week's fireside chat. I'm Lisa Serns, however you may notice I am not here with Dr. Cross today. He is taking some deserved time off.
But don't despair. Instead we have a great panel of guests today to give us the latest information of various aspects of how we are handling this pandemic. Our guests today include Dave White, our associate dean of ag research and Doug Edlin, assistant director with marketing and communications, both who are serving as members of the emergency operations center at USTE Knoxville. We have Dr.
Marci Sousa with the College of Veterinary Medicine, who is also serving on the Knox County Board of Health, and Doug Bonner, our human resources officer. We will be updating you today on the status of COVID-19 cases within the university and talking about how the institute is handling some of these aspects and we'll also be taking your questions. So a couple of reminders, be sure to keep your audio muted during the chat. Use the chat function on Zoom to ask any questions.
You can post those questions publicly or you can send them to me privately. A recording of this session is being made and will be posted to the UTIA coronavirus website. You can find that link on our homepage at utia.tenac.edu. So Dave White, we're going to start with you.
Can you update us on the case count, how it's looking for students and employees both within the university and the institute of agriculture? Absolutely. Greetings like reading UTIA. I'm happy to do so.
So I'll start off with numbers for UTIA and actually look very good. Right now we have three active cases of employees that have COVID-19. I think that's a pretty good number considering the amount of employees we have across the state. We have 16 self-isolation including all four units of jesac research, extension, college of veterinary medicine, and herbert college of back.
So the numbers are fairly low and I'd like to keep it that way. The university of positive cases and self-isolation in terms of students and employees, as compared to the last time I talked to you last month, the numbers have decreased dramatically which is fantastic. Last time I talked to you we were about 600 positive cases and over 2000 self-isolation. As of yesterday we have 49 active COVID-19 cases.
Three of those are employees and 46 of those are students. And today the numbers even drop a little bit more to 43. So the numbers are staying low which is great. Regarding self-isolation we have 322 self-isolation.
93 of those are students in the dorms. 194 of those are students off campus and 35 are employees. Again these numbers dropped a little bit as well today from 322 to 306. Interestingly enough of the self-isolation 54 are associated usually with close contact of someone who is COVID-19 positive.
If you look at the data there is probably a general flattening of the curve. You may have all heard that term. We want to flatten the curve for both active cases and self-isolation. But Dr.
Gregg from our student health center has indicated there has been a small increase this week in self-isolation so we continue to monitor that and see what is happening. That is pretty much up to date. So, Jayde is the operation center thinking forward to whether it gets colder and we start to see some blue cases of how that might be handled or just keeping an eye on that? I think it is just keeping an eye on that.
Monitoring everyone following the same diet, mask social distancing, getting a flu shot. If you feel sick make sure you do the self awareness check every day and talk with your supervisor if you are not feeling done. Great. Well, thanks, Jayde.
So, Marcy, Susan, you have been involved in helping UTIA in college veterinary medicine handle this crisis right from the beginning. So, what are some of the lessons that you have learned that has gone? There is a whole lot of them. I think that we are learning this as we go along for sure.
None of us have actually been trained to deal with the pandemic and there is a lot of reading and trying to work across the various disciplines that are in not only our college but our UTIA and across the campus. So, you know, the four of us that are running the show today, I only actually knew Dave White before he does happen. So, Doug, David, I have weekly meetings now just trying to keep up on things. So, I think that the collaboration across UTIA is actually increased greatly with this.
If that is a silver lining, that is actually happened. So, one lesson, I guess, is reaching across the streets of our working together for UTIA. And I know the college has college veterinary medicine. You all have to stay open from day one and obviously in the patient you have to see.
So, how has that been involved? Well, it has been going pretty well. I just wanted to start off by acknowledging that we have two appreciation weeks going on this week. One is National Vet Tech Appreciation Week.
And so, these are some of the professionals that help our hospital run as well as the better profession in general. And also, sterile processing week. And so, these are the professionals that keep all of our instruments sterile, our scrubs and our lab coats clean so we can keep doing our day to day job. So, just to shout out to those folks in our college.
