enterprise THE DAVIS
FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 11, 2020
Officials wary as Aggies come back Isael Corona, a math major at UC Berkeley, looks out the window from his student apartment near campus where he lives with a roommate on Sept. 3. Corona says he misses being with his friends but wanted to be back on campus.
BY ANNE TERNUS-BELLAMY Enterprise staff writer
and both dorm residents and nearby off-campus students are now under a stay-at-home order. It’s an indication of the disparities in coronavirus testing policies that exist among California colleges and universities — differences driven at least in part by campuses’ varying financial resources and access to testing equipment. The UC
Half of all UC Davis undergraduates and 70 percent of graduate students are expected to be living in Davis and surrounding communities during the fall quarter, a recent survey by the campus revealed. Some 11,000 students were already living here when the survey was conducted earlier this month and another 14,000 or so said they planned to move here over the next couple of weeks. Many off-campus apartment leases began Sept. 1 and on campus housing will fill over the next two weeks, with students moving into residence halls beginning Sept. 21. Meanwhile, city and county officials say they are already receiving calls and emails from residents reporting unsafe behavior by students, including gatherings and a lack of face coverings. The return of students for the fall quarter, even though nearly all classes will be online, has been on the minds of many the last couple of months. COVID-19 outbreaks on college campuses across the country have added to the concerns with their jarring videos of masses of unmasked students gathering at parties. Schools
SEE TESTING, PAGE A5
SEE WARY, PAGE A4
ANNE WERNIKOFF/ CALMATTERS PHOTO
Virus testing varies by campus BY MIKHAIL ZINSHTEY, FELICIA MELLO AND KIMBERLY MORALES CalMatters For several hours after coming back from the campus health center, Isael Corona’s nose was itchy and runny. He wasn’t sick, however. The UC Berkeley senior had just rubbed a cotton swab along the back of his nostrils as part of the university’s mandatory COVID-19 testing policy for
students residing on campus. “I think it’s pretty generous of them,” Corona said of Berkeley. Like Berkeley, other University of California campuses are enforcing across-the-board testing for students living on campus, either during move-in or throughout the term. But that’s not the case at California State University, the nation’s largest four-year public university system, where only two campuses, Cal Maritime and
UCD alum’s device helps patients breathe
Dr. Benjamin Wang is the founder and chief medical officer for startup NeVap, which is producing breathing tubes used by COVID-19 patients on ventilators.
BY OWEN YANCHER Enterprise staff writer It’s a problem that existed long before coronavirus gut-punched the health industry: hospital patients catching pneumonia. But it’s an issue that’s become particularly troublesome over the past eight months as more and more ventilators have been put to use treating virus patients. According to The Lancet, one of the world’s oldest and respected peer-reviewed medical
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Humboldt State, have tested all students living in dorms; only Maritime is testing students regularly throughout the term. Some CSU campuses are now seeing sizable COVID-19 outbreaks, including Chico State, which late last month canceled the few in-person classes they were holding and sent most students home, and San Diego State, where nearly 400 students have tested positive for the virus in the last two weeks
COURTESY PHOTO
journals, of those placed on breathing machines, over 30 percent of COVID-19 patients contract a bacterial pneumonia. And of those patients, more than 90 percent die as a result of the secondary infection. But a 2005 UC Davis alum’s novel respiratory device looks to be helping curb that rate of infection. And already, several state medical centers including
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UC Davis, UC San Francisco and USC, have begun utilizing his product while treating patients on artificial ventilation. Now the founder and chief medical officer for startup NeVap, Dr. Benjamin Wang hung up his white lab coat following several years of work as a physician. After graduating from Davis with a
SEE BREATHE, PAGE A5
WEATHER HAZE
Sat Saturday: Hazy an and warm. Hi High 91. Low 58.
Students carry on professor’s legacy BY KRISTIN BURNS Special to The Enterprise Four years after plant sciences professor Kentaro Inoue was struck and killed while riding his bike, the last three graduate students from his lab are ensuring his scientific legacy lives on through their published research, careers in industry and academia, and mentoring of future science students. Philip Day, Laura Klasek and Lucas McKinnon successfully completed their doctoral degrees in the past year, having continued their studies with the support of plant biology professor Steven Theg, one of Inoue’s colleagues, and the department of plant sciences.
UC DAVIS/COURTESY PHOTO
Kentaro Inoue, a member of the UC Davis faculty for 15 years, died while cycling through West Sacramento on Aug. 31, 2016. Inoue, a member of the faculty for 15 years, died while cycling through West Sacramento, en route to campus, Aug. 31, 2016. Day, Klasek and McKinnon “had to make a decision to stay in science, stay
with projects Kentaro gave them, not knowing how they would turn out, so they really persevered,” Theg said. “I thought it took a lot of fortitude.” Theg would become their mentor — fortunate, he said, to have inherited such talented students. The trio has flourished, he said, citing publication of their work in one of the leading journals in plant sciences, “The Plant Cell” — research that focuses on chloroplasts, which are responsible for photosynthesis in plants. Theg’s own work involves protein translocation across chloroplast membranes. “They should be very
SEE LEGACY, PAGE A5
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