Let's Talk UNLV

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Alright, welcome to another segment of Let's Talk UNLV on KUNV. You with co-host Keith and Renee. Renee, how was your weekend?

0:00:14
It was pretty chill. I went to the golf course and ate at the Buckman's Grill. Had a little brisket melt and some chili. It was on point, man. It was on point. That was my weekend what about you know in

0:00:28
the words of Jerry Maguire you know movie you had me at brisket oh that's just my weakness when I hear brisket especially burnt ends oh yeah yeah it's over it's over it was all good but you know hey it's been great you know the weather's finally broke we're out of this 100 degree weather hopefully the triple digits and you know I just sat in the backyard and had footballs back and just watching college football, watching NFL. So it just...

0:00:53
Yeah, a lot of good games. Alabama, Florida and yeah, Clemson and somebody.

0:00:59
Yeah, great. And the other thing that's great is just to see fans back in the stadium and just things sort of getting back to a sense of normalcy. And that's timely because we have, as the campus reopened and we're talking about how do we reopen safely and keep and remain open. You know we have Dr. Brian Labus who's rejoining us

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who's the assistant professor School of Public Health. Dr. Labus welcome back to

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the show. Thanks for having me back. So Brian tell us what's going on with this Delta variant. I mean I know the numbers are How did you stop? The numbers right now in southern Nevada are on the downward side of this fourth wave. So things are getting better here. The cases are decreasing. We've kind of plateaued a little bit around a 10% positivity rate, which is still not good, but at least things are heading in the right direction. It's a little confusing when you look at the statewide numbers, though, because those continue beginning of August, they are maybe peaking right now and are heading back the other direction hopefully soon but that's driving the numbers up statewide. So if you look statewide it's this really confusing picture because we're not experiencing the disease at the same time. And we know that people get their

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facts and information from different sources. You're our source. Not us, right? Right.

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Brian.

0:02:25
Brian is our source. And Brian, we trust, right? So Brian, could you sort of educate all the listeners to explain the Delta variant and how it formed and how it affects the body, if different from the original COVID-19 vaccine?

0:02:41
So the Delta variant is just one of probably millions of mutations that have happened with this particular virus. Every time somebody gets infected, there is the potential for a new mutation because when the virus copies itself, it's slightly sloppy and how it copies itself and it builds or it creates changes as it's multiplying in your body. And most of those changes aren't good for the virus. They cause problems or they don't give it any benefit at all so they don't really stick around. There's no pressure for them to hang around. Every once in a while though, we get something like the Delta variant. In that case, the changes are in the surface protein and it allows it to get into cells more easily. So that has been the biggest change, just that simple change in the structure of the virus allows transmission to happen more easily. We see higher viral loads in people, so there's

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a lot more virus in the body if you get infected with it and it just makes it

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much easier to spread from person to person. The vaccine still works against it. Everything we know about COVID is still basically the same, just the enemy has become one that spreads more easily and we have to respond accordingly. Okay, so do I need a boost? Do I not need a boost? I mean is the boost on the way? What's going on? That's not clear at this point. So we realize that for immunocompromised people, people that had say an organ transplant really wipe out the immune system. Those people may not have responded as well to the first two doses as the average person. So for those people, those with those very severe immunocompromising conditions, they were told to get a third dose so that they can have the same response as everyone else. That has been approved, that's out there so if you're in one of those categories, the very, very high risk, you should get the third dose. For everybody else, it's not exactly clear yet how that's all going to play out. The White House said they want to do the third dose and their plan was to actually start vaccinating people this week, but that ignored the realities of how we actually approve vaccines. And so the FDA has to approve it first to say it's safe and effective. And then the CDC says, okay, it's now recommended and part of our schedule. The FDA met last week and they did an emergency use for people 65 and older and those with some underlying health conditions but they didn't say it should be used for the general population. There were concerns that there just wasn't enough data to look at a few of the things and so it's kind of premature with the data we had to say that it's that it made sense to use the vaccine for everybody. So right now we're still waiting on the CDC to look at that. The FDA has to make their official recommendation, and the CDC takes that up, I think, the end of this week and looks at what's going to be recommended. And then we'll have more guidance on who should get that dose. But right now, it doesn't look like, for the general population, a third dose is recommended at this point.

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And then, Brian, what about just the initial dose? I know before it was up to six below, I mean, going down to age 16, I think it went down to 12. Are there still conversations for the vaccine to go to lower age population?

