© 2025 SDPB Radio
Play Live Radio
Next Up:
0:00
0:00
0:00 0:00
Available On Air Stations

Teaching Heathcare Students About COVID-19

Lori Walsh: The South Dakota Board of Regents has announced all public universities will move to online learning for at least the next two weeks in light of public health concerns regarding coronavirus. Professor Elizabeth Racz is an epidemiologist and public health expert at South Dakota Mines and Technology. She teaches in the pre-health and biology program on campus, and she joins us now on the phone. Dr. Racz, welcome. Thanks for being here.

Dr. Elizabeth Racz: Thank you.

Lori Walsh: The fact that Dr. Racz teaches at Mines I'm sure is a pretty big celebratory kind of a kind of thing there. You're at the right college. Right?

Dr. Elizabeth R...: Absolutely. It's great to be at such a science and engineering and focused school.

Lori Walsh: All right, tell us a little bit about when you started talking with your students about the possibility of not only online learning, but the possibility of a global pandemic that could reach into our lives as well.

Dr. Elizabeth R...: Well, we began talking to the students early about the potential pandemic and the complications from the newly named COVID-19 virus. We started back in February. We simply knew that we had to address this. I took time out of class, let the students ask me their questions. I turned the class periods into question and answer sessions, and this allowed me to give them information about the new novel coronavirus, but also allay their fears a little bit. If they were kind of wondering, "Hey, are we overreacting to this?" They had questions about, what is this virus? How is it different? Are these numbers inflated that we're hearing? And so, it was a real chance for us to talk about critical thinking, because their questions were leading them to critical thinking points. It's not just about this fact or that fact, but that they're the questions. They're asking, what does the data say? Not, is this case, or are we overreacting in this case? Are we underreacting? But, let's look at what the data says and make a response from there.

I wanted my students to not just react. I wanted them to think about what they're being told. So, we also covered different terminology. We covered vocab words, like what does isolate mean versus quarantine? So, isolate is when you have it and you're staying isolated. When you're quarantined, it's the isolated group plus the group that were exposed to, or potentially exposed to, the agent that we're talking about. It was a real chance just to let the students get a picture of what's going on. For my more advanced biomedical physiology students, they really had a sobering moment that I noticed in the classroom when we started discussing the fact that they were the up and coming physicians, health workers, biomedical researchers, and that they would possibly have to deal with something like this in the future and be calling the shots. That was very sobering for them.

Lori Walsh: And galvanizing in some ways, I would guess. You know that you're in the right field if you sort of feel like you're ready to rise to that occasion in the future.

One of the things and challenges we've seen is that young people such as college students are generally, it's looking as if they're not as effected by this, and that has created certain challenges for behavior, especially as all this happening in the United States around spring break and, you know, in the middle of a spring semester where some people were sent home but not sent home right away in colleges across the state, so they had some opportunities to celebrate a little bit before they left campus. Some were already traveling. What has sort of the, you know, how have you kind of dealt with that impact of getting young people to think about why that would be and how they should behave?

Dr. Elizabeth R...: Well, first, I think young people now, yes we are seeing that the cases aren't impacting them as terribly as other age demographics. However, many students have and many young people have underlying conditions, and they do need to be aware that that puts them at greater risk. As far as communicating with our students and talking with young people about the importance of washing your hands and taking these steps of self quarantine, even though you may only have a mild case, the most effective approach that I have found is to remind them of the good they can do. Remind them that they are protecting grandparents and parents and other friends who have underlying conditions. And, that can be quite sobering.

Lori Walsh: This is also a huge challenge for professors and for students. A dance major, a chemistry major as students in the, there's so much of college that really can't be done online, which is why we send people to college in the first place. Not just from a social standpoint, but from an academic standpoint. How do these students, these future scientists and engineers and researchers continue the rigorous coursework that they need to do at a time of disruption?

