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The University of Texas at Austin is a public research university in Austin, Texas, United States. Founded in 1883, it is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. With 52,384 students as of Fall 2022, it is also the largest institution in the system.
Pox parties, also known as flu parties, are social activities in which children are deliberately exposed to infectious diseases such as chickenpox. Such parties originated to "get it over with" before vaccines were available for a particular illness or because childhood infection might be less severe than infection during adulthood, according to proponents. For example, measles is more dangerous to adults than to children over five years old. Deliberately exposing people to diseases has since been discouraged by public health officials in favor of vaccination, which has caused a decline in the practice of pox parties, although flu parties saw a resurgence in the early 2010s.
The elbow bump is an informal greeting where two people touch elbows. Interest in this greeting was renewed during the avian flu scare of 2006, the 2009 swine flu pandemic, the Ebola outbreak of 2014, and the COVID-19 pandemic when health officials supported its use as an alternative to hand-shaking to reduce the spread of germs. During the latter pandemic, authorities advised that even an elbow bump was too risky, and suggested greeting from a distance.
In public health, social distancing, also called physical distancing, is a set of non-pharmaceutical interventions or measures intended to prevent the spread of a contagious disease by maintaining a physical distance between people and reducing the number of times people come into close contact with each other. It usually involves keeping a certain distance from others and avoiding gathering together in large groups.
Neil Morris Ferguson is a British epidemiologist and professor of mathematical biology, who specialises in the patterns of spread of infectious disease in humans and animals. He is the director of the Jameel Institute, and of the MRC Centre for Global Infectious Disease Analysis, and head of the Department of Infectious Disease Epidemiology in the School of Public Health and Vice-Dean for Academic Development in the Faculty of Medicine, all at Imperial College London.
"Catch It, Bin It, Kill It" is a slogan used in several public health campaigns of the British government to promote good respiratory and hand hygiene by recommending carrying tissues, using them to catch a cough or sneeze, disposing of them immediately in a waste bin and then killing any remaining viruses by washing hands or using hand sanitiser. In 2007, following evidence that good respiratory and hand hygiene might reduce the spread of flu, the phrase appeared in a government campaign that publicised the directive "Catch it, Bin it, Kill it" throughout the NHS, on buses and trains and in libraries, shopping centres and police stations.
Syra Madad is an American pathogen preparedness expert and infectious disease epidemiologist. Madad is the Senior Director of the System-wide Special Pathogens Program at NYC Health + Hospitals where she is part of the executive leadership team which oversees New York City's response to the Coronavirus disease 2019 pandemic in the city's 11 public hospitals. She was featured in the Netflix documentary series Pandemic: How to Prevent an Outbreak and the Discovery Channel documentary The Vaccine: Conquering COVID.
The COVID-19 pandemic in Texas is a part of the ongoing viral pandemic of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), a novel infectious disease caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus 2 (SARS-CoV-2). The state of Texas confirmed its first case on February 13, 2020, among U.S. nationals evacuated from China to Joint Base San Antonio–Lackland beginning in early February; however, retrospective analyses have suggested a much earlier origin than previously thought. The first documented case of COVID-19 in Texas outside of evacuees at Lackland was confirmed on March 4 in Fort Bend County, and many of the state's largest cities recorded their first cases throughout March. The state recorded its first death associated with the disease on March 17 in Matagorda County.
Nils Anders Tegnell is a Swedish civil servant and physician specialising in infectious disease. From 2013 until his resignation in March 2022 he was Sweden's state epidemiologist.
Lauren Marie Gardner is an American engineer who is an associate professor and co-director of the Center for Systems Science and Engineering at Johns Hopkins University. She created the Johns Hopkins University dashboard that is used to share information about the COVID-19 pandemic.
Hugo López-Gatell Ramírez is a Mexican epidemiologist, author, and public health official who has served as head of the Undersecretariat of Prevention and Health Promotion at the Mexican Secretariat of Health since 2018. Since January 2020, he has also been the spokesman and one of the lead members of the federal governments response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Mexico.
Caitlin M. Rivers is an American epidemiologist who as Senior Scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and assistant professor at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, specializing on improving epidemic preparedness. Rivers is currently working on the American response to the COVID-19 pandemic with a focus on the incorporation of infectious disease modeling and forecasting into public health decision making.
Planning and preparing for pandemics has happened in countries and international organizations. The World Health Organization writes recommendations and guidelines, though there is no sustained mechanism to review countries' preparedness for epidemics and their rapid response abilities. National action depends on national governments. In 2005–2006, before the 2009 swine flu pandemic and during the decade following it, the governments in the United States, France, UK, and others managed strategic health equipment stocks, but they often reduced stocks after the 2009 pandemic in order to reduce costs.
