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Friday, August 28, 2020
As student newspapers across the country defend themselves from the directors and media accounts that see famous academics as guilty of COVID-19 academic groups and epidemics, the University of New Mexico Health and Student Council (SHAC) is their diagnosis. ability to test.
UNM opened a cell verification site at UNM Lot C, on the corner of Las Lomas Road and Redondo Drive, earlier this week. With the prospect of generating nearby epidemics and groups such as those seen at universities across the country, UNM is implementing plans to stop a possible tide of cases that may result from the continuation of face-to-face courses.
According to UNM’s Bring Back the Pack: Targeted Testing website, “people chosen for testing will be known in a giant component through the detection of symptoms or self-report or the Interventionist Rapid Response Task Group (IRRTF) process”.
An email sent on behalf of Rector James Holloway to all primary and secondary teachers also pleaded with teachers asking symptomatic students to contact SHAC and self-report the “self-assessment system.”
On Monday, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) released new test rules that state that if a user has symptoms of COVID-19, even if they have been recently exposed, they do want to get tested.
The New York Times recently reported that “experts have questioned the review, emphasizing the importance of identifying infections in the brief window without delay before the onset of symptoms, when many other people are the maximum contagious.”
According to Dr. James Wilterding, CO-Executive Director of SHAC, UNM will review asymptomatic academics who have been exposed recently despite revised CDC guidelines.
“We’re going to check to rationally identify (who tests) while preserving capacity in the state,” Wilterding said in a phone interview with the Daily Wolf.
Wilterding explained that New Mexico is unique in that the state must paint with Tri-Core labs for faster testing. Tri-Core is a local laboratory that is partly owned by UNMH and Presthroughterian, and Wilterding said this means that the lab should focus on the wishes of the state rather than the national laboratories that are most widely used throughout the country.
“In many states of the country, they use national labs that are giant and cannot be environmentally sensitive,” Wilterding said.
However, even with a lab, “our state’s capacity is (still) about 8,000 tests per day, and we come across the same number of days a week,” Wilterding said.
This limitation, according to Wilterding, is partly due to the fact that New Mexico receives fewer control reagents from domestic sources.
“There is shortages across the country and they tend to be sent to hot spots,” Wilterding said.
A reagent is a compound or aggregate that is used to detect the presence or absence of a substance, according to the Compendium of Chemical Terminology of the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry.
Wilterding said the state will have to continue prioritizing testing for other high-risk people, such as other people in retirement homes, as it predicts that the reagents needed to test will remain in a short source until the end of the year.
“We expect persistent disruptions with restrictive materials until December,” Wilterding said.
Despite the shortage of reagents, New Mexico still has one of the country’s capita-consistent verification rates. And UNM still plans to review symptom academics and asymptomatic academics who have had known exposure.
Students with symptoms will want to be shown their symptoms in a telephone medical evaluation, and academics who can provide known evidence of exposure may also be referred through a SHAC medical provider for the test.
In addition, if UNM knows that a user on campus has tested positive, shaC’s immediate test and reaction team “will observe where that user has been and then get advantages from a jump in the contact search by having everyone likely to be exposed to the test, Wilterding said.
Contact trackers are trained Americans who identify those who have been in contact with a user who has tested positive for COVID-19.
“I think the most productive way to think about it is that the first pass (directed through IRRTF) provides a narrower network for possible touches that can test positive,” Wilterding said. “It’s not as nuanced as the touch plotters will, but it will be faster than they can get there.”
Contact trackers will “investigate the index case, the user who test positives, and then identify, based on the criteria, all those deemed exposed,” Wilterding said. “And then the touch trackers start searching to locate those people, and they also notice other possible cases. So they launch a very wide net and it takes longer.”
UNM is in the process of integrating touch plotters, and Wilterding expects them to start painting in about two weeks. Tracers will report to Occupational and Environmental Health Services (EOHS), which are located on the northern campus, and Dr. Denece Kesler, Director of EOHS, will act as supervisor.
There are discrepancies between academics and other universities in how others take the exams.
UNM Athletics proactively administers confirmation tests for all of its athletes, coaches, and workers at least once a month, and the University of California, Los Angeles evaluates each and every student living in college housing and each and every student participating in face-to-face courses. .
Wilterding, however, said that evaluating those academics when they moved or early in the semester is not enough.
“If you’re going to use the controls as a strategy to avoid transmission, you’ll have to control everyone on campus at least once a week, or even twice a week,” Wilterding said. “We don’t have the resources or the verification capacity in New Mexico (to do that).”
On the plus side, and unlike other schools across the country, UNM has made a concerted effort to ensure that no one is charged for the COVID-19 test.
“Students who are evaluated will get any fees for this,” Wilterding said. “We will review the insurance rate when we can, but our agreement with Tri-Core Laboratories is that when they cannot qualify for insurance, they will send (the bill) to the collection or rate the patient. qualify for UNM.”
THE UNM Health Protocol Committee and the committee worked for months to expand this strategy, according to Wilterding.
Wilterding said he believes the strategy is “achievable and practical for our scenario here and provides an appropriate threat point for everyone.”
“The committee, while we have the evidence in place here, is very sensitive to the fact that the tests will have to be fair to all academics and the population on this campus, and we are committed to making paintings that way,” Wilterding said. .
Lissa Knudsen is the editor-in-chief of the Daily Wolf. It can be reached on [email protected] or on Twitter at lissaknudsen
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