And, you know, just I wanted to touch briefly on what we've done as a college and our hospital specifically. And so, back in April and May, the college went to emergency and urgent cases only. And so, as you can imagine, that led to a drop in our caseload, not surprising. But at the same time, our small and low emergency service over the last about six to seven months has actually increased their caseload one and a half to two times over the same period last year.
And so, while we initially did have that drop, our caseload across the hospital has just almost reached back to normal, which is good news in terms of we're seeing those clients, we're taking care of those patients. And, you know, one of the important things about our hospital is that we're also training our students. And so, in order for our veterinary students to graduate, they have a full academic year of clinical experience, which is essentially two semesters. Our students are usually in for actually three semesters.
And so, it's not a problem they easily reach that normal times. But we were a little bit nervous about how that was going to go with this year. And so, our senior year students should have started about the middle of April, early May. And we actually stalled that to try and figure out how COVID was going to affect.
And we brought our clinical year students back June 1st. And even in the hospital, since then, doing clinical rotations, initially, some of our rotations started as a little bit hybrid. The vast majority of our clinical rotations are now pretty much quote unquote back to normal, or as normal as they are, as they're going to be for the next little while. And so, our students are getting their clinical experience.
You know, I think they're having a great time because they're not sitting in a classroom. And so, that's been fantastic. And so, we haven't been able to keep training our students, keep serving the public, treating their animals, and also keeping everyone at work. And in order to do that, we have to take a lot of extra steps, right?
So, we never closed down. And so, Sandra Harverson, who is our media maven in our college, put together a video. And we thought it might be nice to share. It's only about three minutes.
But what it does is it kind of shows you some of the steps that we've taken so that we can keep functioning in our college. And for any of you that have never gotten behind the scenes tour of our hospital, now is your chance. So, Sandy, if you can cue the video. Yeah, there should be sound.
Sandy, can you, I guess, figure out why that sounds not working? This is why I didn't want to be in charge of playing the video because I knew that I would do this. I guarantee I was screwed up. Sorry.
No problem. What were you doing? There's a spot whenever you, right before you share that video, you have to select enable audio down at the bottom left before you ever click the share button to make it work. Thank you very much.
I'm new with this. So, please forgive me. Yeah, you'll have to actually drop the share screen and whenever you start, right before you bring the share, you select what you're going to do. There's a little button on the left and it's least what we've experienced with it.
Here, system audio. So, do you know where that is? I'm so sorry, people. No worries.
It all worked when nobody was here but me. I think I'm just a second. I'm going to make David Purin, the co-hosts, to see knows where this is. How's that sound?
Well, simply can make it happen. We'll find out, but I don't have the video. I'll tell you what, let's, you guys try to figure that out. Let's move on and then once we're finished, we'll play it.
How does that sound? So, let's move on to Doug Edlin, as we know, communication during the pandemic is key. So, this many months in, how is communication continuing to be handled within UT Knoxville and the institute? Well, thank you very much, Lisa.
And thanks for having me on as part of this great group today. And I'm looking forward to talking to all of you and sharing a little bit about what we're doing with communications here at UTIA. The one difference between UTIA's communications efforts and UT Knoxville's efforts has been primarily that UTIA's communications efforts are more than outward facing communications efforts with our stakeholders and with media and also internally with our students, our faculty and staff. UTIA's communication has primarily been student focused because a lot of what UTK is doing is focusing on, especially right now with EOC, is focusing on isolation and quarantine.
So, it's a lot of, here's what you need to do if you have to go into quarantine. Here's what you need to do if you have to go into isolation. So, there's been a little bit of a difference between the two levels of communication. One thing that I noticed when I joined the EOC was that I knew that UTIA had a very robust coronavirus website.
And there's a lot of thanks to go out. I can't name everybody, but I'm going to recognize my colleagues, Sandra Harbison and Patty McDaniels and Sophie Schmidt for the work that they did in contributing to this website. This was an excellent, excellent website for resources for coronavirus. But the one thing that we didn't have were some resources for our administrators, our Dr.
