Owls Continue Responding to COVID-19 Pandemic

As COVID-19 continues to affect us all, FAU students, faculty and staff remain committed to providing education and research to benefit our local and global communities.

With the arrival of the pandemic, more healthcare professionals turned to telehealth or telemedicine to connect with their patients, through videoconferencing, remote monitoring, electronic consults and wireless communications. In response to the increasing popularity of virtual visits, FAU’s Christine E. Lynn College of Nursing launched a new 20-hour online telehealth certification course. The course will provide students with the tools and knowledge they need to communicate virtually and deliver skilled telehealth services with competence and care. For more information on the program, visit nursing.fau.edu/telehealth, call 561-297-6261 or email telehealth@health.fau.edu.

A research team from FAU’s Charles E. Schmidt College of Medicine developed a simplified COVID-19 testing protocol that offers a distinct advantage over the standard viral or universal transport medium (VTM). This testing protocol can detect minimal quantities of the SARS-CoV-2 using samples from nose and throat swabs as well as saliva, and can be used in research laboratories with minimal equipment and expertise. This is great news as we continue to see a lack of COVID-19 testing in the U.S., and many of the protocols require labor and materials that could become scarce.

A team from the College of Engineering and Computer Science made local news for their research using wastewater on the Boca Raton campus to detect and locate COVID-19 cases. The virus is shed through human waste, which then collects in lift stations on campus. By testing samples from the various lift stations, COVID cases can be pinpointed to specific buildings. This data can help predict where cases may spike in the near future, and can also be used to detect the flu and other illnesses.

For COVID-19 updates and information about how you can Protect Your Owl Family, visit our dedicated website at https://fau.edu/coronavirus/.