The University of Memphis, in collaboration with the American Esoteric Laboratories and the Memphis and Shelby County COVID-19 Task Force, is working to help slow the spread of the UK COVID-19 variant in UofM Athletics. A related report is shown on a Local 24 Memphis YouTube video below.
Fox13 reported that a release from UofM stated that no more cases of the said variant had been reported. The UK variant was isolated to the athletics department, and that no other students got exposed.
AEL and Dr. Manoj Jain, a Memphis and Shelby County COVID-19 Task Force members were said to be the key advisor's during the entire process.
Also according to the release, succeeding testing has shown that in over 1,000 COVID-19 tests, all were found negative.
Mitigation Initiatives at the UofM
The said news site also reported that surveillance testing continues at the said university. The release indicated too, that the student body in general, as well as the student-athletes at-large, have continued being separated.
Student-athletes and members of the staff at the university were tested from February 8 to 28. Results showed 31 positive cases and about 2,292 tested negative. Out of the 31 active cases found, 29 of them had the UK variant.
Following a four-day shutdown, all 595 Memphis Athletics staff members and student-athletes were tested from February 19 to 20 and 11 of them tested positive. Of those who had positive results, 10 were identified to have the UK strain.
Basketball Program Paused
In connection to the COVID-19 test results in late February at the UofM, the Daily Memphian reported that the university paused its basketball program originally slated in early February. And for a couple of weeks, it tested almost the entire men's basketball program every day. Then at one point, had everyone in the whole athletic program tested to guarantee it had not spread.
According to the university's associate athletic director for sports medicine, Darell Turner, the spread was hard to contain. The pausing they put in place has enabled them to contact trace and identify the extent of the problem.
More so, it has enabled university staff to clean all athletic facilities properly. They are all college students, Turner explained and continued that, at the end of the day, they are still quite young and want to be around each other.
Under the guidelines of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, those who tested positive, including their close contacts needed to be completely isolated from each other and quarantined for seven days. They should also test negative at the end.
They were not allowed as well, in university buildings outside the South Hall, the area where a lot of them spent their seven-day quarantine.
Infectious disease expert Dr. Manoj Jain, advised the university and said that UofM did a "super job" in terms of contact-tracing, isolating and quarantining the affected individuals.
Wake-Up Call for the University Officials
Officials said that this level of infection in the university cluster serves as a wake-up call for how fast the UK strain, also called the B.1.1.7, can spread, specifically in a closed community like a workplace or school campus.
This is the reason they wanted to show people an example of how fast the variant is spreading and how it can be successfully mitigated, explained Jain adding. He added that others need a model, too, just like what the UofM did.
Since January 2021, the city has reportedly been ramping up its capacity to sequence the SARS CoV-2 virus's genome.
Researchers doing the work at the United States biocontainment lab in the University of Tennessee Health Science Center, St. Jude Research Hospital and Poplar Healthcare are said to have been looking for telltale signs which include the so-called S drop.
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