Cross and for our deans and directors and department heads to really communicate in the event of a COVID emergency here at UTIA. Now, once we saw we needed that, we put together a very quick communications packet for the deans directors and department heads that they can reference when they need to use. One of the biggest problems or not problems, but really issues when something breaks, like if we would have a cluster at say an event that was a UTIA event, how do we communicate? Who do we need to communicate with?
And so we have a little checklist for like Dr. Cross, who he needs to communicate with. If it would be within say Ag Research Dr. Shen, who he needs to communicate with or with a pervert, who Dr.
Beel needs to communicate with. So, we're trying to have a little checklist of communications resources for our administrators as well as talking points and templated messaging. But the reason when we do templated messaging, it's just a template. It's not meant to be fill in the blanks and send this out to everybody.
We want our directors, our deans, Dr. Cross, whoever is sending out messaging to send it out in their own words. So, it's vitally important that we do that. And the challenge with communications in the COVID era is that, as journalists and Lisa can understand this and Charles Danny can understand this as well, you want to get out information as quickly but accurately as possible.
And that's what's always in any kind of communication that comes out of UT, that's always forefront for us. But in this case, we also run into privacy issues as well. So, we have to think about being timely, being accurate. But at the same time, we have to recognize privacy, not both of patients and students.
So, we have HIPAA and FERPA to consider as well when we send out any information. So, it's a balancing act trying to get this information out correctly. And there are various audiences we have to reach. For example, we have to reach to our internal audiences.
We have to get that communication out internally. The one thing I mentioned is that Dr. Cross is we don't want people filling in the blanks. We want to give them as much pertinent and accurate information as possible.
And because when you start filling in the blanks, that's how rumors can get started. You just want to get as much out there as you possibly can. So, we worked on this communications plan to have available for our Dean's Directors and Department heads. And we haven't had to use it.
And I'm hoping we're never going to have to use it because it's good to have because it's kind of like my favorite movie is Apollo 13. And I don't know if you recall that, Part 1's. Once Mission Control finds out that Apollo 13 is in real trouble. And they're trying to figure out what are we going to do?
And Ed Harris who plays Jean Crantz tells everybody to settle down and work the problem. That's what we have to do in communications as well. We have to work the problem. And we have to get that information out to everyone, all parties that are being affected by this quickly and accurately as possible.
Well, that's great. I know it's very appreciated by Nini and you know, just a Dr. Cross 2 for really committing to doing the fireside Jazzy week each week too. Just to make sure that we're all aware of what is going on.
So, thanks. Thanks, God. I believe Sandy actually has the video ready. So, let's go ahead and play that.
The day begins with laundry. Lots and lots of laundry. The college purchase three cents of scrubs, three lab coats, and two coveralls for every clinical fourth-year student. To help maintain biosecurity, the Veterinary Medical Center has a clean-in, clean-out policy.
Students sign out the provided clean clinical attire each morning and turn it back in before leaving each day. Hand sanitizing stations have been installed throughout the building and people practice physical distancing whenever possible. In March, the Veterinary Medical Center transitioned to emergency and urgent care only since no one is allowed in the waiting areas. Upon arrival, clients called the front desk and park in designated spots.
To limit the amount of time spent in person, case history and other details are provided over the phone. The client is met at the curb under the tents that have been installed in case of inclement weather. Reminders concerning best practices have been placed throughout the building. Signs indicating maximum occupancy have been placed on the doors and Plexiglas has been installed as another protective barrier.
In order to minimize traffic in ICU, additional protocols have been put into place and tables placed outside the ICU door to write orders, complete paperwork, and discuss cases. triage has been moved to a larger area adjacent to ICU. A rudimentary messaging system has been implemented and while we're still waiting on the M&M dispenser, a freezer stocked with Mayfield ice cream is available to everyone in the college in the old munchbox. The mobile spay-neuter unit continues operation.
