Tag: COVID-19

When the Madison Metropolitan School District (MMSD) transitioned to virtual learning during the COVID-19 pandemic, their diverse student population, including students with health conditions associated with poor COVID-19 outcomes, lost access to school health services that provide assessments, education, referrals and care coordination. To address this barrier, MMSD implemented a program titled “Leveraging Personal Supports for Immediate COVID-19 Response for 4K-12 Students,” also known as the LPS program. The LPS program aimed to provide immediate support and resources to 2,000 MMSD students with medical conditions from June 2020 to May 2021. Results showed that 356 students and their families received services, with 92 percent requiring one to two support sessions. In addition to addressing physical health needs, the program pivoted to focus on addressing social determinants of health needs such as community resource referrals, food insecurity and housing assistance. The LPS program also provided health and cleaning supplies which helped foster positive relationships between families and staff. Because of these efforts, the LPS program received high satisfaction ratings from both families and staff.

As schools reopened and extracurricular activities resumed in the fall of 2021, it was anticipated that the coming respiratory season would be characterized by numerous respiratory infections, some caused by SARS-CoV-2 and others caused by more typical respiratory viruses including rhinovirus, respiratory syncytial virus, and influenza. Schools needed to develop a strategy to quickly distinguish between cases of COVID-19 caused by SARS-CoV-2 and cases of more typical respiratory viruses. The Department of Health Services in Wisconsin developed testing options for K-12 schools which included the use of BinaxNOW Antigen Self-Tests for individuals with symptoms followed by confirmation through PCR for those who were antigen negative. The goal of this project was to identify ways to improve upon the statewide testing by comparing the results of repeated at-home antigen tests to at-school PCR tests and evaluating whether oral “lollipop” swabs were as effective as nasal swabs for identifying children with COVID-19. The results of this project suggest that the at-home BinaxNOW test was at least as sensitive as the nasal PCR test. Additionally, lollipop samples performed better than the nasal swabs and were preferred by 92 percent of students.

This project, led by Sixteenth Street Community Health Centers (SSCHC), United Community Center (UCC) and the Southside Organizing Committee (SOC), launched a traditional media public health campaign with accurate, up-to-date, culturally-appropriate and literacy-appropriate COVID-19 educational materials and resources for Milwaukee’s Spanish-speaking community. Overall, this project was successful in developing, administering and evaluating a public health communication strategy for slowing the spread of COVID-19 in this community.

COVID-19 presents with non-specific symptoms that are very similar to other viral illnesses, making it difficult to clinically diagnose. Early in the pandemic, polymerase chain reaction (RT-PCR) testing and x-ray computed tomography (CT) were the primary methods of diagnosis, but they lacked effectiveness. The goal of this project was to develop and deploy an artificial intelligence (AI) solution to assist physicians in achieving rapid and efficient diagnosis of COVID-19 using chest x-ray radiography (CXR). Researchers were successful in curating a large COVID CXR dataset and ultimately developed an artificial intelligence (AI) solution that could differentiate between COVID-19 pneumonia and non-COVID-19 pneumonia with high sensitivity and specificity. In the future, this dataset will be used to address key challenges in AI including generalizability, interpretability, and algorithmic bias.

Community health workers in Barron County worked to mitigate the impact of COVID-19 on Somali and Hispanic residents in the county through innovative outreach methods and community-focused education efforts. Due to a lack of accurate, culturally-appropriate COVID-19 information in Somali and Spanish, community health workers sought to inform residents about health and safety measures to slow the community spread of COVID-19, as well as promote the importance of the vaccine. Community health workers in Barron County successfully reduced community spread of COVID-19 and promoted the vaccine with outreach and education to non-English speaking residents who face disparities in local care and kept minority populations as informed and updated during the pandemic as the English-speaking population. The grant team helped keep outbreaks in these communities at the same level or lower than the majority population and identified households that fell below or near the federal poverty level to ensure that they had all the necessary essentials to remain in quarantine provided and reduce spread in the communities. The grant team also contributed to the equal or higher vaccination rates in the county’s Hispanic population.

