Coronavirus Response

Carl Bergstrom, professor of biology at the UW, talks about the ways that social media is designed to surround people with their personal version of what’s true, regarding the COVID-19 pandemic and other topics.

As many as 60% of COVID-19 cases in the U.S. have gone unreported, and the coronavirus has infected nearly 1 in 5 Americans, according to a new model out of the University of Washington. The UW's Nicholas Irons, a doctoral student in statistics, and Adrian Raftery, professor of statistics and of sociology, are quoted.

The number of COVID-19 cases across the U.S. may have been undercounted by as much as 60%, researchers at the UW have found. Adrian Raftery, professor of statistics and of sociology at the UW, is quoted.

By early March 2021, roughly 65 million people in the U.S. — or one out of every five people — had been infected by the coronavirus that causes COVID-19, a new analysis shows. The findings, described in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, suggest that roughly 60% of coronavirus infections had gone uncounted at that point — adding to a growing body of evidence that the pandemic’s true toll is far greater than official tallies show. Nicholas Irons, a doctoral student in statistics at the UW, is quoted.

Facebook’s back-and-forth with the Biden administration got ugly over the weekend. The social network scrambled to respond to the president’s striking accusation that the company is “killing people” for allowing the spread of misinformation about coronavirus vaccines. Carl Bergstrom, professor of biology at the UW, is quoted.

"I have worked in and on Myanmar for more than 30 years. Everyone I know there is either infected or caring for an infected person. No hospitals accept patients anymore, not even the priciest private ones. Some of the COVID-infected die on the steps in front of hospitals that reject them. They undoubtedly go untested, with death certificates likely reading 'pneumonia' as cause of death," writes Mary Callahan, associate professor of international studies at the UW.

Margaret O'Mara, professor of history at the UW, talks about the relationship between Silicon Valley and Washington lawmakers and the role of social media platforms in the spread of COVID-19 misinformation and disinformation.

Kevin Kuehn, a UW doctoral student in clinical psychology, discusses the results of his new study on student mental health.

The pandemic promised nothing short of the End of Cities, a prophecy foretold by pundits, tweets and headlines, at times with unveiled schadenfreude. Margaret O’Mara, professor of history at the UW, is quoted.

The third and — hopefully — final wave of COVID-19 infections sweeping through the country could be a prolonged affair that stretches into the autumn. And the momentum of the virus means that we end up “overshooting” the herd immunity threshold, experts have said. Carl Bergstrom, professor of biology at the UW, is quoted.

Most Americans who turned to the internet for financial help during the pandemic failed to raise much. Of the more than 175,000 GoFundMe campaigns that were started in the first half of 2020 and that cited COVID-19, 43% received no donations at all and 90% did not reach their stated goal. Nearly a quarter of all funds raised through the platform went to the top 1% of campaigns. Mark Igra, a graduate student in sociology at the UW, is quoted.

Are we ready to break up with our masks? Or is it hard to let go? Washington is open again (except for indoor events of 10,000-plus people) and mask restrictions have been relaxed, but with coronavirus variants still out there, people are confronting a new set of social and emotional challenges. Jane Simoni, professor of psychology at the UW, is quoted.

New insights and breakthroughs in artificial intelligence are coaxing, or forcing, proteins to give up their secrets. Scientists are now forging biochemical tools that could transform our world. The UW’s Lexi Walls, a postdoctoral researcher in biochemistry; David Baker, director of the UW Institute for Protein Design; and Longxing Cao, a postdoctoral researcher in biochemistry, are quoted. The UW’s Neil King, assistant professor of biochemistry, and Brooke Fiala, a researcher in the Institute for Protein Design, are mentioned.

During the first several months of the pandemic — when communities locked down, jobs were lost, PPE was scarce and store shelves were cleared — thousands of people turned to online crowdfunding to meet their needs. But a new University of Washington analysis of requests and donations to the popular crowdfunding site GoFundMe, along with Census data, shows stark inequities in where the money went and how much was donated.