In the large animal hospital, the same protective measures have been taken with Plexiglas and hand sanitizers throughout. Due to the nature of the beasts, there's more space to allow for physical distancing in the large animal hospital. Each classroom has a maximum occupancy number. Clinical students are able to sit apart during rounds and there's a hygiene cart in each room.
Hands-on laboratories can be a challenge. In addition to dividing the students into smaller lab sections and holding more lab sessions, Plexiglas has been installed for protection. Adaptations have also been installed in several offices. The faculty, residents, intern staff, and students throughout the college have pulled together to keep education moving forward while providing quality patient care.
The volunteer spirit is alive and well at the UT College of Veterinary Medicine during these unprecedented times. That is great. Thanks so much for sharing that. Marcy and Sandra for producing it.
That's wonderful and appreciate it. Sandy, you're putting that together for us. So, moving on, Jack Bonner, there are definitely challenges from the human resources perspective during a crisis like this. So what are some reminders for all of us on this call?
Well, thank you, Elisa. I think Challenge is a great descriptor for the year we've had. And, you know, of course, like so many others, HR is continuing to monitor the progression of COVID-19, specifically to the impact that it has on our own workforce. And at the same time, we've also been faced this year with the challenges of the political climate and social justice issues taking an emotional pull on so many of our folks.
So I think when it comes to the question of reminders, or reminders, the thing that perhaps is most important for all of us right now, I believe is just to preserve our sense of a workplace community. We all need to stay engaged and connect ourselves. And at the same time, do everything that we possibly can to help others stay connected as well. And I know that probably seems simple, but it's one of the things that can be pretty easily forgotten when we have so many people that have been working remotely for such a long period of time.
And, you know, a lot of our folks are managing this arrangement quite well and some are thriving. But there are a lot of folks out there that continue to struggle with being separated from their coworkers. And I would just ask that all of you consider checking in with one another every now and then, you know, a phone call to ask about family or sometimes even a text message just to say hello can make a huge difference in someone's day. And for those in leadership roles, I think for us, it's especially important to maintain focus on connecting with our direct reports, not only about the work, but much more so about making sure that, you know, your individual people all feel valued and cared for.
And much of this has been said before. I think one of the most important things we can do as leaders is make sure that we're keeping our people connected. So even things as simple as allowing for time at the beginning of a team meeting to let people share what's been happening in their personal lives or gathering everyone together over Zoom for, you know, a lunch, just to let them have a casual conversation, you know, once or twice a month even, you know, are some of the simple things we can do just to help us maintain that sense. And, you know, the importance of that feeling of belonging has been prevalent all year.
I think we've all, you know, struggled at various times as we've navigated the past couple of months. And, you know, the one thing I would say to wrap up my point, I guess, is that as we enter the holiday season, this is going to be even more important than it has been all year. And holidays are a difficult time of year for some people. And now, as we've seen on the news and we're all, you know, talking about amongst ourselves, a lot of people are faced with making decisions about whether to travel for the holidays and be around their family.
So I think we all need to remember to be there for one another, you know, particularly over the next few months as the holidays come and pass so that to the extent we can, you know, we can, we can just continue to build that sense of family here within the Institute. So, and Lisa, I think if you don't mind, you know, there's always so much that we have on our minds as easily as some of the routine things that we all need to address. If I could take just a couple minutes to share a couple of time sensitive reminders, I would, I would really like to. That would be great.
Sorry, thank you. So first, I, you know, folks, I promise not to take too long, but I think most importantly, I want you all to remember that today is a deadline to complete your open enrollment for your 2021 benefits. If you haven't already done so, at this point, you've only got about three hours left to get that submitted. So enrollment needs to be completed by 530 Eastern time or 430 Central, depending on where you're sitting right now.
But again, today is the deadline for that. Another point that's been important and something that we've talked about quite a bit over the past few fireside chats is related to the flu shot requirement for this year. Many doctors are recommending that their patients, you know, begin getting the flu shot around middle of October. So if you haven't already, you know, please remember the requirement to complete the attestation employee self-service.