The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic created conditions that increased well-established risk factors for child maltreatment while also limiting access to protective social supports. The Marshfield Child Advocacy Center (MCAC) partnered with the Wood County Department of Human Services (WCDHS), Wood County Resilience Coalition, and several Wood County school districts to support families through the pandemic as a means to reduce risk for child maltreatment.

Wisconsin is home to the third largest population of Hmong in the U.S., and since the 1990s, it has also been the site of resettlement of tens of thousands of newer refugees from Burma, Laos, Thailand, Cambodia, Tibet and Nepal. These communities experienced significant disparities that were exacerbated during the COVID-19 crisis. Additionally, seniors and parents in these communities were often home-bound, suffer from isolation from their peers, and jobless, while many did not have transportation for medical appointments or grocery shopping. The Hmong Institute created a collaborative of five local Hmong agencies in Wisconsin to address the immediate needs of Southeast Asian, Burmese, Nepalese, and Tibetan elders and parents who lack access to mainstream services due to language and transportation barriers. The grant team developed a community-based infrastructure to facilitate access to food and other resources for those experiencing disparities in access and need as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, created and disseminated culturally relevant, multilingual COVID-19 prevention messages and educational resources to ensure timely access to accurate and up-to-date information, and developed and implemented a statewide multilingual COVID-19 Community Hotline to provide information about basic health resources.

This project sought to address problems in COVID-19 preparedness to reduce morbidity and mortality and to achieve the highest level of health for all people of Wisconsin. To do this, the research team created a biorepository to support research at the UW and beyond. They also evaluated the persistence of anti-SARS-CoV-2 antibodies. The resulting biorepository contains extensive clinical data, serum, plasma, and immune cells collected over the course of a year from 120 subjects who recovered from COVID-19. In addition to supporting the research of multiple scientists at UW and nationally, the biorepository allowed the research team to demonstrate the presence of antibodies against the SARS-CoV-2 membrane protein in the human body for at least one year, and showed that antibodies that bind to the receptor binding domain (RBD) of the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein are a long-lasting, sensitive, and specific marker of both past infection and vaccination. Thus, the researchers determined that a combination of these antibodies can accurately differentiate between distant COVID-19 infection, vaccination, and naïve states to advance public health, individual healthcare, and research goals.

As Wisconsin experienced multiple waves of COVID-19 infections, hospitals and health care facilities faced staffing challenges. Baccalaureate, degree-completion, and graduate nursing students at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and other UW institutions were able to fill critical vacancies across the state at this time of heightened need through the UW Student Health Care Worker Tuition Program (UW-SHCWTP). The initiative aimed to provide a $500 tuition credit for as many as 2,000 nursing and health sciences students within the UW System to help fill local health care staffing needs over the spring 2022 semester. The initiative was led by the UW–Madison School of Nursing and supported with a $500,000 grant from the Wisconsin Partnership Program to expand an initial effort supported by the Wisconsin Department of Health Services. The project was successful as a total of 1,689 UW System students received tuition support from this program, with over one-third being UW–Madison students and two-thirds representing 12 schools within the UW System including six nursing schools. Additionally, work was completed across 79 unique zip code areas and included rural, urban, and suburban locations in Wisconsin.

Healthcare workers caring for COVID-19 patients are at high risk of contracting and spreading the virus. Early in the pandemic, there was an urgent need for effective, safe, and easily implementable strategies to reduce the spread of COVID-19. Researchers aimed to evaluate the feasibility of and effects of decontamination interventions including nasal solution and an oral mouthwash on virologic shedding, transmission, and infection outcomes in healthcare workers involved in COVID-19 patient care. Researchers were successful in completing this project. Participants reported high acceptability of the interventions and 73 percent of respondents were willing to use the interventions moving forward.