Dear Birck Faculty & Research Community, First and foremost, we have NOT had a known exposure in Birck. But as students return to campus and classes resume we're seeing reports of a few positive COVID cases around the Purdue community and we wanted to assure our researchers that we're preparing for a possible future exposure in our facility. We want to be fully prepared. The university is doing a good job of communicating and enforcing the Protect Purdue Pledge and when positive cases are identified the university goes into Contact Tracing mode to determine who the infected individual was interfacing with, and where they had traveled. It seems inevitable that at some point in the future someone who is infected may be in one of our labs. If that happens we will be notified that an infected person may have been in Lab X, but we won't know the identity of the person due to HIPPA regulations. If and when we get such a notification from the contact tracers we will immediately go into a recovery/sanitization mode. Recovery/sanitization mode means we will close that particular lab (not the whole facility) for a period of time and take actions to disinfect the surfaces within the lab. Wet labs will remain closed for at least 72 hours, and dry labs will remain closed for at least 24 hours. These are guidelines established by CDC pertaining to how long the virus can survive on wet vs. dry surfaces. Additionally the POCs have given us delay times to shut down experiments prior to closing the lab. In most cases this is only 1 - 3 hours. POCs (Points of Contact) of each lab are identified as the primary contacts who will direct the sanitization, and individual staff scientists and engineers are back-up/secondary support for the decontamination efforts. See chart below. In order to prepare for this possibility so we can make informed, practiced, and reviewed decisions we will be conducting within the next week a 'dry run' of the sanitization protocol for lab 2233. This will involve a mock-up of an exposure, closure protocol and practice in sanitizing the lab. This will help us prepare for a real event if and when it happens in the future, and we will be prepared with PPE and a level of experience. Thanks for your support as we prepare and practice. Please let me know if you have any questions/comments. R. Reger [cid:image001.png@01D67C8C.A7635960]
