Sustaining University Operations During the COVID-19 Pandemic.

Colleges and universities around the world engaged diverse strategies during the COVID-19 pandemic. Baylor University, a community of ˜22,700 individuals, was 1 of the institutions which resumed and sustained operations. The key strategy was establishment of multidisciplinary teams to develop mitigation strategies and priority areas for action. This population-based team approach along with implementation of a "Swiss Cheese" risk mitigation model allowed small clusters to be rapidly addressed through testing, surveillance, tracing, isolation, and quarantine. These efforts were supported by health protocols including face coverings, social distancing, and compliance monitoring. As a result, activities were sustained from August 1 to December 8, 2020. There were 62,970 COVID-19 tests conducted with 1435 people testing positive for a positivity rate of 2.28%. A total of 1670 COVID-19 cases were identified with 235 self-reports. The mean number of tests per week was 3500 with approximately 80 of these positive (11/d). More than 60 student tracers were trained with over 120 personnel available to contact trace, at a ratio of 1 per 400 university members. The successes and lessons learned provide a framework and pathway for similar institutions to mitigate the ongoing impacts of COVID-19 and sustain operations during a global pandemic.

Comparison of environmental radiation monitoring programs in China and the United States.

The monitoring of environmental radiation has been carried out across the United States by the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency's RadNet (formerly the Environmental Radiation Ambient Monitoring System, ERAMS) and the Global Network Program (GNP) of the Environmental Measurements Laboratory (EML), and in the People's Republic of China (PRC) by their National Radioactivity Contamination Monitoring System (NRCMS). It is expected that an awareness of the similarities and differences in the structure and operation of these programs will prove helpful to both countries and perhaps others as they continue to develop their monitoring capabilities.