Such “preprint” studies have become more widespread during COVID-19, causing some controversy because the findings haven’t been vetted as much as usual. “This is highly unusual to practice science this way,” said Dr. Patrick Remington, director of the preventive medicine residency program at the UW School of Medicine and Public Health and former associate dean.
For Pierce, a professor in UW-Madison’s Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Department and director of the Space Science and Engineering Center, the world under COVID-19 restrictions is a vast laboratory.
“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.”
Quoted: Donald Downs, a now retired UW-Madison political science professor specializing in constitutional rights and free speech, said with the governor’s order to socially distance at least six feet from others, police can enforce that. However, they cannot enforce on the pretext to interfere with a message.
Quoted: Dr. Richard Davidson, the founder and director of UW Madison’s Center for Healthy Minds, says the range of emotions is normal. “The real opportunity and challenge is not to get hijacked by those emotions,” Dr. Davidson said. “We can watch them. We can observe them. We can diminish the emotions.”
Quoted: “I think a lot of that first buying was people loading up and now I think that demand has decreased,” said Ronald Kean, a University of Wisconsin Extension poultry specialist. “Some of our large egg producers sell a lot of liquid eggs, but that has dropped off because that’s mostly used by restaurants and schools.”
Quoted: “It’s pretty clear that pushing the economy to go back to work before coronavirus is brought under control is going to be like being in a vehicle and pushing on the accelerator and the brake at the same time,” said Ian Coxhead, an economist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Patrick Remington, professor emeritus at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said gathering to protest is unequivocally a health risk for protesters and those with whom they come into contact.
Noted: Misleading people by providing real information divorced from necessary context is not a unique strategy, said Dave Schroeder, a cybersecurity expert at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who tracks disinformation on social media.
He’s been following how public health information on the COVID-19 pandemic is being “attacked by actors with an agenda” and twisted to suit certain narratives.
Patrick Remington, professor emeritus at the UW-Madison School of Medicine and Public Health, said health officials would need to first determine the proportion of people who voted out of the total number of people who tested positive for COVID-19 during the time frame in which they could have exhibited symptoms from the April 7 election, or roughly two weeks.
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.
“You have these complex networks of interactions that you wouldn’t be seeing under less disturbed circumstances,” Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, told the Washington Post. “And that provides a lot of opportunities for these diseases to explore alternate hosts and acquire some of the features that would be necessary to make them” jump species.
“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].”
Barry Burden, a professor of political science and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek that while Trump flipped Michigan from blue to red during the 2016 election, the 2018 mid-term elections signaled a possible shift as Democrats swept the state’s Senate and gubernatorial races.
Just over half of workers in Arizona, which had a relatively high minimum benefit of $172 before the crisis, are estimated to make more on unemployment than if they were still working, according to Noah Williams, the director of Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
“Seldom does a consumer go to a grocery store and want to buy a 5-pound bag of shredded cheese,” said Mark Stephenson, director of Dairy Policy Analysis at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. “They wanted maybe 1-pound bags at a time. You can’t just put 1-pound bags through a 5-pound line. Not possible. You have to have a different piece of equipment set up differently. We’ve had an industry that’s had to shuffle a great deal to move product from where it was produced before to where it needs to be today.”
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.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said officials have limited time to make improvements for Wisconsin’s upcoming elections, including a special Congressional race next month and the statewide primary in August.
Quoted: While other YouTube child performers tend to adopt the site’s popular blogging style, speaking directly to viewers as they unbox toys or shop in a mall, “Like Nastya” videos usually involve short, episodic plots. The storylines are simple enough for a three-year-old to follow. Heavy doses of sound effects, jump cuts and slapstick humour are like sugar for young audiences, said Heather Kirkorian, a professor at University of Wisconsin-Madison who studies cognitive development and media. “It’s like ‘The Three Stooges’,” she said. “That plays really well with preschoolers.”
Quoted: “I think one of the most important things for people to be cautious about is there’s now going to be a proliferation of scams,” said Michael Collins, director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Before the pandemic hit, Wisconsin was moving toward full-day 4K programs. Beth Graue, University of Wisconsin-Madison early childhood education professor, said Wisconsin’s economic struggles will likely make that harder as funding gets tighter.