0:05:48
Absolutely. So yesterday, Pfizer announced in a press release, it wasn't done with a scientific article or anything like that, so we haven't seen the data, but they announced that the early data from their studies in kids 5 to 12 showed that it's safe and effective and that it does a good job of preventing COVID in that population. They're using a lower concentration as well. So you get 30 micrograms as an adult. They were using one-third of that in kids. Kids are much smaller, though, so you don't need as much. And they were showing that was just as effective in getting the immune response, and they were trying to avoid any side effects in younger kids, and it looks like that's effective. We still haven't seen all the data from that. All we've seen is just kind of their announcement that it looks like it's working, but it's not surprising. So they are doing that, and then Moderna and Johnson & Johnson will be following them a bit because they got licensed later. They're just a few weeks behind Pfizer on the whole approval process, but right now there's data showing that it's safe and effective, so we would expect hopefully by the end of the year some sort of approval for younger children, and then they're still continuing the studies going from six months of age up to five years of age.

0:06:54
Okay. And then, you know, with the onset of the Delta variant, how has UNRV had to change its plans for reopening? Or what guidance have you provided to the university leadership in how we should reopen or practice that we should adopt to remain open?

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Well, when we got to the end of the spring semester, people were getting vaccinated. The vaccine was being made available to everyone. And we were still at the point where people were getting vaccinated. We hadn't hit that wall yet where there were a lot of vaccine hesitant people. That showed up over the summer. And so our vaccine rates stopped climbing as quickly as they were. And then Delta variant showed up in June and basically changed the entire game. And so in the, at the end of the spring semester, it was kind of looking like we'd be able to go back to normal, everybody be vaccinated, and we'd be through the pandemic essentially. When the virus changed, we had to change. We know that things spread more easily, and so that's going to be a concern. We've reduced the percentage of classes we had that were in-person. We are about, I think, 60% in-person now. Originally planned that we were over 80% in-person, so we had to back off on that a little bit to try and just reduce the density on campus. We don't have the luxury of having rooms where people can really spread out everywhere because we have a limited number of classrooms. And so we were looking at that and trying to make sure we weren't packing people in too closely. And with a lot of classes being canceled, some of those classrooms that were full could move to other rooms now and spread out a bit more. So that's really been the biggest thing in terms of how we plan for the semester. But then the real change was the vaccine mandate and requiring that all students get vaccinated. The governor's order that started with all employees must be vaccinated or have weekly testing. And then, and she right now looking at just making it a vaccine only and getting rid of that testing option so that we basically have close to 100% of our campus vaccinated, which is going to give us the best protection and allow us to return to some semblance of normalcy.

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And then what similar guidance was given to like maybe like in the residence halls, if you're going to be living there, if you're going to be frequenting like the library or like the rec center or the student union, were there any guidance given to those individuals who are sort of managing those spaces or even the students who

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are frequenting those spaces? Well, the thing that's changed for all of them has been the governor's mandate that everyone wear a mask. So by the end of the spring semester, we were at the point we said, all right, if you've been vaccinated, you don't have to wear a mask in public anymore. And Delta variant showed up not long after that. So early in June, we said, you know, even if you are vaccinated, you should wear your mask when you're in indoor spaces. So we went from getting rid of the mask mandate to basically putting it back in. Now that happened over the summer and when we were in the spring, we didn't have a very high density of people on campus, so it didn't come into play that much, but that was basically the guidance that we had to give to all those facilities that we still have to enforce the mask mandate for everybody. The one that we temporarily got rid of for a few brief weeks, we had to put that back in place and we just kind of went back to the way we were doing things before. So it's not like we had to do things all that differently. One big change for the Student Union is the way we have events and gatherings. In the spring semester we restricted how many people could be in attendance at events and other types of things you could do at events. So we were trying to have small events outside and then we said for a lot of them we just weren't going to hold them because there was too much risk. And now we're allowed to do those sorts of things with the vaccine and with masks and all that. There's still some risk there but we're able to mitigate that and reduce that risk. So we are at the point now where we have a lot fewer restrictions on events. Huge events still require some approval through the university but student organization gatherings and things like that do not require any sort of pre-approval, and we don't have to worry about all the steps that we had previously to try and protect people

