Hi everyone I'm Jim Ryan and I hope you're having a
nice evening. I'd like to welcome you to what we are going to be calling
UVA Weekly, a Thursday night program that will feature updates not just from me
but also from UVA students and from our medical professionals. Our aim with this
program is to bring you up to date on how things
are going and to highlight the most important news of the week related to
COVID-19. It's meant to complement the Thursday
newsletter and the admittedly sometimes long and dense emails you've
received. In this week's segment you'll hear about
the importance of getting tested through UVA Health
and cooperating with contact tracing neither of which will get you in trouble
and both of which are really important so that we can stay one step ahead of
the virus and slow its spread. You'll also hear about the randomized
testing that's going to begin later this week as well.
This show is coming a few days after we began in-person classes
and I hope everyone is well and adjusting to a new way of learning and
living. I had the opportunity to help move in
some students over the weekend, a weekend of great excitement but also
anxiety for sure for all of us. This is going to be a very
different kind of semester and one that will require all of us to
work together to keep each other safe and well.
I've been really impressed by and grateful for the efforts I've seen so
far on the part of students, faculty and
staff to follow health and safety protocols. I know the various rules can
seem complicated at times but the basics are really simple; stay
six feet apart and wear a mask when inside,
wear a mask outside when you can't be at least six feet apart,
wash your hands frequently, don't have gatherings that include more than 15
people and if you have symptoms, please self
quarantine until you can get tested and please get
tested right away. Last, if you're living on Grounds, I would
suggest you avoid gatherings off Grounds for a couple of weeks.
Let's ease into the semester and do our best to keep this virus at bay.
That's all from me tonight. If you have questions or suggestions for the show
please reach out to my office or to Matt Weber at mw2xy@virginia.edu
This is an experiment and one that we will continue to work on
to make sure we're getting you the information you need while at the same
time showcasing some of the talents within this
remarkable community. Our hope is that this show
will help bring and keep the community together during an exceptionally
challenging time. Thanks and enjoy the show.
Every single day, we don't know what's going to come next. We don't know
how this is going to end, when this is going to end.
We will get through this and we will get back to a time when life is a little bit easier.
There's not one big thing we can all do, it's a lot of little things that are
going to add up. Hope is the one thing that keeps us
going when we can't see what's on the other side.
We have the opportunity to give the country some hope.
[MUSIC PLAYING]
Hello, my name is Zeno and I'm representing the #YOUVA Team
which is a peer-led public health initiative and we hope to do things like
help to educate students on COVID procedures and stats,
grow a community of care and support and finally decipher some of those
encyclopedic email messages we keep getting from
the administration. In COVID news as of Tuesday there are 190 student cases
and 231 in the University community as a whole.
This is a number reported through the Student at UVA Health and it is high.
UVA has started a couple of asymptomatic testing programs including prevalence
testing. This is randomized and if you're
selected you'll get a letter and a testing appointment
with details on the location. The test shouldn't take more than 10 minutes
and it's just like the Let's Get Checked test we're all very familiar with.
Testing and contract tracing are the best ways for us to keep each other
and the community safe, so please show up for your appointment
if you get selected. Also if you have symptoms of COVID-19
call Student Health, you won't get into trouble at all if you have a positive
test or for any information that you reveal
for contact tracing purposes and their tests have quick turnaround
times. Move-in was this weekend and over four thousand students came to
Grounds with parents and family in tow to move into dorms. Faculty and staff are
working hard to make this process a success
including workers in dining and facilities who are struggling to support
themselves, their families, their own safety and
health while working to keep us safe and healthy too.
The dining hall lines and crowd at O'Hill increases health risks for us
and many of those workers. To combat this, think about going to other dining
locations like Runk or Newcomb and maybe go earlier or later to avoid peak
times. Wouldn't it be dope if UVA had an app
that could let you sign up for a plate to pick up?
I have no idea this exists within dining halls currently but computer science
majors this could be a come up so y'all should jump on it!
Also RA's have released demands anonymously calling for systemic support
during the pandemic to keep themselves, workers and residents safe.
As a former RA, I know they need it. Students are continuing to ask for
change that needs to happen and that's
incredibly important. I hope that the hard-working individuals
in HRL can provide while receiving resource
from the UVA administration. This is the first in what we hope will be
a weekly segment and the UVA Team wants to hear from you.
What is confusing you? Annoying you? What do you want to know more about in terms
of UVA and the virus? What issues you'd like us to promote and
bring up to others? Email us with your thoughts at
YouVA@virginia.edu and we'll try to address your questions through your
posts in future videos. You can follow the campaign on Instagram
@youva.safe Why my friends on the team chose me to
do this every week is beyond me, but I hope you'll stay tuned to watch me
either become an overnight success or a total train wreck, either way this
could be fun. I mean like what are you watching? NBA Playoffs or something?
Testing at UVA for COVID-19 is constantly evolving as we
integrate new knowledge and experiences from other institutions.
Currently testing for COVID-19 has several different pathways at UVA.
One is obvious for symptomatic people who have symptoms consistent with COVID-19.
We have testing available at Student Health
and through Employee Health, but we've also
supplemented that with several other testing strategies.
For example, we have the ability to test asymptomatic significant contacts of
people who have been maybe exposed to COVID-19. Also a team led by
Dr. Amy Mathers is looking at the dormitories and
sampling the wastewater that comes from those buildings and if those buildings
turn positive for COVID-19, then we will go
into the dormitories and test all the students residing there
to try to detect infections at the earliest stages. What's new and
evolving at UVA is that we're now embarking on large-scale
prevalence testing. We'll be randomly selecting students beginning later this
week and testing them for COVID-19 with the
intent that we hope to find asymptomatic infections at the earliest
stages that allows us to isolate and quarantine significant contacts to try
to contain the viral spread as much as possible.
We hope in the coming months that we'll expand that testing
to a larger group of students as we develop further capabilities. So
stay tuned as this continues to evolve, but we think
that our testing plan really allows us to,
again, isolate people who may be infected, remove them
from the general population where the virus can spread
and also detecting patients and students who may have come into contact with
COVID-19 so we can quarantine those as well.
[GUITAR PLAYING]
Know it sounds funny But, I just can't stand the pain
Girl, I'm leaving you tomorrow
Seems to me girl You know I've done all I can
You see I begged, stole and I borrowed! Yeah!
Ooh, that's why I am easy. Easy like Sunday morning
That's why I'm easy. Easy like Sunday morning