In the News
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April 10, 2020
“Predicting the peak is really tricky. As testing capacity changes, that changes it. And then also social distancing is changing. So you have these two factors that are both changing that could both affect the peak time,” said Marisa Eisenberg, associate professor of epidemiology, math and complex systems, who helped build a model that is trying to predict the epidemiological curve of COVID-19 in Michigan.
Detroit Free Press -
April 10, 2020
While Paralympic athletes are, in general, much fitter than most people, some have conditions that make them vulnerable to the coronavirus, says Feranmi Okanlami, assistant professor of family medicine, and physical medicine and rehabilitation, and director of adaptive sports at the Michigan Center for Human Athletic Medicine and Performance.
The Associated Press -
April 10, 2020
The Supreme Court’s decision to roll back an absentee-ballot extension that would have given Wisconsin voters an extra week to submit ballots by mail is “an ominous sign about what the court will allow elected officials to get away with during the coronavirus outbreak, even at great harm to our representative democracy,” wrote Leah Litman, assistant professor of law.
The Atlantic -
April 9, 2020
Jonathan Overpeck, dean of the School for Environment and Sustainability, says satellite photos of reductions in air pollution due to shelter-in-place measures point to how people’s health will benefit if and when societies switch from fossil fuels to renewable energy: “If we can curb fossil fuel burning, which obviously has to change, then we’re also going to curb air pollution and therefore we should start to get health benefits from that that are dramatic. And we will also be less vulnerable to diseases like the flu and this coronavirus.”
Discover -
April 9, 2020
Krista Wigginton, associate professor of civil and environmental engineering, is part of a U-M research team working to establish a scalable process for recycling N95 masks, testing both to determine effective methods to kill virus particles on the masks, and testing how many times N95 masks can be treated before the masks can’t be used: “We’re testing against viruses that are pretty similar to COVID-19. Close enough that we feel there wouldn’t be any major differences.”
Michigan Radio -
April 9, 2020
“The last thing you want is for health care workers to have a false sense of protection and (inadvertently) perform a risky procedure on a patient,” said Christopher Friese, professor of nursing and health management and policy, commenting on the use of homemade protective gear and medical supplies by health care professionals on the front lines in the fight against COVID-19.
National Geographic -
April 8, 2020
Meilan Han, professor of internal medicine, says most of the research about the coronavirus suggests older people are more likely to be hospitalized and die of the disease, but “there are young people in the United States that clearly are experiencing severe disease and are on ventilators. … We don’t have a lot of published data from the U.S., so we’re looking to the little bits of published data that are coming out of China. What they’re seeing is that one of the risk factors … does appear to be smoking.”
Detroit Free Press -
April 8, 2020
“Once (the virus is) there, it will spread like wildfire because there’s basically no way in the crowded conditions that exist in current jails and prisons to implement social distancing,” said Sonja Starr, professor of law. “We do not have the luxury of time here, and we do not have the luxury of being able to just take small steps and hope that this problem is going to go away.”
Vox -
April 8, 2020
Ariangela Kozik, a research fellow in internal medicine, says instead of buying into the hype of antimicrobial cleaning products, we should trust the familiar, time-tested compounds we know will work to keep us safe — soap, alcohol, and in some cases, bleach: “There may be a misconception out there that if chemicals are really strong, that must mean they’re better. … Throwing chemicals at everything is not going to fix the problem.”
Popular Science -
April 7, 2020
Melissa Borja, assistant professor of American culture, and William Lopez, clinical assistant professor of health behavior and health education, were interviewed about how scholars are confronting coronavirus-related racism. “If we think only about curing this disease but not how we talk about it, we are going to miss things like the anti-Asian violence that is coming as the labeling of this disease as the ‘Chinese virus,’” Lopez said. For Borja, “simply being a support for students has been important for me as a professor who puts human relationships first before anything I do.”
Inside Higher Ed
