UTA In The News — Friday, July 24, 2020
COVID-19 testing
To help achieve its goal of facilitating the Maverick community’s safe return to campus this fall, The University of Texas at Arlington is leveraging the expertise and resources of its North Texas Genome Center to bolster UTA’s on-campus COVID-19 testing capabilities, Mirage News reported.
Pandemic urbanism explained
Adrian Parr, dean of the UT Arlington College of Architecture, Planning and Public Affairs, wrote a guest paper about pandemic urbanism for boundary 2, an international journal of literature and culture published by Duke University Press.
Property could help UTA visitors
The center of downtown Arlington is home to the majority of short-term rental permits approved in the first few months of 2020, in a move some say will create more housing options downtown, the Fort Worth Star-Telegram reported. Roman Pedan, Kasa Living’s CEO and founder, said the company bought downtown Arlington’s 101 Center property because the units could be marketed for families and friends of the UT Arlington students staying at the complex.
Crises shows failure
American exceptionalism was this country’s pre-existing condition prior to the pandemic and George Floyd-related protests, a Washington Post column said. Hannah Lebovits, an incoming UT Arlington assistant professor of public administration who specializes in social sustainability and how governments creates or degrades it, said she believes this years’s crises as a total failure of government and institutions. “We’re being gaslit by this country that everything will be fine if we just get back to work,” Lebovits says. “We’re focused on economic stability, business revitalization, what the economy is going to look like after COVID — not what we’re going to look like after COVID.”
Cities need help
Lawmakers in Congress are debating another coronavirus aid package, and Arlington Mayor Jeff Williams hopes that cities like his won’t be left out again, KERA News reported. He said there are still questions about whether UT Arlington’s tens of thousands of students will be bringing their spending power back to campus this fall.
Study shows drop in live expectancy
A new University of Toronto study that followed 12,424 adult Canadians from the mid-1990s until 2011 found that those who were in suboptimal mental health at the beginning of the study died, on average, 4.7 months earlier than their peers who were in excellent mental health, Medical Xpress, Health News Digest and other media outlets reported. Philip Baiden, UT Arlington assistant professor of Social Work, said, was a co-author of the study. “As expected, modifiable risk factors, including smoking, heavy drinking and infrequent physical activity, were associated with a higher probability of all-cause mortality,” Baiden said. “Cancer, heart disease, diabetes, chronic obstructive pulmonary disease and high blood pressure were associated with a higher probability of death over the follow-up period.”