(By Dr. William Petri, professor of medicine) If you’ve been vaccinated for COVID-19, is it safe to gather with friends and loved ones in person? According to guidelines issued Monday by the Centers from Disease Control and Prevention, yes, fully vaccinated people can gather in small groups with other fully vaccinated people. And you can do that without the encumbrance of a mask or social distancing.
Researchers at the University of Virginia Medical Center have struggled to practicalize predictive software applied to COVID treatment guidance. “These algorithms have been proliferating, which is great, but there’s been far less attention placed on how to ethically use them,” one medical scientist tells Morrison. “Very few algorithms even make it to any kind of clinical setting.”
A new method of monitoring communications within the brain may help explain why Alzheimer’s drugs have limited effectiveness. Scientists at the University of Virginia School of Medicine developed the tool.
The Pilgrim Baptist Church of Charlottesville is starting a free Toddler Stay and Play program. Any child age 14 months to 2 1/2 years can be dropped off from 10 a.m. to noon on Tuesdays and Fridays to learn hands-on skills like tying shoes, water plants and setting a table. The program is a partnership between the Montessori Science Program and Equity Center, both at the University of Virginia, City of Promise, and church pastors Christopher and Wendy Cooper.
If a siren suddenly sounds Thursday morning and you begin to hear voices coming from far away, fear not for it’s just UVA testing its emergency public address system.
UVA is joining hundreds of other campuses that are designated as a “Voter Friendly Campus.” In its announcement Tuesday, UVA says the goal of this initiative is to bolster efforts that help students overcome barriers to participating in the political process.
On UVA’s North Grounds, construction work is underway on the new UVA Inn at Darden. The building was originally built more than four decades ago and now is getting a major facelift.
The UVA Board of Visitors has approved a 223,000-square-foot hotel and conference center that will be located next to the Emmet-Ivy parking garage and the new School of Data Science building.
At the Knoxville Museum of Art last fall, a tangle of plant fibers formed the walls of an open-air structure. To Katie MacDonald and Kyle Schumann, this is the future of architecture. The design duo – both UVA faculty members – heads After Architecture, a Charlottesville-based practice dedicated to explorations of alternative building materials, grown or harvested.
Burger King U.K. sparks uproar with ‘Women belong in the kitchen’ tweet on International Women’s Day
Tami Kim, a UVA assistant professor of business administration, researched the strategy that brands use in advertisement – called identity appeals – to target consumers based on a specific identity. What she and colleagues found is that when brands use this strategy to target consumers with a marginalized identity and evoke a stereotype, the ad campaign is more likely to backfire.
“I get excited any time I can build a bridge between the University and the community, especially the African-American community,” said Ahmad Hawkins, a former UVA student-athlete and a behavioral coordinator at Lugo-McGinness Academy, an alternative high school for at-risk students in Charlottesville. He’s part of a group aiming to foster the connection between UVA and the Charlottesville community with a series of events beginning Tuesday night.
The demand for help at free clinics has been on the rise since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic, but one UVA medical student is working to easily connect volunteers with them.
With more vaccine in the pipeline, experts predict more of us will be inoculated against COVID in the next few months, and at some Virginia schools, nursing students are stepping up to help. Dozens of them are learning at UVA before taking their place on the injection line.
(Commentary) The Virginia Republicans of the 1950s weren’t the angels Shaun claims they were either. As former UVA Professor William G. Thomas III put it, ”In 1957 in Virginia J. Lindsay Almond won the governorship in a bitter campaign against Ted Dalton that hinged on the politics of who would defend segregation better” [emphasis added].
(Video) GoLocal interviewed UVA Politics Chair Jennifer Lawless, who discussed the Biden’s administration’s final push of the record $1.9 trillion stimulus legislation, Secretary of Commerce Gina Raimondo’s high profile, as well as New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo’s fate.
Things are unlikely to get any easier for Biden’s Democrats with their current majorities. “It’s possible that the high point for Democrats was just reached,” said Larry Sabato, professor of politics at the University of Virginia.
Wisconsin U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson has also recently downplayed the severity of the insurrection and amplified former President Donald Trump’s false claims that elections were “stolen” in key swing states, including Wisconsin. “He has been saying and doing things that just can’t be justified,” said Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics. “I think a lot of people have been stunned that he would go as far as he has.”
The continued refusal by New York Gov. Andrew Cuomo to resign in the face of mounting scandals is drawing comparisons to Virginia Gov. Ralph Northam, who wouldn’t resign in 2019 despite calls from members of his own party to step down over a scandal of his own. “#Cuomo is pulling a Northam,” UVA Center for Politics Director Larry Sabato tweeted Monday, comparing the two Democrat governors.
Having lived in Virginia most of his life, Larry Sabato can remember racially segregated schools and systematic efforts to stop Black people voting. Now 68, he observes a state that has diversified, embraced liberal values and shifted from symbol of the old South to symbol of the new.
“With Donald Trump out of the limelight, by definition, the entire movement stepped back a bit,” says Jennifer Lawless, a UVA political scientist. “We’ve seen so many egregious examples of sexual harassment and sexual assault and just hostile working conditions for women that – and this is a terrible way to put it – the novelty has worn off. In some ways, people have become almost inoculated against these kinds of charges.”