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Feb. 1, 2021| The Mercury
NEWS
UTD works with UT Southwestern to vaccinate priority populations Vaccines will not be mandated unless specified by state legislature FATIMAH AZEEM Mercury Staff
Although UTD has not received COVID-19 vaccine doses from the state of Texas, the university and UT Southwestern Medical Clinic have been able to work together to vaccinate UTD employees that fall under Phase 1A and Phase 1B vaccine priority. According to the Texas Department of State Health, individuals prioritized by Phase 1A include healthcare and front-line workers, while those prioritized by Phase 1B include people aged 65 and older or 16 and older with chronic medical conditions. Along with those populations, Vice President and Chief of Staff Rafael Martín said that UT Southwestern has offered to extend their COVID-19 vaccination services to employees in the Student Health Center and police department. Clinicians and clinical students are currently being contacted for vaccinations, and campus SHC and police department workers can expect to be contacted soon. “That’s all that UT Southwestern is doing right now,” Martín said. “They are only vaccinating those priority populations. The lack of supply and the need to prioritize our healthcare workers and first responders, and then those who are most
vulnerable and at highest risk, is really driving the whole distribution system right now.” In a survey conducted by The Mercury, out of 260 respondents, 91.5% of students said they think UTD should offer COVID-19 vaccinations on campus. 86.9% of students said they would sign up to get vaccinated on campus if a vaccine was offered. Human resources management senior Haley Deininger said she wants to get vaccinated on campus to protect her immunocompromised family and community members. “I don’t want to be the reason that someone catches COVID-19 and has to end up on a ventilator,” Deininger said. “I really do believe there is a lot of power in vaccinating a younger population because we’re crowded together and we also see a lot of case spikes and a lot of kind of irresponsible behavior at times from kids who are in college.” When it comes to widespread vaccination on campus this semester, Martín said that it is unlikely that UTD will receive enough COVID-19 vaccine doses directly from the state because UTD does not have an affiliated medical school or hospital to provide them on a large scale. However, students, faculty and staff currently in Phase 1A or 1B may register to receive a vaccination elsewhere, through large vaccine hubs – which don’t require county residence in the county where the hub is located – or local vaccine providers.
JUHI KARNALKAR | MERCURY STAFF
“In terms of the larger university population, we’re kind of in the same boat as everybody else,” Martín said. “We’re kind of waiting for supply to catch up with demand at which point, maybe it’ll make sense for us as an institution to be offering vaccines to students and to employees. It may make more sense just to send everybody to the local CVS to get their vaccine. So, we’re just kind of waiting to see what will happen in terms of the distribution system.” To help UTD gauge who is still at risk of infec-
tion, Martín said in an email announcement that a voluntary vaccine reporting form has been made available for UTD members who have already received a COVID-19 vaccination. Of the UT system institutions, UT Austin and UT El Paso are the only other schools that have made forms for requesting COVID-19 vaccination available to their campus community. UT Austin Media Manager Veronica Trevino said that since
SEE VACCINE, PAGE 14
Testing Testing – for COVID-19 Breakdown of COVID testing results on campus at start of semseter TYLER BURKHARDT Mercury Staff
MATTHEW WHITE | MERCURY STAFF
UTD plans to prevent community spread by periodically selecting 7.5% of campus residents for random testing.
As COVID incidence spikes across North Texas to the tune of more than 2000 new cases per day in the DFW metroplex, the results of UTD’s proactive testing program prove encouraging. Vice President and Chief of Staff Rafael Martín, head of the COVID-19 Task Force at UTD, said that while testing capabilities were limited last semester, the process of scaling up last semester’s pilot program with UT Southwestern enabled UTD to instate a free and mandatory testing program for all students staying in University Housing this semester. “We started last semester with testing our athletes on a regular basis, as well as personnel that were working in our research labs,” Martín said.
“Scaling up and learning from that was really what allowed us to have confidence that we could test all of the on-campus residents within the first couple weeks of them returning to campus. And by all accounts, it was a pretty successful effort.” Martín credits the smoothness of this operation to the administration of the university’s housing staff and to the work of UTD’s UMER emergency medical technicians who were responsible for directly facilitating student administration of the COVID-tests. Associate Vice President of Student Affairs Matt Grief, who has overseen the actual testing process, reports further on the success of the proactive testing program.
SEE TEST, PAGE 14
