Category: UW Experts in the News

Quoted: “What we’re facing is unprecedented, and I don’t want to downplay its seriousness, but it’s not the worst-case scenario,” said Malia Jones, a researcher who studies infectious diseases at the University of Wisconsin in Madison.

Quoted: Trump’s insistence on referring to the illness as the “Chinese virus” plays into a central theme of his presidency, experts say, with the president demonizing foreigners. “I think that approach to this whole catastrophe just feeds the culture wars,” says Katherine Cramer, an American Politics professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: Environmental degradation has already been identified as a cause of the Covid-19 pandemic. China’s wildlife markets—where both live and dead animals are bought and sold in tight quarters—likely allowed viruses to mix across species, creating conditions “ripe for new emerging agents of disease, like Covid-19,” said Jonathan Patz, director of the Global Health Institute at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

“A lot of times, medical professionals are really focused on making this one decision for the patient who is right in front of them,” says Laura Albert, a systems engineer at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, who was not involved in the study.

Quoted: Loans aren’t taxable but must be repaid, and they can be risky because if you leave your employer you generally have to repay the loan quickly, said J. Michael Collins, director of the Center for Financial Security at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

WHYsconsin has received numerous questions from audience members about COVID-19 and we are working to answer them. Here are the answers to some of those questions you have submitted. WPR’s Mary Kate McCoy spoke with Kristen Bernard, a virology professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, to answer some of your questions.

Quoted: “This is a moment where misinformation can have real consequences, beyond what we have seen in elections,” says Dhavan Shah, the Louis A. & Mary E. Maier-Bascom professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, director of the university’s Mass Communication Research Center and scientific director of the Center for Health Enhancement System Studies. “This is a moment where misinformation can have life-and-death consequences.”

Quoted: “The wealthy have often done better than the poor when faced with epidemics and pandemics because they tend to be resilient as a function of having greater resources,” says Richard Keller, a professor of medical history and bioethics at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

Quoted: That report, from University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Young Mie Kim, found that Russia-linked social media accounts are posting about the same divisive issues — race relations, gun laws and immigration — as they did in 2016, when the Kremlin polluted American voters’ feeds with messages about the presidential election. Facebook has since removed those accounts as well.

Quoted: “The Electoral College creates these strange incentives for campaigns to ignore most of the country and pour their attention into a small number of places,” Barry Burden, a professor of political science and director of the Elections Research Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, told Newsweek.

Noted: There’s no doubt Human Nature will contribute to improving the public’s literacy about Crispr, including the differences between editing cells that can pass down those changes to future generations (germline cells, like sperm, ova, and embryos) and ones that can’t (somatic cells, or those from other body tissues). That’s critical for the future of the technology, says Alta Charo, a bioethicist at the University of Wisconsin-Madison who appears in the film for her work on the National Academy of Sciences’ reports on the ethics of gene editing.