Dr. Elizabeth R...: I think the first thing we need to do is remind them that we are working very hard to keep them on track academically. That the faculty, staff, the entire South Dakota Board of Regents system is trying to provide them a quality education and keep them on track. They will have some adjustments to make if their course was not online prior to the recent changes that we've had going out. There are some feelings of being overwhelmed. But, I think we do just need to remind the students that we are working to get the classes online, get the materials that they need online, and conduct the testing that they need to show us that they are learning. So, we have tools as faculty. We have tools, we have software, we have the ability to put our lectures online, prerecorded so the students can listen to them.

We will be making changes to the program, at least in my classes. I'm making some changes to my syllabus. I'm adding more worksheets. I'm adding more written essay so I can see that they're writing things out by hand, because getting the information out, we have software programs that we use to communicate with the students already. We use D2L, we can use Zoom, regular email, so communication isn't a huge problem. It's more about, or the ability to communicate isn't a huge problem. It's more about communicating often enough, almost communicating here at first so we know we're all on the same page and the students really are getting that quality information, and if they're not, then we just troubleshoot it and keep working on it until they get it.

Lori Walsh: As an epidemiologist, as a public expert, a public health expert, I'm sure you're also getting a lot of questions from friends and family and colleagues who are in different fields and they're asking the same thing. Are we overreacting? Are we underreacting? What's your message?

Dr. Elizabeth R...: I don't think that we're underreacting at this point. Overreacting, we need to pull out all the stops right now. That's not really the issue. If we look back with 20/20 hindsight and say, "Well, you know, we didn't use those extra ventilators that we organized," I think that we will be happy that we're at least looking back in hindsight and saying, "Well, we did the best we could. Maybe it was more than enough, but we've saved lives."

Lori Walsh: When you look back in your expertise at other, you know, much as being written about the Spanish flu or Ebola or other pandemics, other worldwide health challenges, public health challenges, are there useful comparisons, and did we learn from those previous events that gives us knowledge we can apply now?

Dr. Elizabeth R...: I think we do need to look back at former outbreaks and pandemics. They do inform us on how to handle quarantine better. What are issues that might come up? How were those issues handled? Were they handled well? It may give doctors, physicians, and nurses on the ground interacting with patients who are very ill insights into how to treat them. We don't have our modern tool kit ready. We don't have our vaccine ready yet. We don't have our antivirals ready yet. So, we do need to rely on the lessons learned from prior outbreaks. Those are the tools we can use.

Lori Walsh: The state of South Dakota currently has 11 positive cases. 551 tests have come back negative. There are 35 tests pending, and we're being told by the state Department of Health that we don't have community spread of the disease at this time because all those cases are travel related, they can document those. We're anticipating those numbers are going to increase, and increase maybe even at alarming rates based on what's happened in other communities. Is that what you're anticipating too?

Dr. Elizabeth R...: I anticipate that we will certainly keep the numbers updated as best we can. I know the South Dakota Department of Health is tracking with testing as best they can. I think part of the scariest thing for me about the numbers that we're seeing is that we're not seeing all the numbers.

We know that this, when we have a person who's infected with this novel COVID-19 virus, that they can spread it to two to three people, and that multiplies very, very quickly out into the public, and I think this leads into issues with testing. As we increase our testing we are going to find more cases and we will see spikes. Now, if those spikes are overloading our healthcare system, that's when we're going to really run into problems. I think right now, as of about a week ago, the state had about 900 test kits. We've used, as you were saying, around 500 of those. There are more, it has been said that there are more that have been requested. I don't know the status on when those are arriving, but that is a major concern. We want to get a full picture of what's happening so we can take the proper steps.

One issue that we don't always think about with the results that we're getting from the testing, the testing results that we see on the day we get them are from the past. They're from a few days ago, and so a lot of times in public health when you want to make a difference, it feels like you're overreacting because you're responding to the cases that haven't happened yet, and when you have a spike, you don't know that until days later. So, you need to put requests out to the public to self quarantine, etc ahead of time, and that's why I think for many people it feels like sometimes we're overreacting, and then later we're like, "Oh no, it really did hit." I'm glad we did that.

Lori Walsh: Dr. Anthony Fauci said, "If it looks like you're overreacting, you're doing it right."

