the spread of COVID-19. People will hear from Dr. Aimee Becker who is one of the Chief Medical Officers at UW Health.
Dr. Loren Kuzuhara, a professor in the Department of Management and Human Resources at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says so much has changed in recent months that it’s unlikely offices will just go back to normal after the pandemic.
Coroflu, a vaccine jointly developed and worked on by vaccine maker FluGen and the University of Wisconsin-Madison is India’s third prime vaccine candidate after COVAXIN and ZyCOV-D which uses a self-limiting version of existing influenza virus to stimulate immunity and spike up production of helpful antibodies in the system. The vaccine is expected to delve into human trials by the end of 2020.
But can a declaration really make a difference? Just pushing it through the process can have an impact, said Paula Tran Inzeo, a director at University of Wisconsin’s Public Health Institute.
If needed, chief quality officer says, hospital will make more room for coronavirus patients
“Basically, everyone in the world is susceptible,” said Thomas Friedrich, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
But there is no clear line that neatly separates medical research from hospital operations or quality control, said Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. And researchers and bioethicists often disagree on what constitutes one or the other.
Willems Van Dijk would leave her Marathon County position in 2009 to work with the University of Wisconsin-Madison Population Health Institute. In 2019, she became deputy director of Wisconsin’s Department of Health Services — just in time to be one of the top officials managing the state’s pandemic response.
“Basically, everyone in the world is susceptible,” said Thomas Friedrich, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
UW-Madison remains committed to preserving elements of in-person teaching, with physical distancing requirements and widespread testing. However, as families and faculty continue to ask more specific questions about what school will look like, the university has about five weeks to hash out the details. “This is a big lift,” Blank said at a University Committee meeting Monday. “We’re going to be running the university in virtually every area differently than it’s ever been run before.”
In addition to possibly contracting the virus from contaminated fingers or brushes, a makeup user also risks exposure to the coronavirus from the products themselves, especially if those products are shared with others or are used outside of the home, said Sarah M. Nehls, an ophthalmologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “The makeup could be potentially contaminated,” she said. “[The coronavirus] has been found on the ocular surface. This is why conjunctivitis [pinkeye] can be an initial symptom of infection.”
UW Health patients will be among those testing an experimental antibody treatment heavily backed by the federal government to see if it can treat and prevent COVID-19.
“We just didn’t have that endurance to see that to the point where cases are now sporadic,” said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison focused on epidemiology and infectious diseases.
Joy Kirkpatrick is an outreach specialist for the Center for Dairy Profitability at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. She thinks farm families will utilize the service, not only for its convenience but also for the anonymity telehealth services provide.
But Patrick Remington, a UW-Madison emeritus professor and former chief medical officer for Chronic Disease and Injury Prevention in the state Division of Health, said the issue over DHS’ authority is “black and white” on the matter.
With governments and industry injecting billions into the development, testing, and manufacturing of vaccines, scientists say, a vaccine may be available in record time, but it simply may not be fully effective. “We could have vaccines in the clinic that are useful in people within 12 or 18 months,” Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Nature in May. “But we’re going to need to improve them.
“School opening is an engine for all the other respiratory viruses,” said Dr. Jonathan Temte, a UW-Madison family medicine professor and member of the State Disaster Medical Advisory Committee, which met online Thursday. “This is going to be a nightmare for our school districts.”
Quoted: Dr. Nasia Safdar, director of infection prevention and control for UW Health, said masks cannot single-handedly prevent coronavirus spread but are an effective intervention.
“If someone was wearing a mask, it would likely reduce the number of people they would infect,” she said.
Noted: The surge in cases in the county has put in jeopardy the ability of the state’s flagship university to hold in-person classes this fall, the University of Wisconsin Health chief quality and safety officer told the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel last week.
As colleges and universities announce plans to invite students back to campus this fall, American higher education is, according to the New York Times, “about to embark on a highly uncertain experiment.”
With the prolonged heat wave this week, UW Health physicians are reminding you to be conscious of your health.
Quoted: Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, worries there is so much pressure to produce positive results that conditions are ripe for cutting corners. She notes, for example, that in an emergency where people are suffering, there can be resistance to having control groups that don’t get an experimental treatment in a study.
“But it doesn’t work scientifically,” Ossorio said. “It doesn’t produce good enough data that you can actually have any confidence that the test intervention is safe or effective.”
“We have this real brick and mortar view of how clinical research had to happen, and I think COVID has really challenged that,” said Betsy Nugent, the director of clinical trials development for the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and UW Health.
Song Gao, an assistant professor of geographic information science at UW-Madison, was among the first to study and map how people’s mobility changed during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In March, Buttenheim and Malia Jones, an epidemiologist at UW-Madison, launched “Dear Pandemic,” a social media group that communicates the latest COVID-19 research.
“The world is just going to be different,” Jones said, “Getting to the point where there’s hopefully a vaccine that’s effective is going to take enough time that I think science will change.”
University of Wisconsin-Madison engineer Scott Sanders usually spends his time figuring out how gases and particles behave in combustion engines.
But Sanders has turned his expertise to determining how a different type of particle, one that has sickened millions around the world, moves from human mouths covered with masks.
Alta Charo, a University of Wisconsin lawyer and bioethicist, recalled the clamor in the 1990s to get insurers to cover bone marrow transplants for breast cancer until a solid study showed they “simply made people more miserable and sicker” without improving survival.
Pilar Ossorio, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, worries there is so much pressure to produce positive results that conditions are ripe for cutting corners. She noted that in an emergency when people are suffering, there can be resistance to having control groups that don’t get an experimental treatment in a study.
The additional $70,000 brings total pandemic-related aid to $705,000 for the year, including assistance to front-line health care workers and vaccine-related endeavors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “A mask that is not covering the nose will not stop a person infected with SARS-CoV-2 from contaminating the air in front of them when they exhale. Similarly, a mask covering only the mouth will fail to prevent an uninfected person from inhaling contaminated air. Since it does not take a lot of virus particles to cause infection, a partially worn mask may not be effective enough. This reminds me of when I see people wearing a bicycle helmet without buckling the strap or wearing it so loosely that it doesn’t cover the front of their head. The intention might be there, but there is a higher risk of head injury following an accident if the helmet is unable to do what it is designed to do.”
— Ajay Sethi, PhD, MHS, associate professor, Department of Population Health Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Iris Zhou, an 18-year-old from Wuxi in eastern China, has been admitted to the University of Wisconsin-Madison for the coming school year, but the earliest visa appointment she could get when she applied in May was in November.
