Chris Richards/University of Arizona
COVID-19 case numbers have begun falling nationwide, and the same can be said at the University of Arizona, where last week s test positivity rate was 1.18% – down from 2% the previous week.
However, the state of Arizona still has the highest infection rate in the nation, and improving numbers are not a sign that people should let up on public health precautions such as mask wearing and physical distancing, UArizona President
Robert C. Robbins said Monday during his weekly virtual briefing on the university s COVID-19 status.
The national seven-day rolling average of COVID-19 infections, as reported by The Washington Post, is 46 per 100,000 people. In Arizona, it s 74 per 100,000 people – down from 100 the previous week. In Pima County, it s 66 in 100,000, and the county s Rt number – which refers to the number of people typically infected by a single person with the virus – is 0.73.
They plan to use the method in conjunction with a saline swish-gargle test developed by
The team s latest research using water samples – done in collaboration with
Kelly A. Reynolds, chair of the Department of Community, Environment and Policy in the UArizona Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health – is published today in Nature Protocols. We ve outlined it so that other scientists can basically repeat what we did and create a norovirus-detecting device, said
Lane Breshears, a biomedical engineering doctoral student in Yoon s lab. Our goal is that if you want to adapt it for something else, like we ve adapted it for COVID-19, that you have all the ingredients you need to basically make your own device.
Chris Richards/University of Arizona
The University of Arizona will remain in stage one of its reentry plan this week and next week, with only essential courses meeting in person and the rest held online. As we all know, the surge of COVID-19 infections has continued, and Arizona remains a hot spot – the hottest spot in the nation, UArizona President
Robert C. Robbins said in his weekly virtual briefing on the university s status.
He pointed to data reported by The Washington Post on Sunday showing that Arizona has the highest infection rate in the country, with a rolling seven-day average of 100 daily new reported cases of COVID-19 per 100,000 residents.
The study was born out of a request from Pima County officials to
Courtney Crosson, an assistant professor of architecture in the UArizona College of Architecture, Planning and Landscape Architecture, to investigate whether vacant, publicly owned land in Tucson could be turned into small farms that could efficiently produce enough food with sustainably collected water.
Crosson and her co-authors – UArizona geography graduate student
Yinan Zhang, lead author Daoqin Tong from Arizona State University and Qing Zhong, also from ASU – reference a city of Tucson study from 2012 that found Tucson to be the sixth poorest metropolitan area in the U.S., with food insecurity as a leading issue.
By Howard Fischer
Capitol Media Services
A program at the University of Arizona to test 250,000 people to see if theyâre immune to COVID-19 hasnât gotten the public demand that was expected.
In April, UA President Robert Robbins announced the school would be offering the blood tests, first to students and the staff, and later to front-line medical personnel and first responders.
Robbins, who is a medical doctor, said someone who shows a positive test for antibodies likely is immune from getting the virus again. And that, he said, could allow people to decide if they feel safe when doing their jobs.