So far across the Institute, we have about a 25% completion rate and of those 86% have chosen to receive the flu vaccine with 14% opting out. And then just two more real quick updates. A reminder from last month, if you did not work on, or if I'm sorry, if you did work on Labor Day last month, please keep in mind that that deferred holiday needs to be utilized by December 34 first or it will be lost. All you need to do is log into employee self-service.
And when you go into the leave request section, simply apply the deferred holiday to the day you wish to use the holiday. And then finally, Lisa, I'd just like to remind everyone that early voting is now available across the state. And with the heightened interest that we've seen in the election this year and, you know, keeping social distancing in mind as well, I'd encourage everyone to visit the local polling location prior to Election Day if you're all able to do so. And for those of you who meet eligibility requirements, there's also still time to request your absentee ballot.
Great. Well, those are great reminders, God. Somebody did ask if the signup for benefits is still through Edison and how people access that? It is through Edison.
And if you have not gotten instructions around how to log in, please give me a call or contact your human resources partner for your unit. We can get you in touch with the team. Great. Thank you so much.
So it looks like we have one question and this question is for Dave White. The question is, are the students cases down dramatically because they are doing all the right things in terms of COVID safety guidelines or because they are not reporting? Thanks for that question. And I will, I'll say yes to both.
I think there is a greater emphasis on wearing masks though. Remember, I have twins that are here. One's an RA and one's in Laurel Hall. And my son, when he goes out with his friends, they wear masks.
But on game day last week, they were driving down Cumberland and took a pic and sent it to me. And I was like, holy crap, one of those bars, there was probably 100 kids, but not a single one wearing a mask on the strip. That is not good, frankly. And I mean, you've heard Chancellor Plahmann talk about this every time on her update.
This is something we got to do. Now, there is also that other point about students are not being tested. And if you go to the UTK COVID-19 webpage, there is a data monitoring link that I suggested you're all interested to take a look at. It now adds saliva, pulled saliva testing data.
And then the percentages of the students that are participating is very low. So that's actually a question the EOC is trying to wrestle with right now, carrot or stick to get the students to do this. And I'm more for carrots because sticks, people get tired of sticks over time. So we're actually trying to figure that out.
A lot of other universities are moving into incentives for the students to be tested in particular, gift cards, t-shirts, weekly drawings. If you come, you're going to be entered into a drawing for a meal dining plan for free. So that's something that's being discussed right now. But I do think it's a combination of both right now.
Up the kids probably not being, you know, this testing fatigue is happening across the world, frankly. And you know, our kids are, you know, remember, they're 18 to 22. They're at a very different point in their lives than we are. We kept staff very low across the whole six, seven months, right?
It's been the students and we saw those huge increases. And then it's been very low lately trying to dive into that with the contact research. It's probably a combination that we hope students are understanding the importance of these measures. But there may be a small part too, they're just not interested in being tested.
Well, that's a great point. And obviously we all need model the correct behavior in hopes that that rubs off as well. So. And that happens, as you know, I mean, when we're in the office or in Morgan Holland, anytime I'm running the lease in others, and we're all wearing masks.
So we are, you know, we are living this here. It's tough to do, you know, it's like forgetting your phone. Right, you're going to have that mask with you. I always like, if I walk out of my office, I'm going to get the mask.
You know, one day this show passed. But right now, I think this is the best way to manage infection rates. Great points. Doug Bonner, Charles, you pointed this out that there is a change in the flexible spending plan from pay flex to optum.
Did you want to address that? Sure. So this is a change that is going to be going into effect on January 1st. In terms of the process and the IRS requirements and stipulations, there is truly no change.
