“A more transmissible variant is something to take seriously and may alter the way we think about schools reopening or other thing we are doing in the community,” said Dr. Thomas Friedrich, a professor in the Department of Pathobiological Sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s School of Veterinary Medicine.
President Trump is now the only president in American history to be impeached twice. But with only a week left in his presidency, what exactly does that mean? Barry Burden weighs in.
“There’s nothing the president can do to get out of the legal mess that he’s in,” Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at UW-Madison, told NBC15.
“The fact that gorillas are susceptible to SARS-CoV-2 should come as no surprise,” says disease ecologist Tony Goldberg of the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “Fortunately, gorillas at zoos have excellent medical care, and most will likely pull through due to the efforts of dedicated veterinarians. That’s not the case for gorillas in the wild, though.”
Thomas Friedrich, professor of virology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, says a new, more transmissible variant of the virus that causes COVID-19 could have big implications for the pandemic in the U.S. if its starts spreading widely in the country.
“People often wonder whether an officer’s actions complied with local policy. But as to an officer’s civil or criminal liability, this question does not matter. When a department asserts an officer acted reasonably, the department looks to constitutional law. And constitutional law is very forgiving of officer decision-making,” said Ion Meyn, a professor at the University of Wisconsin Law School, who has extensively studied the issue.
“The choice is ours,” said Dr. Dipesh Navsaria, associate professor of pediatrics at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “It’s ours as a population, as a country, as a community … Navsaria was joined on the Wisconsin Health News panel by UW-Madison epidemiologist Malia Jones, La Crosse School district superintendent Aaron Engel and Eau Claire City-County Health Department director Lieske Giese.
“Whatever we do is going to be far from perfect, and that’s OK,” said Dr. Jonathan Temte, co-chair of the subcommittee and associate dean of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health. “The important thing is to get as much vaccine into as many people as possible.”
“New variants will continue to emerge and circulate,” Thomas Friedrich, a UW-Madison professor of pathobiological sciences, said during a recent state Department of Health Services webinar. “We should expect these or other ones to appear in Wisconsin and spread here.”
“This is a climate we want to change,” said Erika Marin-Spiotta, a geography professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, at the American Meteorological Society’s 100th annual meeting, held last January in Boston.
“Parents and children can do well in any state. But doing your best will indeed be easier in some states than in others, and child development is better on average in some states than in others,” says Dave Riley, Ph.D., a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Human Ecology who took part in the report.
“Not surprisingly, the circuits that they’re looking at are remarkably similar to some of these processes in humans,” says Jules Panksepp, a social neuroscientist at the University of Wisconsin–Madison who was not part of the study. Both mice and humans share a connectedness with their compatriots in emotional situations, he says, and research points to a shared evolutionary basis for empathy.
The U.S. Geological Survey (USGS) has estimated 6 hectares are required for monarchs to stay afloat in the long run. “Current monarch numbers are not sustainable,” says ecologist Karen Oberhauser of the University of Wisconsin, Madison.
“The era of landslide elections appears to be behind us,” said Barry Burden, a University of Wisconsin-Madison political scientist. “The strengthening of partisanship in the electorate has dampened the magnitude of swings from one party to the other.”
Many journals have teams that check images for mistakes in image manipulation, notes Kevin Eliceiri, a biomedical engineer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison.
Dr. Jonathan Temte, co-chair of the subcommittee and former chair of the CDC advisory committee, said that if disabled people who live in group homes are prioritized, inmates should be too because both live in congregate settings. “I think we should be unwilling to decouple those,” said Temte, associate dean of the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
UW-Madison professor Mike Wagner explained this would require the vice president and a majority of cabinet members to agree the president can no longer carry out his duties.“The vice president would become acting president if that took place,” Wagner said.
“White people can get away with more stuff than black people and that happens a lot. There’s a lot, a lot, a lot of that. That white people are given a pass,” said UW-Madison emeritus sociology professor Pam Oliver.
