“Autistic people have very specific routines they like to follow,” says Lauren Bishop, assistant professor of social work at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “When those things are taken away as a result of a national crisis, it can make the crisis that’s already stressful even more stressful.”
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.
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.”
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.
Judith Walzer Leavitt, an American historian and professor emerita at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in medical history and women’s studies, says Mallon’s story illustrates a unique and unprecedented period in medical history. “It’s a wrenching personal story. She was the first healthy carrier of typhoid fever to be discovered, so people had never seen it before and didn’t know what to do,” she told CTVNews.ca during a phone interview on Sunday from Madison, Wis. “It was completely unheard of. People in the medical community thought, ‘How could this be?’ There were a lot of skeptics,’ Leavitt added.
Still, the early data offer clues as to how coronavirus vaccines might generate a strong immune response. Scientists say that animal data will be crucial for understanding how coronavirus vaccines work, so that the most promising candidates can be quickly identified and later improved. “We might have vaccines in the clinic that are useful in people within 12 or 18 months,” says Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “But we’re going to need to improve on them to develop second- and third-generation vaccines.”
Quoted: “We dream for a variety of reasons,” explained Dr. Shilagh Mirgain, a UW Health Psychologist. “We dream to process information, to integrate experiences, to work through distressing emotions, and there’s learning and growth that occurs. We’re being asked to live in unprecedented ways and as a result because there is heightened anxiety and stress that can show up in our dreams.”
“Not every kid can be online and have a confidential conversation about how things are going at home with parents in earshot,” said Seth Pollak, director of the Child Emotion Lab at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Malia Jones, a UW-Madison assistant scientist and social epidemiologist, said that because the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention is recommending people wear a mask when social distancing isn’t possible, food workers should wear some kind of face covering.
Research on the effectiveness of wearing face masks is limited, but the idea is that wearing a mask helps reduce the transmission of the virus from the wearer to people in proximity through talking, coughing or sneezing. Dr. James Conway, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said cloth masks can achieve that quite well.
But researchers like Malia Jones, an assistant scientist in health geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, say the impact of COVID-19 can’t always be traced to an urban-rural divide.Jones studies how infectious diseases spread. In Wisconsin, four rural counties have remained case-free, yet plenty of other rural counties have not.
“It’s utter nonsense. This has been shown over and over. The continued insistence that there are material levels of intentional voter fraud is itself a form of fraud.”
KENNETH R. MAYER, an elections expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Voting experts said this was “utter nonsense.””This has been shown over and over,” Kenneth Mayer, an elections expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told the Times. “The continued insistence that there are material levels of intentional voter fraud is itself a form of fraud.”
Quoted: “The social distancing requirements set everyone on their heels,” said Dr. Michael Miller with the Addiction Medicine Fellowship Program at the UW School of Medicine.
“There are a lot of other things to do to change the workplace” to make it safer, said Alta Charo, a bioethics expert at the University of Wisconsin Law School who has served on several national and state ethics advisory panels.
Sandra Newbury, director of the Shelter Medicine Program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, worked with the shelters to contain the virus. Thanks to the private donor, they were able to offer free testing and medical care for the adopted cats, eventually isolating hundreds that had been infected. “We were really aggressive in our efforts to not let it spread,” Newbury said. She believes identifying such a large number of infected animals and quarantining them allowed the authorities to eradicate the virus. According to Newbury, no positive tests have been reported since March 2017.
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.
Quoted: Richard Keller, professor in the Department of History, and Department of Medical History and Bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. His research focuses on the history of European and colonial medicine, as well as public health and environmental history.
Dr. Ajay K. Sethi, an infectious disease epidemiologist and associate professor of population health sciences at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, cautioned that there is no evidence Gold and his co-investigators “used a scientific approach to test their hypothesis that ‘different exposure to vaccines between younger and older people may account for this different morbidity rate [in COVID-19].’”
But Dr. Jim Conway, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said readers “need to be cautious when people are trying to draw associations that don’t have a lot of biological plausibility.”
Richard J. Davidson, professor of psychology and neuroscientist at the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, has demonstrated that “when individuals engage in generous and altruistic behavior, they actually activate circuits in the brain that are key to fostering well-being.”
“It’s utter nonsense. This has been shown over and over,” said Kenneth R. Mayer, an elections expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “The continued insistence that there are material levels of intentional voter fraud is itself a form of fraud.”
For years, people with irritable bowel syndrome symptoms were told the issues were related to stress, it was in their heads or they needed to exercise more, said Melissa Phillips, a clinical nutritionist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Health System’s Digestive Health Center.
But society tends to become inured to prolonged death tolls, said Richard Keller, a UW-Madison professor of the history of medicine. “We’re going to see a pushing of the pandemic out of sight, out of mind,” Keller said.
