Reporting students who test positive for COVID-19

UGA’s Student Care and Outreach (SCO) is coordinating all notification efforts for students who test positive for COVID-19. As the number of cases has increased, they are tweaking their internal protocols to ensure all notifications are done within one business day after a case is reported in DawgCheck. Note that there was some lag in response time earlier this week, but they are rapidly catching up with any remaining backlog.

If a student reports a positive test to you, ask the student to report the positive test on DawgCheck, as that gets the entire support network moving to help the student and complete necessary cleaning and notification protocols. Most delays appear to be caused by a failure or delay in reporting test results on DawgCheck.

If a student notifies an instructor about a positive test directly and two business days pass without the instructor receiving notification of that student’s positive test from SCO, the instructor should notify SCO of the student’s positive test. This may mean the student did not report the positive test via DawgCheck, and the University is not officially notified yet.

A number of faculty are asking SCO about contact tracing procedures, particularly how that impacts their classes, which is adding a significant volume of emails for SCO to respond to and detracting from their ability to support students. As a reminder:

  • SCO does not do contact tracing
  • Students report additional details (e.g. close contacts, spaces where they have been) via DawgCheck, and that information is shared with the Department of Public Health (DPH)
  • DPH conducts all contact tracing and communicates directly with anyone who may have been a close contact
  • Faculty do not need to conduct contact tracing or handle additional notifications—these responsibilities are done by SCO or DPH as appropriate

If supervisors become aware of multiple faculty, staff, or students testing positive in a single classroom or other shared space, they should contact their department head or dean to coordinate engagement with the Preventative Measures Advisory Board (PMAB) by email or through the PMAB Help Desk. The PMAB and unit leadership—together with the Medical Oversight Task Force, Facilities Management Division, and/or others—will discuss the next steps and additional measures that may be appropriate

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