The gradual and very public rollout of the new vaccines provides the opportunity to make vaccination for COVID a new norm—something that everyone will be doing. Studies show people make choices such as buying flood insurance or solar panels for their home because their neighbors have done so, “and the exact same thing is true for vaccinations,” observes Dietram Scheufele, a professor of life sciences communication at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. He and Milkman think it might be a good idea to hand out stickers that say, “I got vaccinated,” much like the “I voted” stickers used to propel people to the polls, or to do the digital equivalent with a Facebook profile filter. If celebrities and sports stars join the trend, so much the better.
“It’s relatively easy for folks to rally behind species with a cute appearance, a charismatic name or a compelling story,” says Patrick “PJ” Liesch, entomologist and director of the Insect Diagnostic Lab at the University of Wisconsin Madison. “However, for every cute or charismatic species in existence, there are many more species threatened with extinction that don’t get their moment in the spotlight. We should be concerned about all of those species as well — not just the ones catching the most headlines.”
“The clinical trials were designed to determine whether the vaccines can prevent symptoms and hospitalization in people. They did not test whether or not somebody can still carry the virus despite being immunized and potentially pass that virus to others,” said Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist and associate professor in the University of Wisconsin-Madison Department of Population Health Sciences.
Richard J. Davidson, director of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has discovered that optimism practitioners are more active on the left side of the prefrontal cortex. This area of the brain, among other circuits, is responsible for our cognitive control and emotional response. Davidson proved that by consciously directing attention, we can influence our emotional reactions.
For months politicians made baseless claims against a democratic process, and Ken Mayer, a professor of American politics, said hearing that from President Donald Trump and other Republican politicians led to this result.
Quoted: “The rollout has not gone real smoothly, and for as many doses out there, we’re not vaccinating very quickly,” vaccine committee co-chairman Jonathan Temte, the Associate Dean for Public Health and Community Engagement for UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said Tuesday about deciding who is included in the next phase.
“And the larger we make any particular group, the much longer it’s going to take,” he said. “One of the questions is how long do we put off some of those high-risk individuals.”
Recent studies have shown symptomatic, pregnant patients with COVID-19 are at increased risk for more severe disease, ICU admission, mechanical ventilation and death than nonpregnant patients, according to William Hartman, MD, PhD, a principal investigator for AstraZeneca’s COVID-19 vaccine trial at the University of Wisconsin’s Madison campus and an assistant professor of anesthesiology.
Parents also saw a benefit, engaging in more responsive feeding practices and showing more skill in sensitively scaffolding their child’s learning and development, said Dr. Robert L. Nix of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who coauthored the study with colleagues there and at Pennsylvania State University.
Over time, Corona cameras and film improved in quality. With an archive of almost one million images, the program detected Soviet missile sites, warships, naval bases and other military targets. “They counted every rocket in the Soviet Union,” said Volker Radeloff, an ecologist at the University of Wisconsin — Madison whose lab has used the images in its studies. “These images kept the Cold War cold.”
Those expected objections to the final tally has University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Director of the Election Research Center, Barry Burden, thinking it could be a long night for Congress and Vice President Mike Pence on Wednesday.
When it comes to the coronavirus, there’s some risk every time you leave your house, said Nasia Safdar of the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. But golf is a relatively safe activity, especially if players take precautions, like only riding in carts with members of their household, she said.
“In the last 10 to 15 years, there has been an explosion of research linking well-being in its many forms to numerous indicators of health. When that work [began], we didn’t know that purpose in life would emerge as such an important predictor of numerous health outcomes,” says Carol Ryff, psychologist at University of Wisconsin-Madison, and director of the MIDUS (Midlife in the United States) national study of Americans. Research has shown that people who have high levels of purpose in life spend fewer nights in hospitals, have lower odds of developing diabetes, and over two times lower risk of dying from heart conditions than do others.
British pharmaceutical company AstraZeneca, which has enrolled at least 23,000 so far in its ongoing U.S. study, recently decided to offer individual participants the opportunity to be unmasked as they become eligible for the approved vaccines.
“You never really want to unblind,” said Dr. William Hartman, a researcher for AstraZeneca’s trial at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
These changes in social interactions have real effects on our mental health, said Shilagh Mirgain, a psychologist at UW Health. “When we are not able to be together for long periods of time, it can impact our mood, motivation and outlook and make us more vulnerable to engage in negative health habits,” Mirgain said.
Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Wisconsin Public Radio that the forecast is slightly higher than last quarter’s estimate, partly because of a price rally for corn and soybeans seen around harvest time.
Children can still read the emotional expressions of people wearing masks during the COVID-19 pandemic, researchers say.
“We now have this situation where adults and kids have to interact all the time with people whose faces are partly covered, and a lot of adults are wondering if that’s going to be a problem for children’s emotional development,” said study co-author Ashley Ruba, a postdoctoral researcher in the Child Emotion Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
When masks cover a significant part of the face, how well can people understand the facial expressions of the people wearing them? Children can still understand, to an extent, the expressions on masked faces, according to a new study published in PLOS One.
Quoted: Paul Mitchell, director of the Renk Agribusiness Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the forecast is slightly higher than last quarter’s estimate, partly because of a price rally for corn and soybeans seen around harvest time.
“Cash revenues, from soybeans especially, are up compared to where they were in September. It’s rare to have prices go up at harvest when everyone is bringing crops in,” Mitchell said
Quoted: “It’s a more hopeful view of well-being,” study researcher Cortland Dahl of the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, a cross-disciplinary research institute, told HuffPost. “It’s the idea that you can take active steps that improve well-being, very much so in the way that you might take steps to improve physical health.”
Quoted: “When norms are violated it’s very hard to walk back, this can be insidious,” says Christine Whelan, a professor of consumer science at the University of Wisconsin. “My fear is it encourages further violations and a counter-reaction from the other side.”
Quoted: Some native plants are tied to the survival of a specific species. Like milkweed and monarch butterflies. Experts at UW-Madison say people planting milkweed in midwest have helped monarch populations survive.
“Basically right now we have thousands of people that are working to preserve monarch habitat, and i really think that without these efforts monarchs would be a lot worse off,” said Karen Oberhauser, director of the UW-Madison Arboretum.
Quoted: It’s “really a reflection of the history of how the United States came together in the 1700s, when it was a collection of colonies and states that agreed to have a kind of weak central government to coordinate their activities,” said Barry Burden, the Director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
Quoted: “It’s really important that we don’t just anthropomorphize cows based on our human experience, but we do know that they can experience negative emotions like pain and fear that we want to minimize,” said Jennifer Van Os, an animal welfare scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “On the flip side, they can have positive experiences like pleasure, reward and contentment that we want to try to promote.”
Before 2020 closes out, the Cap Times got one more chance to check in with Malia Jones. The University of Wisconsin-Madison epidemiologist has spoken with us multiple times this year to share her insights on the pandemic. In the summer, we talked about schools as they considered how to begin the 2020-21 school year.
Quoted: “Pandemic cooking is a real thing,” said Mark Stephenson, head of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Restaurants have used a lot of butter, but we’re seeing greater sales even going through retail now than we did the sum of retail and restaurants before that.”
Quoted: Alta Charo, a professor of law and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin who consulted on guidelines for prioritizing the COVID-19 vaccine for the National Academies of Science, said showing confidence in the vaccine is good reason for elected officials to be vaccinated early in the process. This may be especially true for Republican leaders. A December poll from ABC News/Ipsos showed Republicans were four times as likely as Democrats to say they would never get the vaccine.
“The amount of vaccine hesitancy that has been created in the last 20 years, 25 years is profoundly disturbing and goes deep into our society. So it takes a long time to build up confidence for people, and people who are unsure,” Charo told ABC News.
Quoted: Paul Barford, a University of Wisconsin computer science professor and co-author of a study on the effects of climate change on the internet, sounded less worried about cables sinking anytime soon, because of the financial interests of the telecoms firms involved with cables. But he still says planning now is important. From the get-go, “simply assessing what the current state of this infrastructure is would be something that the government could potentially motivate and potentially help to facilitate,” Barford said. And considering how “unbelievably expensive” these cables are, with costs running into “tens and hundreds of millions of dollars,” it would be a boon if the federal government poured in “funding to help facilitate new deployments or to harden current infrastructure.”
Noted: In this week’s episode of “Pitchfork Economics,” Nick Hanauer and David Goldstein spoke with Fenaba Addo, an associate professor at University of Wisconsin Madison whose research focuses on racial disparities and student debt.