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because the vaccine is available now. Sorry, talk to us about the challenge that you see when you're talking about the REC users. I know there's some differences in how that might be approached with the, you know, mask mandate, and then folks are concerned that they're not able to fully, you know, participate in their recreational activities for their own, you know, wellness and their own, you know, physical strengthening and endurance and, you know, ways of exercising, but we had to still

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follow the mask mandate. So talk about that tough decision. This one has been a giant challenge for us to deal with and unfortunately we're kind of in a no-win situation. So the governor's mandate says that everybody has to wear a mask. And he specifically said you have to wear it in gyms. Even if you're working out, you have to wear the mask. So we are required to enforce a mask mandate with everybody. Not every place in town is gonna enforce it probably as strictly as we are, but we are all state employees. So it's not like we can ignore what the governor's saying and just do our own thing and then worry about getting in trouble later it's really different when you actually work for the governor so it's something that we have had to enforce unfortunately and as a result um it was very difficult to get people to comply with that and the only option was to shut down some of the facilities then specifically the basketball courts have been a a huge challenge because people don't want to wear the mask when they're playing basketball and it makes absolute sense why they don't want to but the governor's rule says they have to. So if nobody's wearing the mask, the only way we can enforce it is to shut down the courts. And so it puts it in a situation of no matter what we do, it's going to be a problem. We want to protect people, but we have a set of rules that we have to follow, and it's not really our call. We don't have the ability to say, go ahead and do what you want, or we'll just say you don't have to wear a mask on the court or anything like that because we can't make those exceptions to the governor's mask mandate. So it puts us in this really unfortunate position where nobody's happy and I'd love to see it resolved, but it's really the challenge of dealing with these kind of mandates in the middle of a pandemic.

0:13:03
So let's shift a little gear, some gears here. Getting tongue tied today, what is going on? Get it together, Renee.

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That's what happens when we don't record for a few weeks. We've gotten rusty.

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Okay.

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But no, shifting gears because, you know, as you said, the numbers are turning in the right place and now I'm looking at, you know, the Halloween candy is everywhere. You know, I see the costume stores have opened. We're going to be going into November with Thanksgiving and so forth. And so talk to the families and talk to the students who might be thinking about shifting their the ways that they're spending these holidays and how they seem to be mindful of the Delta variant and COVID. Well everything we

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said about the holidays last year holds true this year. There's going to be a risk when you bring people together. If you have a bunch of people indoors in close contact there's an increased risk of disease transmission. The big difference between this year and last year though is the the ability for us to get vaccinated and so doing that is going to provide the best protection possible in all of those sort of gathering situations. We don't have to look at Halloween the same way we did last year where it kind of seemed like there's a potential here that this is going to lead to another wave. And the same thing with Thanksgiving and Christmas and New Year's parties and things like that. That potential there but with the vaccine and with more and more people being mandated to get the vaccine and that increasing percentage of protected people in our population, it's going to help blunt the effects of whatever those gatherings are. But still, no matter what you do to protect yourself, it's not going to be perfect. The vaccine does not prevent 100% of cases. Masks plus vaccine still can't stop 100% of cases. They're going to reduce the risk, but it's not going to eliminate it. So you can still be smart when you're planning those gatherings because even though things might be looking a little better, we are still in a pandemic. And so if you're thinking about doing things, smaller is always better, outside is preferable to inside. And if you're thinking about who's there, you really want everybody to be vaccinated. So those are the kind of things that we can do this year. The vaccine is really that biggest difference, but all the stuff that we've thought about for the last two years in terms of disease transmission, we can still do those things. The pandemic's not over. It's not like you can stop washing your hands and stop covering your mouth when you cough because the pandemic's over. You should continue to do those things anyway. And so that's what you have to think about with these gatherings. There's not the same risk as last year, but it doesn't mean that there's no risk.

0:15:28
Well, let me jump in front of you, Renee. So Brian, what I heard through all of this, I have a built-in excuse to not invite certain people to gatherings, right?

0:15:36
Well, you can always find an excuse not to invite people to gatherings, but...

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Well, you know the disembarrading is still out there...

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I'm sure this will divide some families this year, and I'm sure the people who are normally fighting at Thanksgiving or Christmas are just going to find another thing to fight about in politics, and it'll be whether you're vaccinated or not. And I'm sure some people won't be invited to family gatherings because they're not vaccinated. So it does give you that excuse, but really, you want to see your family members protected. You want them to get vaccinated so that they're protecting themselves and you and you know it's not just keeping them out of the house you want to put some pressure on them to get vaccinated just for their own health. So that means gonna be in-house

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trick-or-treat for the Rogers family. You can go to bedroom to bedroom, pass out candy.