It is simply a change in the vendor that we're going to be using. So if you are a user of one of our FSA plans, and if there's any need that you would have to utilize your credit card, particularly if you're, you know, a user of the healthcare FSA, having gone through the process myself, I thought it was pretty easy to enroll and request the card. If you have a spouse or a partner that would need a card, there's the option to order additional cards as well, or for any of your dependents that are at least the age of 18. So the one thing that I would point out, and this is not different this year than from years in the past regardless of the vendor, is that it is a separate enrollment process from open enrollment.
So to the question earlier, you'll go through Edison for your benefits enrollment, but you'll be prompted to go to the optimum site to enroll in an FSA. Very good. Good to know. Well, it looks like, one more question, will there be a period of inavailability of FSA funds during the change over to the new vendor?
Someone had had an experience with that one previous employer. That is not the intent. All funds should be available as of January 1st. And I know our benefits team has been working diligently with Optimfortunatly.
We have a relationship with them because they're currently our provider of EAP. So I'm not anticipating any challenges, but I'm afraid I can't promise. Quite optimistic that we'll be a smooth transition. At least I did get one question that maybe better suited to Dr.
Sousa. It's about the contrast in COVID cases from the county and campus, where it seems it's campus. I'm sorry, the county numbers continue to go up, and maybe what's happening to drive that? Yeah, so the thought is that basically, probably globally, we're going into that second wave that was talked about many months ago.
And so as people are starting to move inside a little bit, we're starting to see greater transmission. Also, we've talked about this in our hospital with some of our folks that are having to wear masks all day long every day at work that there's something called PPE fatigue. And so people are getting sick wearing masks. So there may be a little bit of lacks happening with some of the steps that have been practiced since back in early summer, and a lot of the mandates went into place.
And so we're starting to see increases in cases, not just in Knox County, but across the state, the country and globally. So I think that hopefully that trend doesn't continue to increase. But as we get into the colder months, that's certainly the fear when people tend to move inside and bunch up a little bit more. And that's some of the issues that we always see with flu every year, is that as we move inside, you increase just the contact between people.
There was one slightly bright note that I saw on one of the list serves I get from infectious diseases across the world today that they've been looking at flu cases in New Zealand over the last, so their seasons are flipped from us. They're coming out of summer, I'm sorry, they're coming out of winter and going into summer. And so they're basically coming to the end of our flu season and their flu cases over the last season, basically their winter season, have dropped dramatically, something like 98%, because the flu is going to be prevented in pretty much the same way that we're doing for COVID-19. And so fingers crossed, if we can kind of hang in there a little bit longer, we can reduce not only COVID-19 transmission, but also flu, so that it's not as big of a hit taking wearing masks and washing our hands as well as those flu vaccinations.
But I think we're starting to see globally, Dave, that second wave that people were talking about is probably a combination of factors that can trigger into it though. The fear is that over the last week, we've had the highest number of hospitalizations in Knox County, as well as our regional hospitals. And the concern is that with these increased cases now, and these high hospitalization rates that we're going to start unfortunately seeing probably more deaths associated with it. And while our physicians have gotten much better treating it over the last nine months, sometimes even with the improved ability to treat these cases, people will unfortunately do still pass away from it.
Your point, Marcy, just, as we've been sitting here and news alert, just came over that we've unfortunately hit 8 million cases globally. So it's certainly still here. Just won't go away. No, not anytime soon.
So thanks so much for that. Doug Bonner there, just for one more clarification, someone's asking, do we have the until the end of October on the FSA signup? I believe for the enrollment in Optum, there is the opportunity to continue that until the end of the year. But I will confirm that and follow up.
Okay, great. Well, everyone, it looks like those are all the questions for today. I just want to really thank this panel. Marcy made the comment earlier and she is correct that this group has been really putting in some extra hours to help the institute really deal with this pandemic and how we respond to it.
So just appreciate all four of you being with us today. Also appreciate Sandy Lindsey stepping in for my Stanley today. She had not done this before. You came for like a chance, Sandy.
So appreciate your help on that. And just hope everybody has a great weekend. It looks like it's been a beautiful one. And let's all cheer on the balls as they take on Kentucky.
Have a great weekend.