3 minute read
STAYING IN TOUCH
STUDENTS HELP WITH CONTACT TRACING CITYWIDE
BY SHAWN RYAN
Every day for about a month, Stacey Wong pulled out her smartphone to text and call other students at the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga. She wasn’t always calling for a cheerful chat.
She wanted to know how the person on the other end was feeling. How they were doing? How did they feel physically and mentally? Was there anything they needed?
A fifth-level student in the School of Nursing at UTC, she was a critical element in stopping the spread of COVID-19 through contact tracing, reaching out to people who were either in quarantine or complete isolation after testing positive for the virus.
“There is a lot of pressure to make sure it is done correctly because it could affect a lot of people,” Wong says. “It all comes down to making sure you are helping the person who is in isolation or quarantine and making sure to help keep the public safe.”
Wong was one of 17 UTC students—nine seniors in nursing, eight in other majors—who performed contract tracing for the Hamilton County Health Department. For nursing students, it also was part of their curriculum in the Tennessee Volunteer Mobilizer Initiative.
“This has become part of their clinical rotation in their community health course. This is the optimum experience for a community health nursing student,” says Susan Thul, associate professor for graduatelevel courses in the School of Nursing and the faculty member working with the contract tracing effort at UTC.
“In our lifetime, they’ve never gotten the opportunity to see the importance of communityhealth nursing to this degree. I think it makes it even more important that we’re in our own UTC community,” she explains.
Alexis Underwood, a fifth-level student in the School of Nursing, says she participated in contact tracing almost every day between Aug. 26 and Oct. 2. Some days were only a few minutes long; some were as much as eight hours, depending on the number of cases she handled.
“In general, most students were just anxious to get out of quarantine/isolation and wanted to know exactly when they would be out,” she says.
Wong says she would talk to as many as 10 people a day.
“They usually responded to my call or text on a daily basis. Most of them were thankful for someone checking on them,” she says.
Susan Thul
Thul also is contact tracing and has talked with students who are not only nervous about the virus, they feel as if they’re stranded on a desert island.
“I was talking with a student last night who has done pretty well, but she finally said to me, ‘I’m eight days into this quarantine and I’m having a lot of anxiety.’ She said, ‘I’m just so lonely.’
“I was able to hook her up with the resources of the Counseling Center where they do the Destress Tuesdays and Mindful Mondays, so she can at least work in a group environment virtually to feel like she’s not alone.”
Underwood recalled a student who felt both alone and disconnected from everyone. She would talk to him beyond simply asking questions then saying, “Goodbye.”
“He preferred for me to call him because he was lonely and bored while in quarantine,” she says. “I can only imagine how lonely it becomes in isolation, so I really felt bad for him and made sure to call him and make conversation to help his loneliness.”
Thul points out that some students are freshmen, and it’s the first time they’ve lived away from home, a scary situation in itself.
“Imagine the circumstance where you have a student who’s moved into her dorm, away from home. She’s settled in her dorm and then, all of a sudden, she’s told to quarantine on campus,” Thul says. “So now all of sudden she’s taken away from an environment she’s just gotten accustomed to and she’s moved to a whole different environment.”
Wong looks at her role in contact tracing as a way to both comfort those who tested positive while keeping them safe at the same time.
“I took this very seriously and wanted to make sure I did my part in keeping people safe. I was glad to be a part of something bigger and learned a lot that I can use in my nursing career.” +