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You gotta find it. It's gonna be sort of a hybrid of Easter and Halloween. The can is going to be hidden. You have to

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find it. And you have a pool, so you're good. I mean, you know, the weather will still be

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pretty good. Yeah. Well, you know, the five year old, he don't understand. You can't swim year round. He's thinking like, just hit the pool, just hit the pool. I can just, you know, like, OK. But one of the things that I want to pivot to, you know, you were vital with, you know, advising the state, ENCHI, in particular UNRV, you know, working with the health department. And so I know UNRV was recently recognized through its UNRV Contracting and Tracing Team efforts and was named the 2021 Nevada Public Health Association Public Health Program of the Year, so we want to congratulate you and sort of your role in that. Could you talk a little bit about that work? This is probably the

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best thing that I've been involved in in my career. I had an amazing team of students that did this and it's not employees that were doing this. These were student workers. I had a team of graduate students. I started with seven people and it was a completely volunteer effort. We started working with the Health District to do contact tracing and case investigations. We managed to bring in over five million dollars in funds to continue that with the state and with the Southern Nevada Health District. We had 268 different employees. I think they spoke 29 different languages and it was all led by students. I had an amazing team of graduate student leaders, of supervisors and managers that made this entire team possible. In the end, we investigated over 43,000 cases, which was one out of every six cases in Southern Nevada and to think that I had 18 year old students calling people right after a family member had died and getting the information to them that they needed to protect themselves and others and they were able to take on these incredibly difficult situations and do really well at it. It's just so gratifying. It was an amazing team to work with and like I said it'll probably the best thing that I do in my career. So I'm just curious

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have you thought about what does it mean for you on the other side of this? I mean, I can't imagine the number of calls and emails and invitations such as this and you know, I read your work in the paper. I mean, have you thought about what this will mean for you on the other side of COVID? I mean, how your career will change or what aspects of what you you're doing now you'll want to keep? Well, what I would love to do, and one of the

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things that I talked about when I came to UNLV, was making something like this team a permanent resource. The idea that we could have a team of students that are ready to go to assist health departments when emergencies happen. It's not going to be another pandemic, but we have foodborne outbreaks all the time, or we have vaccine preventable diseases like measles or pertussis. People get sick all the time. We have outbreaks in our community, and the health departments need help in responding to those things. And so I've wanted to start basically a group that has essentially a small version of that contact tracing team, a standing team of people that are able to help and also get this amazing real-world experience so that when they graduate from UNLV with a public health degree, they've already been doing this job for a year or two and it helps them

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find a job when they start to interview. And the students that were part of the contract tracing team, did they have to have certain experiences or in certain disciplines?

0:19:45
When we hired people, we asked them about their background. We were trying to find people that would be the easiest to train, but we had to hire 200 people essentially overnight. So it wasn't like we could even do full interviews for people. We had online forms that they filled out. We were looking for if they had the ability to speak a different language, that was always a plus because we were calling people in our community that didn't necessarily speak English. So there's a good chance you'll have someone at the other end of the line every day that speaks Spanish and only Spanish, so it's helpful if you do as well. But the diversity of the UNLV student body really came through with that. Like I said, we had just tons of different languages out there. We had people that spoke all kinds of things from all over the world, so that was a plus. If they had some healthcare experience, that was a plus. If they had some customer service experience that was a plus. We were looking for people that that would be able to just step up and do the job and we were fortunate to find a great team of people who could do that. But all those skills they had, the ones they think that that oh it's just a job I had in high school and while you worked at Starbucks and McDonald's you were in a frontline position dealing with customers, talking to people and those sort of things were helpful when you had to call somebody and now talk to them about COVID. So maybe share with us the reactions from the students that were honored with this award. What how do they feel? What was their takeaway when they received this honor? Well I think everybody on our team is incredibly proud of the work that we have done. To talk to them you'll realize this is a for a lot of them a life-changing event. It helped refine their career. It helped them figure out what they wanted to do when they graduate. I've had people become public health majors as a result of this. And so, I think it helped people find the path that they want to be on or for a lot of them, confirm that they had chosen the right path and this is what they want to do for the rest of their lives. So, this team has been a big influence for a lot of our students. And it's always nice to be recognized with awards like that. I was very proud that we got this award because it's really the students that did all the work, and it's something they should all be very proud of.

