Dear RVU Family,

We hope that everyone had another safe, healthy, and productive week of telecommuting and virtual learning.

Here are a few highlights, reminders and updates from this week:

• CO update. Colorado is still at the Level of Safer-at-Home. The governor is asking everyone to wear a non-medical cloth face covering while out in public for necessary activities like grocery shopping. Please make or buy a face covering that will cover your mouth and nose and use it whenever you are outside your own house or yard. Wash your face covering regularly.
• UT update. Almost all of Utah is at the Low Risk Yellow Phase.  The guidelines include groups of 50 or fewer, maintaining 6 feet, and using face coverings in pubic if social distancing is difficult. Number of cases have recently risen in the St. George area and the move to the Green Phase is probably months away, so please remain vigilant. click for source
• Campus re-opening update. A draft of the RVU Re-Integration Plan is currently being reviewed by the COVID-19 Response Team (CRT).  We are grateful to the Guiding Principles and Strategy subcommittee for their many hours of hard work in creating this document. Our goal is to finalize this plan within the next 2 weeks with implementation starting hopefully in early June. This will consist of several sequential phases with controlled access of approved employees occurring in the first phase of re-integration.  We will share this plan with all of you once it is finalized.
• Myth buster. People may say that the number of deaths due to COVID-19 are inflated. This is impossible to confirm. It could also be argued that COVID-19 deaths are under-represented. Patients arriving to the morgue or the emergency department “dead on arrival” are typically not recorded as COVID deaths. Further, the SARS-CoV2 could have contributed to deaths caused by cardiac arrhythmias leading to cardiac arrests. However, if the physician did not list COVID-19 or COVID-like-illness (CLI) on the death certificate, these cases are obviously not attributed a COVID-19 deaths. Data on causes of deaths have wide margins of error, which goes both ways.
• Educational update/correction.  The novel Pediatric Multi-System Inflammatory Syndrome (PMIS) mentioned in our last email was officially renamed to Multisystem Inflammatory Syndrome in Children (MIS-C) by the CDC on May 15.

Thank you for your resilience and patience as we continue to weather through these tough times together.

Our RVU family’s ability of adaptation is truly inspirational. Proud to be RVU Strong!

Sincerely,

The COVID-19 Response Team