Dr. Elizabeth R...: That's correct. In public health, I mean, it's hard to prove a zero. Oh, I prevented that. You know, it's harder to see for the public, but I think as long as we know that we still have cases coming in or we know that we don't know what the landscape of this virus looks like in our state or in our country, we need to be prudent.

Lori Walsh: When we did these conversations earlier in this week and talked to healthcare providers about what their process was, and we heard from everyone that they needed to prioritize their testing. So, people are calling, we're hearing from people who are calling with symptoms who are not able to get a test, and so they're choosing to self isolate or they're being, you know, requested to self isolate. But, really they can't even get the test. Would a massive amount of test, would an influx of tests so where everyone could get a test who had symptoms or who had been exposed to someone, you know, who had traveled, you know, those three criteria that we're hearing about, if you had a massive influx of tests, would that help the problem? Because, we would have more data. Is that how I understand that?

Dr. Elizabeth R...: Correct. If we had more tests, we would have more data. To do basic epidemiological assessments, we need to know about the cases and where they are and who has them and who has interacted with whom. We need to track, it's really being a disease detective with no clues. If we have a huge influx of tests and a huge influx of people, we do need to be very careful we're not over exposing our healthcare workers, so you do need to still need to call your health professional before you go in for a test, for example, especially if you think you might be infected.

Lori Walsh: All right. Any other thoughts that you might have about this that we haven't, questions to pay attention to? What are those really smart questions that we need to look into in the future here in the coming days?

Dr. Elizabeth R...: I think in the coming days we need to remember to be compassionate. We are hoarding, we are doing the best we can to hold it together while our children aren't in school. People are doing balancing acts of the new schedules and how do I pay the bills. Even if it's not hitting them yet right now in South Dakota, they have family members and friends in other states that this is affecting. So, I think we need to remember, you know, to communicate with people as we can virtually. We need to help people not feel so alone and isolated even as they are in self quarantine or in isolation. And so, really finding that compassion, checking on your neighbors as you can.

Obviously, you don't want to expose anyone to potential infection, but it is important to make sure that we don't buy out the store because there is a timing issue, especially in more densely populated issues with food delivery. We don't want people to not be able to have access to resources they need. Something else I think we really need to think about is adjusting our world view, especially when it comes to triage. I think that's sort of the new word we need to educate people on. What is triage? Why would it possibly start? And, the issues surrounding that word.

Lori Walsh: That's interesting. I was listening to something on the radio last night, and Governor Cuomo in New York City was saying, you know, that these people who are particularly vulnerable with cancer and, you know, heart disease, they're already vulnerable, so we want to take care of them, but to keep in mind, and my brother has a four year cancer fight, and it just made me so angry because I thought, but then it also made me think more deeply because I thought you just prioritized him at the bottom and said, you know, he's a goner anyways, kind of what it came across as. But, at the same time these are the things that we start thinking more broadly about our lives and caring for other people and, you know, the most vulnerable among us, but then also thinking about how can we stay out of the system so people like that can get through. So, for all the people who hoarded masks, and now my brother can't get his, and that's a real challenge. People need to think about their behavior as well as their worldview, yeah.

Dr. Elizabeth R...: That's absolutely right. Who is in your community? What can you do, even in small ways, not buying something that you don't absolutely need that someone else might? Because, we do have these very poignant moments when it hits us personally, with your brother, with someone's grandparent or parent that we really realize, "Wow, I have to make a difference here," and those are the situations that we need to pay attention to. We need to wash our hands, even if you're young and healthy, so you are protecting the most vulnerable. Because, we don't want to end up in a situation where we are using words like triage.

We need to take our lessons from places like Italy and say, what can we do ahead of time? We are trying to flatten the curve. Will we flatten it enough? We're trying, but we need to so we don't have the vulnerable in really terrible situations, and causing major mental health issues for healthcare workers and the public in general.

Lori Walsh: Dr. Racz, I hope you'll come back in the future as we navigate this. This is certainly an ongoing story, and we're hoping we can use you as a public health expert and resource in the future. We really appreciate your time today.

Dr. Elizabeth R...: Absolutely. Thank you so much for helping get the facts out.

You access all of SDPB's local COVID-19 coverage at www.sdpb.org/covid

Tags