In a weekly update released on Friday, UVA’s Biocomplexity Institute said prevention and mitigation strategies could contain the variants. “However, if coupled with reduced prevention effort, [variants] could lead to high transmission and extend the worst impacts of the pandemic,” the report said.
UVA Health held a press briefing Friday to update vaccination and COVID-19 data. Officials say they have administered 32,643 doses of the COVID-19 vaccine. Of those doses, 22,673 were first doses, and 9,970 were second doses. Each day, UVA Health vaccinates more than 1,000 people.
(Video) Dr. Taison Bell, UVA assistant professor of medicine in the divisions of Infectious Disease and Pulmonary/Critical Care Medicine, breaks down the latest coronavirus vaccine developments.
All of the prediction models for where the pandemic is headed are showing encouraging signs, according to analysts at UVA’s Biocomplexity Institute. The data indicate the coronavirus likely peaked two weeks ago. But experts caution that getting complacent now could allow the more aggressive variants of the virus to get a strong foothold in Virginia.
After parlaying his electric rookie season in MLS into an overseas loan to English Championship side Barnsley FC, [and former UVA men’s soccer star] Daryl Dike is reportedly on the English Premier League radar. That’s according to a report published on Thursday from Leon Wobschall of the Yorkshire Post, who spoke with Barnsley CEO Dane Murphy about the arrival of the 20-year-old Dike and what it could mean for his future.
Orange County African American Historical Society board member Ellen Wessel described Sekum Appiah-Ofori as “a passionate change maker.” She cited her social justice work at Orange County High School and at UVA, where she and a classmate successfully petitioned the school to remove the “whispering wall,” built as a memorial to Frank Hume, a Confederate soldier and former member of the Virginia legislature. The school’s Board of Visitors voted to remove or rededicate the memorial. “Removing the Hume memorial is an important step in signifying that UVA will no longer value white supremicists’ hi...
A streamer could just post a link to their PayPal or shout-out their Venmo every now and then to scrape together an income. But that would look more like busking than the back-and-forth conversations that fomented countless parasocial relationships through Twitch. Streamlabs and StreamElements stuck because of their social dimension. “It’s the package itself that gives the money meaning,” says Lana Swartz, UVA media studies professor and author of “New Money: How Payment Became Social Media.” “Without the meaningful dimension, it’s possible many people wouldn’t be inspired to give money and ge...
To Barbara Perry, the UVA Miller Center’s presidential studies director, it is “premature” to pronounce the end of Biden’s honeymoon with the press corps. Instead, she said reporters were simply jumping on any indication the “Kumbaya moment” might be over as they adjust to the dynamics of a new administration. “If you want to use that metaphor, it would be like a couple on their honeymoon, and they have a little spat over something, and then people report the marriage is ending,” she said.
Some marketers took aim at the changing habits and ways we live during the pandemic. Tide’s ad depicts a boy not wanting to wash a clean-looking sweatshirt with the face of “Seinfeld” star Jason Alexander on it. But as the sweatshirt collects garbage and dog drool, Alexander’s face starts scowling, and only perks up when Tide saves the day. By suggesting that you may be wearing the same clothes more, and washing them less, the ad encourages more detergent use, said Kim Whitler, a UVA marketing professor. “They wouldn’t have run this ad if COVID hadn’t happened,” she said.
State courts are likely to err on the side of protecting employers from liability by finding an adverse vaccine reaction was covered by workers’ compensation, said J. H. Verkerke, a law professor and director of UVA’s Program for Employment and Labor Law Studies. “That’s emphatically not a conventional principle of the no-fault workers’ compensation system,” Verkerke said. “But desperate times sometimes call for desperate measures.”
Local doctors say dealing with the pandemic has been somewhat stressful and unlike anything they’ve ever seen. “It sometimes is emotionally challenging because of the challenges in taking care of coronavirus patients,” said Dr. Catherine Bonham, physician of pulmonary and critical care medicine at UVA Health.
“Despite race/ethnicity being repeatedly shown as an independent risk factor for morbidity and mortality, this identifier is missing for 49% of the known infections and 33% of deaths associated with COVID-19,” said Dr. Ebony Jade Hilton, UVA associate professor of anesthesiology and critical care medicine. “Currently only 16 states report race/ethnicity for persons they have vaccinated. In denying access to this information, we are limited in our abilities to address systemic flaws leading to the disparities, and the cost of that lag in activity is human life.” … “The COVID-19 pandemic has rav...
“Ensuring equity in Covid vaccine distribution requires collecting accurate data on who is receiving vaccinations,” tweeted Dr. Taison Bell of UVA Health. Bell’s colleague, Dr. Ebony Hilton, noted, “COVID-19 has claimed the lives of over [451,000] Americans. Race has been identified as an independent risk factor for whether or not someone lives or dies for every age. Yet, the majority of states are not reporting the race of those they are vaccinating. This must change.”
In direct contrast with mainstream media coverage and the claims of pharmaceutical companies, business ethicist and professor Dr. David Martin, a Batten Fellow at UVA’s Darden School of Business, said in an interview that “mRNA is not a vaccination. It’s a gene therapy that was originally developed for cancer treatment.” On top of that, Martin described the role the media have played in propagating falsehoods around PCR testing for COVID-19.
Among today’s most respected Spanish-language poets and currently Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Virginia, Fernando Valverde offers a multiply refracted view of the contradictions and violence that define his newly adopted country in “America,” translated by Carolyn Forché. (Alos mentioned: English Department professors Rita Dove and Lisa Russ Spaar.)
The Virginia Film Festival has been approved for a $20,000 Grants for Arts Projects Award from the National Endowment for the Arts to support the 2021 Virginia Film Festival.
There’s a new antibody drug infusion available at UVA Health for high-risk COVID-19 patients, but it is only available for certain groups. Currently, UVA can provide this drug for 20 patients a week. The goal is to keep more high-risk patients, like those with heart or kidney disease, out of the hospital.
Researchers from UVA, Lehigh University, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology are pooling their respective labs’ expertise to unlock the mysteries of a protein that plays a critical regulatory role in human health and disease. Knowing how the protein works could lead to improved therapies for cancers and other diseases.
A new antibody cocktail being tested by UVA researchers was able to block 100% of all symptomatic coronavirus infections when people were exposed to the virus.
According to research conducted at UVA Health, among 186 individuals who received Regeneron Pharmaceuticals’ antibody cocktail and were subsequently exposed to COVID as part of the company’s phase 3 clinical trial, none developed symptomatic cases of COVID; eight members of a placebo group who were exposed to COVID developed symptomatic infections.