Cross says officials from across the UW System have already begun planning the reopen, from academic instruction to residence hall and dining service operations to athletics to academic counseling.
Quoted: “COVID-19 has thrown a huge wrench into the global economy. It is not a good thing,” Andrew Stevens, UW-Madison Applied Economics Assistant Professor said.
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.
Ajay Sethi, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and director of its Master of Public Health program, studies the spread of infectious diseases such as HIV and measles. He also studies the spread of public health conspiracies, which can quickly unravel the progress achieved by researchers.
Numerous academic studies have linked interactive narratives with improved empathy. In 2018, the University of Wisconsin-Madison found middle-schoolers who played a video game “showed greater connectivity in brain networks related to empathy.”
“If we can’t empathize with another’s difficulty or problem, the motivation for helping will not arise,” Richard Davidson, director and professor of psychology and psychiatry at UW-Madison, said of the study. “Our long-term aspiration for this work is that video games may be harnessed for good.”
Late in 1990, when Paul Kagame was hiding on the Congolese side of the Virunga Mountains preparing to invade Rwanda, his army, the Rwandan Patriotic Front, were not the only formidable inhabitants of that densely forested volcanic range. The Virunga are also home to mountain gorillas. Soldiers are notoriously trigger-happy when it comes to wildlife, but Mr Kagame ordered his men not to shoot the apes. “They will be valuable one day,” he said.
(Tony Goldberg, virologist, School of Veterinary Medicine)
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.
For diagnostic tests that are designed to detect current infections, the possibility of some false-negative tests could also allow infected travelers slipping through the cracks, Laura Albert, an industrial and systems engineering professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told ABC News.
“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.
Here & Now’s Tonya Mosley speaks with Rebekah Pryor Paré, associate dean for the Career Initiative in the College of Letters & Science at the University of Wisconsin Madison.
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: “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.
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.”
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.
UW-Extension meat specialist Jeff Sindelar said that while there are fewer packages of meat available at stores, this isn’t a “no food on the shelf” situation. He encouraged consumers to avoid the impulse to stock up on supplies.
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.
Ajay Sethi, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and director of its Master of Public Health program, studies the spread of infectious diseases such as HIV and measles. He also studies the spread of public health conspiracies, which can quickly unravel the progress achieved by researchers.
Quoted: Hart Posen, a management professor at the UW-Madison School of Business, said it will be key for industries to incorporate both in-store and online options effectively.
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.”
That number is “incredibly high,” said Dr. Laura Dresser, associate director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison think-tank COWS.
COVID-19 has put science in a tricky spot. The good news, as National Academy of Sciences President Marcia McNutt explains, is that scientific expertise is back in high demand: “When the chips are down and everything is on the line and you can be the next person in the hospital bed, it’s the experts that you want to listen to.”
, , , and
With scientists and science itself seemingly under attack during the COVID-19 crisis, I find myself wondering what Dietram Scheufele thinks.
Quoted: A horticulture expert from UW-Madison explained there are a couple steps home gardeners can take to prepare for the freeze.The first is to take advantage of the warmth during the day and to irrigate. “Water the plants. Water the soil,” Amaya Atucha said.
“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.”
Bob Cropp, emeritus professor of agricultural and applied economics from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the trend has already continued into 2020 despite price improvements at the end of 2019.
David O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, said the most interesting feature of the Los Alamos research is that the same pattern was seen in multiple locations. But he said “significant caution is warranted” because the data was not collected randomly. The vast majority of SARS-CoV-2 genomes in online databases come from Europe and North America, meaning strains from these regions are overrepresented in research
University of Wisconsin virologist Thomas Friedrich, who has spent years studying the evolution and transmission of the Zika virus, said a virus that makes its way into a highly susceptible population — for example, Europe in January — will spread like wildfire, quickly becoming the dominant strain in the region
Quoted: “It’s an old language, where all we’re trying to do is maintain it,” UW-Madison Professor Emeritus of Computer Science Charles Fischer said.
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.
Andrew Stevens, professor of agricultural and applied economics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said shortages could happen because the meat supply chain is complex and relies on refrigeration in transport and production facilities.
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?
Quoted: UW Health Distinguished Psychologist Dr. Shilagh Mirgain said the daily uncertainty around the pandemic causes people’s bodies to experience wear and tear. “We are bombarded with daily stressors–something as simple as grocery shopping can be overwhelming and leave us feeling drained and fatigued,” Mirgain explained.
Quoted: “It’s going to be tough for some companies,” said Matthew Hora, director of the Center for Research on College-Workforce Transitions at the University of Wisconsin. “Converting to working remotely requires quite a bit of forethought as to how to design meaningful tasks and how to supervise them in a productive way.”
Quoted: Social media wars with misinformation on all things COVID-19, and it’s harder to spot. According to Mike Wagner, a journalism professor at UW-Madison, coronavirus misinformation is less absurd or intentional.
