COURTESY UMMC
‘We Have Not Met Our Peak’
Dr. LouAnn Woodward on UMMC’s Battle Against COVID-19 // by Nick Judin
May 13 - 26, 2020 • jfp.ms
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wice now, LouAnn Woodward, vice chancellor for health affairs and dean of the School of Medicine at the University of Mississippi Medical Center, has made headlines for her strong public stance on Mississippi’s response to COVID19. Gov. Tate Reeves’ delayed statewide shelter-at-home order came on the heels of her impassioned letter to state leadership: “In my opinion, (a shelter-in-place order) is the only additional thing we can do right now to decrease the force of the impact,” she wrote on April 1. Then on May 4, Woodward cautioned on Twitter that the state had yet to see the peak of the virus, only days before Reeves expanded the state’s reopening well in advance of the national guidelines. Her urgings reflect the challenges facing UMMC at large, responsible for both treating COVID-19 patients and, as the state’s only research hospital, developing partnerships with state agencies to test, trace and eventually treat the disease. Woodward spoke to the Jackson Free Press about the breakthroughs in testing
Dr. LouAnn Woodward, University of Mississippi Medical Center’s vice chancellor for health affairs and dean of the School of Medicine, is eager to see the unique abilities of UMMC at work in fighting COVID-19 in Mississippi and across the nation.
and treatment at the medical center, as well as the state’s larger coronavirus strategy. Help me understand UMMC’s role in the fight against COVID-19, both as a hospital and as a research institution. That’s my favorite thing to talk about right now. I’m glad you started with that. We are doing the things that every other hospital and health system is doing. Right out of the gate, as soon as the (Centers for Disease Control) recommendations, Department of Health recommendations and the governor’s orders started coming out, we restricted our visitor policy. We clamped down and stopped doing elective cases and canceled a lot of clinic appointments that can be postponed. Then we started looking at our PPE (personal protective equipment) supplies. All of those things that everybody else did, we did that with a vengeance. There were a lot of things that we did that, because we’re an academic medical center, we have the capability, the range of resources and expertise to be able to do.
As soon as we started wrapping our heads around what this virus meant and what things were happening all around the country, we started working fast and furious on an internal test development. That was really one of the game-changers, you know, developing this internal test. We were doing a lot of work around things like making swab kits, because all of these supplies that we took for granted became very precious and very hard to get. We spent a lot of time and energy looking at alternate sources of PPE. So the test development was a very big thing. We started early on looking at what was happening in the space of clinical trials, and now we’re at a point where—I don’t know our last number—it’s between 12 and 15 clinical trials that we have stood up and available for patients in Mississippi. We’re the only site in Mississippi that’s offering those. When you say clinical trials, can you elaborate? Yes, so for clinical trials for treatment, this is a virus for which there is no known
identified treatment plan. And so we are now participating in a dozen or more national clinical trials that are treatment trials. So different types of drugs are being trialed. Also, we’ve got a long existing, very good relationship with the Mississippi Department of Health and have partnered with them before at the state level in different disasters. So we very quickly, with their partnership, with (the Mississippi Emergency Management Agency) and with the Department of Public Safety, stood up testing opportunities at the Fairgrounds. With the partnership we have with CSpire, we developed—over a couple of days’ time—an app for screening. We were able, right out of the gate, to participate with the Department of Health and to provide the medical expertise in screening at a statewide level and testing at a statewide level. I don’t know the number exactly, but by the end of this week, it’s definitely north of 50, it may be close to 60 sites across the state where we have sent teams to perform tests in local communities, realizing that everybody can’t come to the (Mississippi State) Fairgrounds for testing.
