Members of the UT Health RGV Student Health staff pose in their Cortez Hall office on the Brownsville campus. In a Feb. 8 email, the university announced both UT Health RGV Student Health clinics will continue to provide COVID-19 tests, vaccines and boosters to active UTRGV students. Shown (from left) are Liza Esquivel, medical assistant; Beverly Estrada, patient services representative; Steven Machner, physician assistant; and Mary Ferguson, licensed vocational nurse. Citlalli Torres/The Rider
In August 2020, UTRGV looked “in house” to protect the campus community from COVID-19 instead of relying on “outside entities.” Since then, the university has tested and vaccinated thousands of people, a university official says.
The UTRGV COVID Response Team was created to protect the campus community as students, faculty and staff began to return to campus by “managing positive cases, close contact exposures, and people expressing symptoms that might be caused by COVID-19,” according to the UTRGV website.
“In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, The UTRGV proactively teamed up with UT Health RGV in a multifaceted approach to protect the 32,600 students and 6,400 employees who work and study on the UTRGV campuses,” Doug Arney, senior vice president for Administration Support Services, wrote in an email last Tuesday to The Rider. “This coordinated approach included the establishment of the Infectious Disease Committee (IDC), which developed management strategies to address the pandemic, the medically staffed COVID Response Team (CRT), which managed over 15,000 UTRGV COVID-19 related cases, the Safety Dept., which managed PPE distribution and conducted fit testing for medical personnel, and UT Health RGV, which tested over 112,000 persons and vaccinated another 86,000 from both the UTRGV campuses and the general public.
“This comprehensive and seamless ‘in house’ approach eliminated the need to rely on outside entities for support, and proved to be extremely effective in the prevention, mitigation, and response to the COVID-19 pandemic on UTRGV campuses and among the general public in the RGV as a whole.”
Eliza Gomez, director of Emergency Management and Continuing Planning, said the team wants to support students, faculty and staff’s health and wellness and give them a sense of security and assurance that UTRGV cares.
Gomez said there are five members on the team: three case investigators, an emergency management coordinator and medical guidance provided by Dr. Scott J. Spear, an associate professor of pediatrics and medical director for Student and Employee Health at UTRGV.
A student, faculty or staff member can report their COVID-19 test result to the COVID Response Team and they will respond within one to two business days, she said.
“The person has to send their information to the COVID Response Team,” Gomez said. “We don’t own those results. Those results are the property and responsibility of each individual employee and student, so we have to wait for them to send the results to us. Sometimes, there’s a little bit of a delay. They’ll get their results and send it the next day. So, as soon as they send them to us, we process them and get them up and get them safely returned to campus.”
She said a typical day for her is checking the queue, responding to people sending in their results or their symptom tracker logs, sending emails and processing cases.
“So just about everybody gets a phone call,” Gomez said. “And we have a confidential discreet screening interview, where we obtain critical information like contact reason, where someone has been, when someone started feeling sick, were they on or off campus at the time that that occurred, how long were they there, you know, to create that situational awareness … to figure out what needs to happen going forward, based on the university’s protocols based on the CDC [Centers for Disease Control and Prevention] guidelines.”
There’s a lot of misconception about the COVID Response Team, she said. The team’s purpose is not to keep people away from campus and to frustrate them.
“We’re here to help,” Gomez said. “We care deeply. All of us have been professionally and personally touched and affected by COVID-19, so this is real to us. We understand the struggles. We’re here for you as a resource.”
Arney said one of the challenges the Infectious Disease Committee has seen are the continuous changes of the virus and the new variant, Omicron.
The changes are all based on science, he said. By following the CDC guidelines, the committee is able to change the protocols and provide the best guidance to the campus community.
“I think that the COVID Response Team was put in place to help … navigate our community. Keep them safe,” Arney said in a phone interview with The Rider last Tuesday. “I don’t know how we would have operated without that structure. So, I think the structure is a really, really good structure. It has worked out really well and there have been relatively little issues in the structure since day one.”
