Keeping it close: The role of a Campus COVID Support Team (CCST) in sustaining a safe and healthy university campus during COVID-19

  1. Karen A McDonnell
  2. Amita Vyas
  3. Amanda Castel
  4. Nitasha Nagaraj
  5. Megan Landry

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Abstract

It has been over 24 months since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic forced university campuses to shut down and then reopen under new safety guidelines. Now as we move into the subsequent years of the pandemic, we can look back and evaluate what has worked, improvements to be made, and plans for providing a sustained response for a campus community. In this article we detail one campus response to the COVID-19 pandemic and directions being taken to ensure a sustained campus COVID support team (CCST) is in hand to ensure the health and safety of the university community. The CCST was created to serve as a one-stop-shop to help the university community navigate COVID-19 policies and procedures. The responsibilities of the CCST include conducting case investigations for any positive COVID-19 tests within the university community, contact tracing for authorized university affiliates, epidemiological surveillance and mitigation efforts, and communication through real-time analysis and dashboards. Continuous monitoring procedures demonstrated the CCST conducted all case investigations within the post-testing 24-hour window, thus keeping the university test-positivity rate below 3%. Quality improvement surveys demonstrated a high level of satisfaction with the CCST efforts and provided areas for improvement and sustainability. Having a public health faculty led CCST enabled the university to act swiftly when COVID-19 positive cases were emerging and deter widespread campus COVID-19 outbreaks. The CCST timeliness and connectivity to the campus has demonstrated benefits to the health and safety of the campus.

Highlights

  • Universities are their own communities and having on campus COVID support teams can mitigate potential COVID-19 outbreaks.

  • Having a public health driven Campus COVID Support Team that can conduct case investigations within 24 hours of a positive test result has demonstrated benefits to taking responsive measures.

  • Continuous quality improvement efforts including surveys of the Campus COVID Support Team should be implemented for any COVID service efforts.

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      SciScore for 10.1101/2022.05.01.22274540: (What is this?)

      Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

      Table 1: Rigor

      Ethicsnot detected.
      Sex as a biological variablenot detected.
      Randomizationnot detected.
      Blindingnot detected.
      Power Analysisnot detected.

      Table 2: Resources

      No key resources detected.

      Results from OddPub: We did not detect open data. We also did not detect open code. Researchers are encouraged to share open data when possible (see Nature blog).

      Results from LimitationRecognizer: An explicit section about the limitations of the techniques employed in this study was not found. We encourage authors to address study limitations.

      Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

      Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

      Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

      Results from rtransparent:
      • Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
      • No protocol registration statement was detected.

      Results from scite Reference Check: We found no unreliable references.

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    2. Version published to 10.1101/2022.05.01.22274540v1 on medRxiv