Addo points out that “approximately 45 million borrowers” owe more than $1.5 trillion in college loans. And while a few disingenuous pundits would like to claim that figure is largely made up of people spending above their means to attend overpriced elite institutions, the truth is that only six percent of student loan borrowers owe more than $100,000.
For epidemiologists like Malia Jones, a lot about 2020 was foreseeable. The experts who dedicate their careers to studying diseases knew the story of the 1918 Spanish flu pandemic long before the rest of us did, and they knew another such catastrophe could be imminent.
UW Health’s Dr. Jeff Pothof is hoping this will be the last of our State Street Doctor series. In the first segment we did back in March, Pothof answered any questions people had about COVID-19. In our second segment in July, doctors were learning more about the virus, so we did another.
On paper, 2020 wasn’t very different for Barry Burden. He taught political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and conducted research for its Elections Research Center. After finishing up the fall semester, he’s preparing for a month of much-needed winter break.
Noted: Kelsey Vandersteen, a trauma I.C.U. nurse at UW Health University Hospital in Madison, Wis., will receive her first injection on Wednesday — probably months ahead of her young daughters and husband, who works from home for a software company.
Even after her second shot, she doesn’t intend to change her behavior, including wearing a mask. She says she hopes this will model good behavior for others. Besides, she said: “I prefer the mask. It protects me from other stuff as well. We’ve been completely healthy — not a sniffle since March.”
Quoted: Voting by mail may seem more convenient, but it also requires the voter to act much earlier than they would if they went to the polls, said Barry Burden, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. You have to make sure to request your ballot early, and in some states, make sure you have a valid ID to do so.
“One problem with having a hard and fast election day deadline is that it actually forces people who want to vote by mail to submit their ballot before the campaign is over, and so it deprives them of the right to watch the campaign to its conclusion,” said Burden.
Quoted: Still, there was a high bar to clear for Pfizer and Moderna to get their vaccines in front of the committee. Dr. James Conway, an infectious diseases expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s Global Health Institute, said he was “reassured and a little taken aback” at the rigorous safety and effectiveness data the FDA required to issue an emergency approval for a COVID-19 vaccine, even at a time when President Donald Trump and others in Washington were pushing to speed the process up.
Quoted: One key benefit of therapy is the close relationship between the patient and the provider, which fosters a strong sense of belonging. “You’re meeting with somebody with whom you have a real relationship—this is a person who cares about you, seeks to understand you, is warm and accepting,” says Bruce Wampold, a professor emeritus of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “And for many people, this is particularly healing.”
Noted: Dr. Ajay Sethi, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said travel bans need to be carefully considered because they can cause fear and disruption. Such restrictions can buy time, he said, but may not always be effective. He noted, for example, that Trump’s oft-cited ban on travel from China occurred after the virus was already circulating in the U.S.
Quoted: According to Dominique Brossard, a science and risk communication expert at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, that is because, “Humans do not make decisions based on facts. Facts alone do not change our mind.”
UW-Madison School of Business professor Moses Altsech does a survey on behalf of First Business Bank with businesses across Wisconsin.
UW Professor of Pediatrics at the School of Medicine & Public Health James Conway leads UW Health’s immunization efforts as the programs’ medical director. After serving as a scientific advisor for both Moderna and Pfizer this summer, Conway now works on a Wisconsin Disaster Medical Advisory Committee about the state’s COVID-19 vaccine allocation and distribution and also works in Dane County’s distribution efforts.
Our brains, generally speaking, operate qualitatively, not quantitatively, explains Dominique Brossard, a professor and chair in the Department of Life Sciences Communication at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who focuses on risk communication. In short, that means we tend to think in terms of emotion, not numbers.
Voting by mail may seem more convenient, but it also requires the voter to act much earlier than they would if they went to the polls, said Barry Burden, political science professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. You have to make sure to request your ballot early, and in some states, make sure you have a valid ID to do so.
One key benefit of therapy is the close relationship between the patient and the provider, which fosters a strong sense of belonging. “You’re meeting with somebody with whom you have a real relationship—this is a person who cares about you, seeks to understand you, is warm and accepting,” says Bruce Wampold, a professor emeritus of counseling psychology at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. “And for many people, this is particularly healing.”