Sotiris Tsiodras is a Greek internal medicine physician, specializing in infectiology, in charge of Greece's management of the coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 crisis.
Helen Branswell is a Canadian infectious diseases and global health reporter at Stat News. Branswell spent fifteen years as a medical reporter at The Canadian Press, where she led coverage of the Ebola, Zika, SARS and swine flu pandemics. She joined Stat News at its founding 2015, leading the website's coverage of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic.
Marc Lipsitch is an American epidemiologist and Professor in the Department of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health, where he is the Director of the Center for Communicable Disease Dynamics. He has worked on modeling the transmission of Coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19).
Caroline O'Flaherty Buckee is an epidemiologist. She is a Professor of Epidemiology at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. Buckee is known for her work in digital epidemiology, where mathematical models track mobile and satellite data to understand the transmission of infectious diseases through populations in an effort to understand the spatial dynamics of disease transmission. Her work examines the implications of conducting surveillance and implementing control programs as a way to understand and predict what will happen when dealing with outbreaks of infectious diseases like malaria and COVID-19.
Sara Yemimah Del Valle is a senior scientist and mathematical epidemiologist at Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL). At the LANL, Del Valle leads the Fusion Team, where she combines internet data with satellite imagery to forecast disease outbreaks. During the COVID-19 pandemic Del Valle created a computational model that could predict the spread of COVID-19 around the United States.
Austin, Texas, reportedly confirmed its first cases on March 13, 2020, with the related onset of symptoms occurring as early as March 2, 2020. However, the disease may have reached the Austin area earlier. In an unconfirmed case, a 67 year old man in Bastrop, TX, traveled to Clovis, NM on December 21. He was hospitalized in Clovis on December 23, 2019, then transported via ambulance to Lubbock where he was placed on a ventilator. He declined rapidly and died on January 2, 2020. Though there was no testing available at the time, he exhibited classic symptoms of COVID-19. The first fatality associated with the disease was reported on March 27, 2020. As of January 21, 2021, the City of Austin has reported over 50,000 cases of COVID-19, with 573 deaths associated with the disease.
Dr. Sara Lea Sawyer is a professor at the University of Colorado Boulder. She has received national and international prizes in virology. In 2011 she was as awarded the Presidential Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers (PECASE) by President Barack Obama at the White House. She serves as a Senior Editor at the journal eLIFE, and as a government consultant on the topic of pandemic preparedness. In 2020, she co-founded Darwin Biosciences, an infectious disease diagnostics company located in Boulder, Colorado. In 2022, she was awarded the National Institutes of Health Director’s “Pioneer” award. Her research focuses on animal viruses that infect humans, including HIV-1, and the evolution of the immune system.
References
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- 1 2 3 4 "Lauren Ancel Meyers". University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved 25 July 2020.
- 1 2 "Lauren Ancel Meyers". University of Texas at Austin. Retrieved 25 July 2020.
- 1 2 Heid, Jason (12 June 2020). "How a Texas Expert on Swine Flu Had to Change Her Game". Texas Monthly. Retrieved 25 July 2020.
- ↑ Cone, Tonyia (27 May 2020). "COVID-19 in Context: Epidemiologist and Community Member Dr. Lauren Ancel Meyers Predicts and Guides Coronavirus Decision Making". The Jewish Outlook. Retrieved 25 July 2020.
- ↑ Korte, Lara (24 April 2020). "Coronavirus in Texas: UT's top epidemiologist has been preparing for this fight for decades". The Statesman. Retrieved 25 July 2020.
- ↑ "For Each Day's Delay in Social Distancing, a COVID-19 Outbreak Lasts Days Longer". University of Texas News. 1 June 2020. Retrieved 25 July 2020.
- ↑ Thornton, Ryan (30 June 2020). "Without rapid behavior change, city heads for stage 5 shutdown". Austin Monitor. Retrieved 25 July 2020.
- 1 2 "Coronavirus Spreads Quickly and Sometimes Before People Have Symptoms, Study Finds". University of Texas News. 16 March 2020. Retrieved 25 July 2020.
- ↑ Freer, Emma (10 June 2020). "COVID-19 'can and does spread silently' says UT's Lauren Ancel Meyers as Austin sees daily cases spike again". Austonia. Retrieved 25 July 2020.
- ↑ Meyers, Lauren (20 March 2020). "The secret life of coronavirus: Why we need such drastic social distancing measures". Economics Intelligence Unit. Retrieved 25 July 2020.