Public health experts do not agree with the Legislature’s assessment that now is the time to lift restrictions. Thanks to the Safer at Home order, “the curve is looking a lot more flat than three weeks ago,” says Malia Jones, assistant scientist in Health Geography at the University of Wisconsin-Madison Applied Population Laboratory. “That does not mean that the pandemic is over. There’s another step that has to happen or we’ll be right back where we were.”
Quoted: “The entire stimulus program, which has many moving parts, is being designed on the road,” Ian Coxhead, professor of applied economics at UW-Madison, explained.
“Every president wants to defend their legacy,” says Allison Prasch, assistant professor of rhetoric, politics and culture at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. “But the way that Trump is portraying himself rhetorically demonstrates a self-obsession in ways that I think are unprecedented
Quoted: “Every day it’s shut down it becomes more costly to reopen and recover, there’s no doubt about that,” said Ian Coxhead, an applied economics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “Depending on how long before we can begin to reopen the economy, there will be more people and more businesses added to the rolls of those who are not going to come back to the labor force of the business world.”
Qutoed: Barry Burden, a professor of political science at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who is among the academics who have produced studies that found no partisan advantage to mail voting, said the Times analysis of the Wisconsin data did not align with any previous studies from states such as Colorado and Utah, which transitioned to fully vote-by-mail systems in recent years.
Quoted: Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said officials have limited time to make improvements for Wisconsin’s upcoming elections, including a special Congressional race next month and the statewide primary in August.
David O’Connor, a viral diseases researcher at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, explained: “If a substantial amount of transmission occurs before people feel sick, how do you stop that?
Quoted: David O’Connor, who studies viral disease at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said: “If a substantial amount of transmission occurs before people feel sick, how do you stop that? By the time people feel sick and seek care, all the testing and isolation in the world would be too little, too late.”
Quoted: Freshwater mussels are even finicky in sickness and death. Monitoring a mussel’s health is nearly impossible, said Tony Goldberg, a veterinary epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a Strike Force member.
Quoted: In recent years, scientists have identified about two dozen genetic changes that might have helped make our brains not only bigger but incomparably capable. “It’s not just one quantum leap,” says University of Wisconsin-Madison paleoanthropologist John Hawks. “A lot of adaptations are at play, from metabolic regulation to neuron formation to timing of development.”
Quoted: David O’Connor, who studies viral disease at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said, “If a substantial amount of transmission occurs before people feel sick, how do you stop that? By the time people feel sick and seek care, all the testing and isolation in the world would be too little, too late.”
But Mark Stephenson, director of dairy policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said these are not ordinary circumstances.
Quoted: Existing research on best practices in online learning will only get educators so far. “When you are being asked to implement online learning in the way our research suggests you should, but you are being asked to do that in a 12-day period, that’s nearly impossible,” said Annalee Good, co-director of the Wisconsin Evaluation Collaborative at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Dr. J. Igor Iruretagoyena, medical director of maternal-fetal medicine for UW Health and Meriter, reiterated in a statement Thursday that hospitals remain the safest places for delivering babies.
Routines and structure are important for all children, said Sigan Hartley, an associate professor in human development and family studies at UW-Madison.
Steep price drops for renewable energy and a groundswell of public support have created an opportunity for local leadership on climate change, said Greg Nemet, a professor of public policy and environmental studies at UW-Madison.
Quoted: “Poverty represents a level of deprivation that many middle- or upper-income Americans can’t even wrap their head around,” said Sarah Halpern-Meekin, a sociologist at the University of Wisconsin who has conducted extensive interviews with poor parents. “The first thing that come to mind is a mother I met who was trying to manage her son’s asthma while living in an apartment that had rodents, insects and mold no matter how much she cleaned. Rising poverty rates means more families living like that.”
Quoted: Most pheromones are single chemicals, says Charles Snowdon, an emeritus psychologist at the University of Wisconsin, Madison, who was not involved with the work. “But what this paper is saying is that it’s a mixture of chemicals that seem to be more important,” he says.
Quoted: Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, said that likely gave some Democrats more of an incentive to vote even if the race was all but decided, according to previous Wisconsin Public Radio reporting.
On a crisp, sunny February afternoon in Kris Saha’s lab in Madison, doctoral candidate in biomedical engineering Nicole Piscopo put a petri dish of cells underneath a high-powered microscope. The cells, which were gene-edited to include a gene from sea anemones, were glowing red.
