JANUARY 11, 2023 — Editor’s note: The following message was sent via email today from President Taylor Eighmy, Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs Kimberly Andrews Espy, and Chief Financial Officer and Senior Vice President for Business Affairs Veronica Salazar to faculty, staff and students:
Since the start of the pandemic, we have closely monitored the ongoing impact of COVID-19 on the UTSA community. The health and safety of our students, faculty and staff remains our highest priority. San Antonio’s community risk level has recently elevated to medium amidst a minor surge in cases as a result of more infectious COVID-19 variants. Thankfully, the impact to local hospitals remains low at this time. We continue to collaborate with state and local public health experts to thoroughly assess the risk level for regular campus operations, and we have determined that our campus community can look forward to starting classes on January 17 as planned. As always, we encourage you to take recommended precautions and do your part to help keep our community healthy and safe. If you have not already done so, we encourage you to get vaccinated/boosted, particularly with the bivalent booster. Continue to practice good hand hygiene, mask up and monitor your health. These practices are also effective against influenza and RSV, which are also currently seeing an uptick in cases. At this time, we offer free at-home test kits to faculty and staff, on-campus testing at Wellness 360 for students, on-campus vaccine clinics, case management and confirmed case report tracking. We will remain especially vigilant in our monitoring as people return from the winter break. Most importantly, please stay home if you are sick. If you are exposed or diagnosed with COVID-19, be sure to submit a case report and follow masking and isolation guidance as it applies to you. University leadership—in collaboration with UTSA’s Recovery Operations team, San Antonio Metro Health and the UT System public health experts—will continue carefully monitoring our local community risk level, especially around the new XBB.1.5 variant, to ensure we continue to make the best informed decisions to keep our Roadrunner community safe. To learn more about UTSA’s pandemic response and the resources available to Roadrunners, visit the Recovery Operations website. For questions, contact Recovery Operations.
Thank you for doing your part to keep yourself and our entire campus community healthy this semester.
Original source can be found here.
