University of Arizona in the News

A pandemic that has killed 3.5 million people globally is beginning to be publicly memorialized. "Memories change over time," said Susan Crane, a historian at the University of Arizona. "There may be other stories we want to tell ... that involve losses but also other events that haven’t happened yet."

Many saguaro cacti are budding on their sides – a phenomenon never seen before. It is a development that has researchers curious – and a little worried. Dr. Benjamin T. Wilder, a desert ecologist and Director of the University of Arizona's Desert Laboratory on Tumamoc Hill, said that he suspects the unusual growths may have been caused by normally reproductively active areoles (the bumps on cacti that produce clusters of spines) being damaged by last summer's drought – particularly since the summer was extremely hot and dry.

17th U.S. Surgeon General Dr. Richard Carmona, a Distinguished Professor in the Mel and Enid Zuckerman College of Public Health, writes that he is confident that Arizona will recover from COVID-19 faster than many other states. "The (University of Arizona's) leadership and students demonstrated effective mitigation and response efforts to limit the spread of COVID-19 on campus, allowing students to continue to participate in their world-class learning environment and even have in-person graduation ceremonies earlier this month," Carmona writes.

Experts say the protection that vaccines offer is more like a coat of flame retardant than an impenetrable firewall. SARS-CoV-2 can, very rarely, still set up shop in people who are more than two weeks out from their last COVID-19 shot. Chasing constant reassurance about infections after vaccination could send the wrong message, according to Saskia Popescu, an infection-prevention expert at the University of Arizona. "If we're telling people they can be unmasked and we’re still (frequently) testing them, what's the signal we're sending?"