As infections rise, so will the number of hospitalizations and deaths. With millions of children infected, says Debbie-Ann Shirley, even a small share “adds up to tens of thousands of children being hospitalized for COVID-19.” Shirley works at UVA Health. There, she studies infectious diseases in kids.
Basically a doctor or a nurse uses a nose swab to collect a sample of secretions for analysis. Like it or not, for babies this is also often the best way to test, though there are other options as well, Dr. Debbie-Ann Shirley, the medical director of the COVID-19 clinic and division head of Pediatric Infectious Diseases at UVA Children’s, said. “These include testing a nasal (or nasopharyngeal) swab, throat (oropharyngeal) swab or saliva. Some studies suggest that testing using the nasal swab may improve the chance of finding the virus in the back of the airway passages,” says Dr. Shirley.
“We know there are some people in our community that were waiting for that, that felt that full approval was needed before they felt entirely comfortable with the vaccine,” said Dr. Costi Sifri, director of epidemiology at UVA Health.
President Biden said he hoped full approval would result in more local governments and private sector businesses adopting their own vaccine mandates, noting that it’s been commonplace in the past to adopt vaccine mandates for diseases like polio and mumps. “I think employers are looking to get back into business, they’d like to bring their populations back into the office,” UVA law professor Margaret Riley said.
Kyle Kondik, a political analyst at the University of Virginia, said the approach could slightly benefit Democrats over the alternative. “Both the [House of Delegates] and congressional maps are partial Republican gerrymanders—both were altered in part by courts but a lot of the districts stayed the same,” Kondik said. “If your starting point is a Republican gerrymandering, that would skew the process toward Republicans. If you say, hey, let’s start from scratch, that might benefit Democrats.”
Doctors at a UVA Health briefing say the vast majority of hospitalized patients with COVID-19 are not vaccinated against the virus. UVA Health currently has 32 people hospitalized with the virus. About half are in the intensive care unit, and two of those hospitalized are children.
The number of visitors at the University of Virginia Medical Center will be limited beginning Thursday due to an increase in the COVID-19 cases in the community.
Citing increasing numbers of COVID-19 cases in the community and at medical facilities, UVA Health officials are tightening restrictions on the number of visitors allowed at bedsides.
Shigehiro Oishi from the University of Virginia and Ulrich Schimmack from the University of Toronto Mississauga conducted a study where they “tested the relation between residential mobility and well-being in a sample of 7,108 American adults who were followed for 10 years.” From their study, published by the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, Oishi and Schimmack concluded that “The more residential moves participants had experienced as children, the lower the levels of well-being as adults.” The two scholars arrived at another interesting observation: the negative association betwe...
Some research has shown that application fees can nonetheless discourage certain students from even applying. A 2013 study by Caroline Hoxby of Stanford University and Sarah Turner of the University of Virginia examined an experiment they conducted with high-achieving low-income students. A number of interventions -- including offering them fee waivers to 171 selective colleges -- were conducted to make these students more aware of their options. The students in the program were more likely than similar students outside the program to apply to more colleges, and to more competitive colleges.
(Commentary) The result is the launch of several high-profile vaccine mandates. In July, the Biden administration began requiring that all federal workers be vaccinated or adhere to strict precautionary protocols (thought officials say it’s not a mandate). Meanwhile, some business, both large and small, health care facilities and universities have implemented mandates. Indiana University’s requirement was upheld in federal court when it was challenged. And The University of Virginia disenrolled 238 students who refused to abide by the policy.
(Commentary) Government leaders at all levels, from President Biden down to local school boards across the country, should require employees to be vaccinated — not “vaccinated or regularly tested,” as has become a popular way to impose a non-mandatory mandate, but “vaccinated, period.” All universities should join the University of Virginia, the University of Michigan and many others in requiring all students coming to campus this term to be vaccinated or face the prospect of being disenrolled.
The beginning of the school year marks a lot of firsts and Sunday was an important one: the first time UVA’s Class of 2024 was able to get together as a group. Second-year students were finally officially welcomed to the University during Opening Convocation, an event that wasn’t able to take place in person last year due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Students are back on Grounds at the University of Virginia, and there are no gathering limits in place this academic year. However, there is a temporary indoor masking policy in effect that will be re-evaluated on Sept. 6.
(Co-written by Naomi Cahn, professor of law) When embryologist Joseph Conaghan arrived at work at San Francisco’s Pacific Fertility Center on March 4, 2018, nothing seemed awry. He did routine inspections of the facility’s cryogenic tanks, which store frozen embryos and eggs for clients who hope to someday have biological children. But what he found was not routine; it was an emergency.
If Aetna customers’ pharmacy benefit provider and pharmacy services provider merge, it could be difficult for them to go outside their network for pharmacy benefits, and their pharmacy options could diminish, said Dr. Michael Williams, an associate professor of surgery and director of UVA’s Center for Health Policy. Consumers might find they have fewer choices about where they can get services, or what they’ll pay – but those services might be more convenient.
While there is no widely accepted definition of near-death experiences, the term typically refers to the mystical, profound experiences that people report when they are close to death. They’re most common in patients who survive severe head trauma or cardiac arrest. In other words, “conditions in which you would die, and stay dead, unless somebody instituted emergency medical procedures to help you,” says Bruce Greyson, a UVA psychiatrist who has studied NDEs for nearly 50 years.
Carla Williams grew up in LaGrange and is now the first African American female athletic director in her conference at the University of Virginia. Being that she credits the William J. Griggs Recreation Center as the reason behind her success, she reached out to Calloway Foundations and asked them to fund the renovation of this historic landmark.
August 28 is the birthday of American poet Rita Dove, who reportedly told Black American Literature Forum,”There’s no reason to subscribe authors to particular genres. I’m a writer, and I write in the form that most suits what I want to say.” Dove is the Henry Hoyns Professor of Creative Writing at the University of Virginia.