This story appeared in the Spring 2021 Letters & Science magazine.
Illustrations by Miguel Porlan.
Using anonymized data from hundreds of thousands of cell phones, Professor of Geography Song Gao was able to create maps and models that tracked the movements of Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, when most of them were living in communities under stay-at-home orders designed to prevent the spread of the virus. Using a tool available through Gao’s Geospatial Data Science Lab, experts were able to track, on a day-by-day basis, how maximum travel distances increased or decreased. While the tool wasn’t designed to track specific individuals—it used proxies instead—it did give researchers a clear sense of the relationship between movement and virus spread.
“The way behavior changes as orders and messages change tells us what was successful,” says Gao.
Reka Sundaram-Stuke, a research fellow in the Center for Research on the Wisconsin Economy (CROWE), released a report on the threats to food, employment, housing, and mental health security experienced by Wisconsinites in the early weeks of the pandemic. The analysis showed that the COVID-19 pandemic had real economic fallouts in key areas: job loss, food security, and housing security. Sundaram-Stuke also found an increase in anxiety levels across all income groups, pointing to a correlation between threats to economic security and mental health.
As part of its ongoing effort to document and analyze the economic fallout of the COVID-19 pandemic, CROWE featured research briefs throughout the fall on a variety of impacts.
Adeline Lo, an assistant professor of political science, was part of an international team that calculated the number of years of life lost to the virus, measured across 81 countries, including the United States: 20,507,518 years, with the average years of life lost per death at 16. Researchers used population and country life expectancy data to make their projection, also comparing years of life lost to COVID-19 to two other significant sources of fatality—heart conditions and traffic accidents. The group’s findings, published in Nature, confirmed that the elderly are hardest hit by the virus, and that policies are needed to protect the most vulnerable demographics in each country.
Last spring, Brian Yandell, professor of statistics and interim director of the American Family Insurance Data Science Institute at UW–Madison, began to wonder about the ways in which mathematical modeling could help inform policymakers and the general public about the pandemic.
Yandell reached out to researchers at UW Health, the School of Medicine and Public Health, and others on campus, such as Michael Ferris, professor of computer sciences and director of the Data Science Hub at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery.
Within three weeks, Yandell had heard from more than 100 people across campus and throughout the U.S. who are now participating in various ways. The COVID-19 Data Science Research Group works under a charter focusing them in three areas: interpreting data, using that data to create models, and sharing information and findings. For example, researchers have used data visualization tools to track infectious disease trends. The data science research group has also collaborated with the Wisconsin Department of Health Services, most recently on problems with hospital overcrowding and vaccine delivery.
Masks reduce the risks of COVID-19 infection, but they also cover most of our faces, masking the facial cues that often help children know what and how we’re feeling.
Ashley Ruba, a graduate student in the Department of Psychology, and Professor of Psychology Seth Pollak, the director of the UW-Madison Child Emotion Lab, conducted a study that concluded masks are not preventing kids from understanding adults’ facial expressions.
Ruba and Pollak showed more than 80 children, ages 7 to 13, photos of faces displaying sadness, anger or fear that were unobstructed, covered by a surgical mask, or wearing sunglasses. Asked to assign an emotion to each face from a list of six labels, the kids were correct about the uncovered faces as often as 66 percent of the time, well above the odds had they simply guessed from the six options they were presented.
“Even with a mask covering the nose and mouth, the kids were able to identify these emotions at a rate better than chance,” says Ruba.
In a study from the UW School of Workers, funded by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services and prepared in partnership with UW’s Population Health Institute, authors Alexia Kulwiec and Armando Ibarra (Chican@ and Latin@ studies) found that COVID-19 has devastated the lives of essential workers, their families and their communities. While many in the U.S. can work from home during the pandemic, those who grow and prepare the country’s food, care for the sick, maintain the state’s infrastructure, and educate the nation’s children must leave home to do their jobs. Workers of color and Latinx workers face greater risks than their non-Latinx, white counterparts and suffer poorer health outcomes as a result. This report presents the concerns about workplace safety expressed by workers in several industries deemed essential.
