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.”
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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.
“That is incredibly accelerated when you consider most vaccines have been in development 10 to 15 years before they come to market,” said Dr. Jonathan Temte, a family medicine professor and associate dean at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.
Quoted: Tash and Brown’s comments get an endorsement from Kathleen Bartzen Culver, who directs the Center for Journalism Ethics at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
A government loan doesn’t automatically cause a conflict of interest, she said. But “I would . . . ask what [a] local news organization will do to counteract any potential conflict.” Her suggestion: “Any news organization that takes funds should report on that and reassure readers that they will continue to see fair, hard-hitting reporting, including on the government’s approach to an economy wrecked by an epidemic.”
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: “In the end of the day, there is only the same number of people wiping their, um, you know what,” said Troy Runge, the chair of the biological systems engineering department at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: “The presence of a minor party candidate can affect who wins an election,” said Barry Burden, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and director of its elections research center. “My research on prior minor party candidates for president indicates that between 25% and 60% of their support is from people who would not have voted.”
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: UW-Madison anticipated a freshmen class of roughly 7,300 students, nearly 3,700 of those students would be in state.
André Phillips, director of admissions and recruitment at UW-Madison, said they should be able to surpass the 7,300 students anticipated by at least 100.
“We’ll likely have several hundred students that we’ll work with throughout the month of May leading up to the June 1 deadline, and that’s pretty significant,” Phillips said.
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.
Quoted: “You’ve certainly seen in places that stopped isolation measures too early — what the flu pandemic did in those places,” said Dr. James Conway, an infectious disease expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health and a self-described history buff.
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.
Quoted: But virus expert David O’Connor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said he thinks too little is known to rule out any source, except the idea the virus was man-made. Finding the source is important, he said, because it may harbor the next pandemic virus.
But virus expert David O’Connor of the University of Wisconsin-Madison said he thinks too little is known to rule out any source, except the idea the virus was manmade. Finding the source is important, he said, because it may harbor the next pandemic virus.
Dr. James Conway, a professor at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health who specializes in infections diseases, said loosening up restrictions regionally would more easily allow for infection to spread rapidly in places other than Madison and Milwaukee.
Most COVID-19 viruses sequenced from Dane County patients appear to come from Europe, while Milwaukee-area samples stem from Asia, according to preliminary genetic sequencing data by UW-Madison researchers. “There’s not much mixing between the two locations,” Thomas Friedrich, a UW-Madison professor of pathobiological sciences, said. “This suggests to us that there’s been some success in the travel restrictions that we are still under.
On April 6, the State Department announced it would designate the Russian Imperial Movement (RIM) as terrorists. This marks the first time that the United States has officially applied the “terrorist” label to a white supremacist organization.
Anna Meier (@annameierPS) is a PhD candidate in political science at the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
Donald Waller, a forest ecologist recently retired from the University of Wisconsin-Madison, goes further. “I sketched out a little balance with risks on one side and rewards on the other, and I just kept scratching my head over the risks” that this transgenic tree could pose to the forest, he told me
Quoted: Dr. Jim Conway, a pediatric infectious disease specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told reporters on the call that if the statewide order is erased the state would start seeing major outbreaks within a week.
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.
“We definitely can see shortage of products in the grocery stores,” said Jeff Sindelar, an associate professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison’s College of Agricultural and Life Sciences with an expertise in meat processing. If the larger processing plants continue to shut down or operate with limited capacity, certain products may be unavailable and others could get really expensive, he added.
“Our brains are prediction generators, and when there are delays or the facial expressions are frozen or out of sync, as happens on Zoom and Skype, we perceive it as a prediction error that needs to be fixed,” said Paula Niedenthal, a professor of psychology at the University of Wisconsin at Madison who specializes in affective response. “Whether subconscious or conscious, we’re having to do more work because aspects of our predictions are not being confirmed and that can get exhausting.”
Charting the animal origins of human diseases like COVID-19 can be difficult and often leads to unexpected discoveries, explained Dr. Tony Goldberg, a professor of epidemiology at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Veterinary Medicine. During a January 29, 2020 presentation at the Wednesday Nite @ the Lab lecture series on the UW-Madison campus, Goldberg recounted the growing body of research into pathogen transmission between animals and humans over the past three decades.
Bipolar disorder, a condition that causes erratic shifts in mood and activity, affects about 1 percent of Americans. It is often misdiagnosed as depression, largely because the people who suffer from it tend to seek help in their depressive stages, says Claudia Reardon, a psychiatrist and an associate professor of psychiatry at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Reardon has worked with a handful of bipolar athletes, most notably middle-distance runner Suzy Favor Hamilton.
Also: Shortly after, in mid-December, Shattuck was fired from his job as a senior financial specialist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. Losing his job hit him hard.
Christine Whelan, Ph.D., professor in the School of Human Ecology at University of Wisconsin – Madison, told TODAY she believes that the falling importance of religion in today’s society also plays a role, evidenced in part by more unmarried couples living together.
“The idea of first comes love, then comes marriage, then comes baby — it could be any order you choose at this point,” she said. “For the last couple decades, we’ve seen ’choose your own adventure’ when it comes to marriage patterns.”
“This is a striking case of rapid evolution, which, as we can see here, can proceed exceedingly fast, even within a generation,” Carol Lee, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who was not involved in the research, told Ed Yong of the Atlantic in 2018. “I expect there will be many more cases like this in the future, where catastrophic events impose strong selection on populations, and where populations will need to evolve or go extinct.”
Quoted: None of these studies provides the sort of evidence that health professionals consider robust, like a large double-blind trial. Nasia Safdar, a professor with the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health, says the current state of research, while not optimal, has inspired caution. “At the moment there’s no evidence to suggest that this is a harmless, helpful treatment, as was suggested by some,” says Safdar. The pitfalls of the studies to date, says Safdar, are “exactly why you need to wait for the science to demonstrate whether it works.”
Last year, the University of Wisconsin-Madison sociologist Nathan Seltzer analyzed 24 years of data, looking at every birth in America at the county level. He found that a lack of manufacturing jobs in an area was an incredibly accurate predictor of fertility rates compared to unemployment rates, which have long been used as the ur-economic indicator.
Quoted: Malia Jones, a University of Wisconsin-Madison epidemiologist, called the event a “vehicle” for the disease to spread across the state.
Quoted: “This is kind of the smoking gun,” says geochemist Annie Bauer of the University of Wisconsin-Madison, who was not part of the new study. “This is the most important evidence we can get [of early plate motion].”
Quoted: “What groups will do is say to supporters, ’Our ability to win this election is threatened by some action or inaction that the government is taking.’ That’s a way to generate energy among core supporters, even if the law doesn’t successfully change,” said Barry Burden, a professor of political science and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
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.
Quoted: Katherine J. Cramer, a political scientist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, coined the term “rural consciousness” in her 2016 book “The Politics of Resentment,” which is built on conversations she had with rural Wisconsinites over years about how they saw their communities as both overlooked and dictated to by Madison and Milwaukee.
Quoted: Ankur Desai, University of Wisconsin-Madison professor of atmospheric sciences, said while the emission declines may be dramatic, they won’t have an immediate impact on the climate or the amount of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.
Malia Jones, an assistant scientist at UW-Madison’s Applied Population Laboratory, said the gathering “is epidemiologically a very, very bad idea.” Jones described how in a large gathering of people, COVID-19 can spread easily if just one person has the disease.
