UVA punished five fraternities for breaking COVID-19 rules on Grounds, but officials say the problem is much bigger than the Greek system.
UVA officials say the COVID-19 outbreak at the school is the result of many small groups and individual students not following public health guidelines rather than the result of a few super spreader events.
UVA’s president hosted a virtual town hall Friday, apologizing repeatedly to students for new restrictions on their day-to-day lives. Jim Ryan said limits were needed as the number of active cases among students, faculty and staff rose to 844.
Cases of COVID-19 are falling precipitously in Virginia but not in Charlottesville, which is experiencing a “severe outbreak” of the virus. Responsible for the recent uptick in cases is the University of Virginia, where daily case counts have remained well above 100 throughout this week. In a webinar town hall on Friday, UVA officials said they are working with the local health district to monitor transmission of COVID-19 from University students into the surrounding community.
Dr. Michael Williams, an ICU doctor and director of UVA’s Center for Health Policy, said many essential workers are not able to complete tasks, and thus be paid, from home. “They definitely can’t do their job remotely. You can’t package at a meat packaging facility or you can’t stock a shelf from home,” Williams said.
His son’s life was at stake when Woody Jones sat down at a long wooden conference table inside UVA Children’s. It was Christmas Day 2017, and Woody had come with his oldest son, Juan, in hopes of fixing Juan’s failing heart.
Some business owners around the Corner as well as community members say they have faith in what UVA is doing trying to combat the number of COVID-19 cases.
Some business owners around the Corner as well as community members say they have faith in what UVA is doing trying to combat the number of COVID-19 cases.
He earned master’s degrees from VUU’s Samuel DeWitt Proctor School of Theology and Union Theological Seminary in Richmond and was, according to his family, the first Black person to earn a doctorate from the University of Virginia’s Department of Religious Studies.
The memory of his parents’ initial financial struggles lingered, even as Pailla went on to earn an undergraduate degree and three additional graduate degrees from UVA. Now, that 10-year-old is the CEO of Sunny Day Fund, a startup that helps workers build near-term savings accounts with support from their employers.
When playwright-actor Priyanka Shetty moved from Columbus to Charlottesville [to earn an M.F.A. in acting] in 2016, she didn’t expect to write “#CHARLOTTESVILLE.”
UVA alumnus John Hollis, 54, was found to have “super antibodies” against COVID-19, making it virtually impossible for him to get the virus.
Gerrymandering is a factor, but the fact is that Democrats are densely packed into cities and college towns, leaving them with limited numbers of districts where they can compete successfully in many states. “Legislators are in safe seats,” says Richard Schragger, a UVA Law professor who studies state-city relations. “That means you don’t get a lot of rural-urban coalitions built, at least in state legislatures.”
“It is important that there is a continuation from the intervention that we are giving them and the help into the community through case management, through different programs,” says Dr Nassima Ait-Daoud Tiouririne, a UVA psychiatrist and addiction specialist. “Help with housing, employment, transportation.”
Many institutions have in recent years created diversity officer positions, but academics say it’s crucial for people of color to also fill general executive roles – department chairs, deans, residency program directors, and so on. As Taison Bell, a UVA critical care physician and assistant professor, put it, tapping a person of color to be chief diversity officer but having white executives otherwise “is like adding another passenger in the car, but who’s driving the car?”
Cathy Hwang, a UVA Law professor who teaches corporate law, explained that the “report just underscores how under-represented women (and people of color) continue to be in corporate America. Many companies have focused on hiring a diverse workforce, but there’s still a ton of work to be in retention and promotion.”
Larry Sabato, director of UVA’s Center for Politics, likewise said primary battles wouldn’t benefit the GOP. “The last thing you want is intraparty disputes because it drains money and alienates some of your own people,” he said. But if McConnell and Trump end up duking it out in their party’s primaries, Sabato said he’d bet on the Kentuckian in a lot of those battles. “McConnell’s a much better strategist than Trump has ever been,” he said.
The researchers were inspired in part by the work of University of Virginia economist Christopher Ruhm, who has examined relationships between recessions and mortality.
Danielle Citron, a UVA law professor, argued that attempts to limit the offense should be examined more as a technical enhancement to existing harassment laws. “While the problem might present itself as potentially solved by arguing that the content could be permissibly censorable as obscene, modern technology’s rapid development should perhaps instead inspire a reexamination of when a photograph or video becomes an action rather than speech,” she wrote, comparing it to modern day cyberstalking laws.
In an op-ed last May that appeared in The Washington Post, a trio of constitutional law professors from Cornell University and UVA argued that churches were making contradictory claims by arguing they were entitled to PPP funds while at the same time saying they should be exempted from certain pandemic-related health orders.