Update regarding COVID-19 from President Houston Davis to students, faculty, and staff
Welcome back to campus, Bears, and happy first two days of fall classes! It has been wonderful to see many of you in person and others by Zoom this week as we have returned to campus and enjoyed a series of Welcome Week activities unlike any other. While we have made many accommodations to keep our campus community safe in the time of COVID-19, we hope that our freshman class, our new graduate students, and all of our returning students are enjoying an exciting start to the 2020-21 academic year. UCA Faculty and Staff have worked for months to get us to this point, and I cannot thank them enough for ensuring we all start the fall 2020 semester strong.
Last week, I shared our Student Guide to Returning to Campus to help you understand important changes we have made in order to make the 2020-21 academic year a successful and safe experience for the entire campus community. If you have not yet reviewed it, please take the time to read that informative guide, which is linked here. In addition to the guide, I have a few more important updates I would like to share below.
First, I want to make you aware that the President’s Office will share information about the number of COVID-19 tests we have conducted on campus and through our partnership with Conway Regional Medical Center. This will involve tracking the number of positive results, our positivity rate relative to the local positivity rate, and the number of individuals in on-campus quarantine and isolation housing relative to our capacity for both. This information will be shared publicly on the COVID-19 Response tab of the COVID-19 website and updated on a weekly basis. Click on the UCA “Testing and Tracing Data” box to view the data.
As a reminder, before students and employees leave their residence each day, they should remember to do a self check for the following symptoms:
- Fever of 100.4 or greater in the last two days;
- A cough, difficulty breathing, sore throat, or loss of taste or smell;
- Have had contact with a person known to be infected with COVID-19 in the previous 14 days.
If you have any of those symptoms or other concerns, contact our UCA Student Health Clinic at (501) 450-3136. If you need to call after-hours or on weekends, reach out to our partner, Conway Regional Medical Center, at (501) 504-2330.
As previously announced, face coverings are required in all enclosed spaces and outside when individuals cannot maintain six feet of physical distance. I was so pleased to walk around campus on the first day of classes and see our students wearing their face coverings as well as maintaining distance from others. Great work! These are the most important steps we can all take to help ensure our campus remains safe and we are able to continue with our on-campus instruction and activities.
In the coming weeks, continue paying attention to our COVID-19 website and your university email for regular updates and current information. I am so happy that each and every one of you have chosen to be a part of our Bear family, and I look forward to interacting with you on campus as the semester progresses.
Go Bears!