Quoted: Habitat fragmentation is a major problem, said Dave O’Connor, a virologist at the University of Wisconsin at Madison. Human incursions into animal habitats — chopping down forests to build farms, venturing into parks to poach — bring us into increasing contact with animals and make us more likely to pick up their diseases.
Quoted: “We can practice relaxing as we are walking, cleaning our house, doing the laundry,” says neuroscientist Richard J. Davidson, founder of the Center for Healthy Minds at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “We can also practice a little self-compassion at these times, recognizing that no one is perfect and not being too hard on ourselves for failing to accomplish something in the time we had originally planned, for example.”
Quoted: It’s more likely that Democratic turnout benefited from the party’s presidential primary being on the ballot. And at a time when Americans are spending more time consuming news at home, the controversy over whether to hold the election may have actually wound up encouraging voters, said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Quoted: Barry Burden of the University of Wisconsin-Madison and Amber Wichowsky of Marquette, co-authored “Economic discontent as a mobilizer: unemployment and voter turnout.” Burden described by email the complexity of political mobilization during an economic crisis:“Historically, unemployed individuals have voted at much lower rates than working people,” Burden said, but when unemployment “becomes widespread enough to be perceived as a communal concern rather than an individual predicament” it raises turnout.
Quoted: Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, said that likely gave some Democrats more of an incentive to vote even if the race was all but decided.
Quoted: Barry Burden, University of Wisconsin-Madison political science professor, said that likely gave some Democrats more of an incentive to vote even if the race was all but decided.
At a UW-Madison webinar Tuesday, campus epidemiologists said the outbreak could get worse again if strict measures aren’t maintained. “If (the “Safer at Home” order) is not extended or an alternative, equally effective solution is not put in place, we’re at risk for a second wave of COVID-19,” said Ajay Sethi, an associate professor of population health sciences.
Quoted: Action games are associated with improvements on a pretty broad range of perceptual and cognitive skills,” says C. Shawn Green, a psychologist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who specializes in cognitive neuroscience.
“This went against all public health recommendations,” said Patrick Remington, the director of the University of Wisconsin-Madison Preventive Medicine Residency Program.
Quoted: And for this generation of teens, there is little precedent for this kind of threat. Most were born after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks and haven’t experienced the type of disruption that would make them fearful of going about their regular lives, said Bradford Brown, a professor of human development at the University of Wisconsin in Madison who specializes in adolescents.
Quoted: In the 2016 presidential election, voters there cast some 145,000 absentee votes by mail; in Tuesday’s election, there were over a million. The state’s election officials regularly process high volumes of absentee ballots, but the last-minute cascade left them swamped, said Kenneth Mayer, a political science professor at the University of Wisconsin.
Quoted: “It seems impervious to what happens with voters,” said Barry Burden, director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. “It really looks like an unresponsive institution.”
Quoted: On May 27, hopefully, lessors and lessees will have worked out things in order to have a smooth transition into — what I hope is — a much more normal world,” said Mitch, a University of Wisconsin-Madison Law School clinical professor and director of the Economic Justice Institute and Neighborhood Law Clinic.
Quoted: Sigan Hartley is a University of Wisconsin-Madison associate professor of human development and family studies and the 100 Women Chair for the School of Human Ecology. She’s also a Waisman Center investigator, whose research focuses on positive well-being in individuals with developmental disabilities and their family members.
As medical director of infection control at UW Hospital, Dr. Nasia Safdar has helped lead UW Health’s response to COVID-19 and assisted local officials in explaining the pandemic to the media and the public.
Quoted: UW Health psychologist Dr. Shilagh Mirgain says there is a way to help fill that empty loss feeling you may have had the last few weeks.
I never imagined when launching the UW Odyssey Project 17 years ago that a pandemic would shut down our face-to-face classes, postpone our exuberant May graduation, and leave our families at the poverty level and hurting badly.
Quoted: Dave Schroeder, an information technology strategist with the Division of Information Technology at UW-Madison, wrote in an email that controls like those outlined in the district’s email are “ways to use Zoom securely,” but added that “some of those can only be controlled by the person hosting the meeting.”
Quoted: “From a public health perspective, this was counter to all good scientific evidence and advice right now for how to continue to curb the pandemic from having serious impacts in the state,” said Kristen Malecki, an epidemiologist at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and Public Health. “The fact that politics interfered with sound judgment and jeopardized public safety is something that should not be ignored.”
