Roxanna Miranda/The Rider Photos
Omar E. Zapata | THE RIDER
A UTRGV official says the university’s COVID-19 testing has been moved to clinics on campuses due to a decline in demand.
Doug Arney, vice president for Administrative Support Services and chair of the Infectious Disease Committee, told The Rider that the COVID-19 testing was moved to UTRGV’s health clinics on April 12 strictly from a demand standpoint.
“We can handle [COVID-19 testing] on a day-to-day basis, so we just … transferred the work that was being done on the drive-up testing sites to the employee and student health sites,” Arney said.
He added that the decline in the demand of COVID-19 testing was at a point that they decided to move the operations into the clinics because there was a lot of effort by people to keep the testing sites running.
“We had campus police out there and we had all the clinicians out there and it was just not worth it anymore,” Arney said. “Because there’s a lot of time and energy and money spent on employees that were just waiting around for someone to come in. … The demand wasn’t there. So, we made this change and, you know, if the demand increases, we can always switch back.”
The Health Services Clinics are located at 613 N. Sugar Road on the Edinburg campus, Cortez Hall 237 on the Brownsville campus and at 2106 Treasure Hills Blvd. on the Harlingen campus.
“What happens is someone who thinks they may have COVID, right, they call our case management team and then they go through the process, the questioning. … Then we decide that they need to get tested,”Arney said. “The case management team will provide guidance to the student, faculty or staff, you know, where to go get tested, and then we will notify that site that they’re coming.”
Testing for COVID-19 can be scheduled during normal clinical operation hours, which are from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday.
Non-campus members who want to get tested at a UTRGV site may call 883-887-4863 to schedule an appointment.
Arney said since the COVID-19 testing sites were set up, Edinburg accounted for 19,643 tests, Harlingen conducted 6,114 and Brownsville had 3,372.
He said in the last 11 weeks, there were no faculty confirmed cases of COVID-19 and no staff cases for the last 10 weeks.
Arney confirmed three undergraduate student cases between April 3 and 8 and one between April 9 and 15, totaling 14 student cases in 10 weeks.
“The more vaccine shots that we get, that we provide, you know, these numbers just keep going down,” he said. “That’s why the testing is going down as well, right. There’re just not as many cases.”