0:21:51
So sort of given where we are as a state, where would you say we are in terms of the percentage of the population who's eligible to be vaccinated is fully vaccinated?

0:22:04
I think the numbers are somewhere in the low 60 percent now range. As soon as we open it up to people 5 to 12, that's going to add another huge group of people. So we'll see that percentage drop. But I don't just look at the percent that is vaccinated, I compare it to the percent that needs to be vaccinated to really protect us. And we need still to do a much better job than we're doing right now if we want to reach those levels where that it becomes something that's under control like a lot of the other vaccine preventable diseases. We don't worry about measles every single day because most people are vaccinated. We can occasionally have small outbreaks of it and that's what we want to get to with COVID. We're just not near that point yet and it's been really a big struggle over the last couple of months to try and get people vaccinated because we've reached the point now where anybody who wants to get vaccinated is, anybody that can be easily convinced to get vaccinated is, the people who are resistant or completely refusing vaccine are the ones that we're dealing with now, and that's very difficult

0:23:01
to make progress in that group. And what is that preferred threshold for the, or what percentage of the population should be vaccinated, and so that we could get to this point to where we are with some of these other, like measles, etc., so we don't have to be concerned about it day to day.

0:23:16
For a long time we were saying 70% was our target and that was based on how the virus spreads. We have a delta variant that spreads much more easily now and so that's going to put the percent we need in the 80-90% range. It's going to be nearly everybody in our population vaccinated to really protect us. So the more the virus can spread, the more people we have to vaccinate to keep things under control. But even then, once we reach those levels, it doesn't mean that it's going to completely go away because the unvaccinated people sometimes will cluster together and so there'll still be transmissions within the populations within a population, whether it's a neighborhood or a school or something like that. If there's a lot of people unvaccinated in those areas, that's where the transmission is going to occur. You'll find other places where 100% of people are vaccinated and they're not really seeing transmission. But in general, it will keep things under control in the community.

0:24:08
And could you speak to maybe some of the conversational thinking behind some of these incentive programs that have rolled out to motivate those who are not vaccinated to get vaccinated?

0:24:20
We've tried to do anything we possibly can to get people vaccinated. Some people are convinced simply on the idea that here's the vaccine, here's the information showing the risk and the efficacy and the safety and all that and they don't want to get COVID and they see it as safe. Those people are really easy to deal with so we didn't have to do much with them. We're at the point now where we're trying to convince people that this is a safe and effective vaccine and it's not that it's not that it's not, it's that they have that perception that it isn't. So we need to change those incorrect perceptions and get people to want to get vaccinated. So whatever we can do, whether it's having the event some more fun, offering some sort of perks, or like a couple of municipalities have done, giving a gift card for $100 to every person who gets vaccinated, it's pushing people toward doing it in a way that speaks to them. And that's the real challenge. Whatever hesitation they have a resistance to getting vaccinated is very personal and it's not like there's a one-size-fits-all approach. You

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really have to deal with it at that individual level and everything we can try might work for one person and might not for somebody else and so we're going to

0:25:43
keep trying more and more things. So we're going to get you out of here on this last question. When you were here last you gave us the you know Bryanism you know

0:25:39
you. So what do you got this time?

0:25:43
You know, I don't really have anything like that to say. I think the thing to think about is the safety of this vaccine. We are talking about a vaccine that is not perfect by any means. No vaccine is. But the safety of this vaccine is so much better than just about every other vaccine we've dealt with. The side effects are rare. You might get a sore arm for it for a day or so. You might not feel great. But it's really not causing those side effects or serious problems. And so I think people really just have a huge challenge with understanding the risk of the vaccine versus the risk of the disease. And honestly, the most dangerous part of getting vaccinated is driving to the site. You are much more likely to have something bad happen on your drive than you are from the vaccination itself. And if you're willing to accept the fact that every time you get in a car there's a certain amount of risk, the risk from vaccination is much lower than that. And so in comparison, it is a much safer thing to do than get the disease or even a lot of the things that we do in our day-to-day lives.

0:26:43
All right. Well, Brian, thank you for joining us again and enlightening us and just giving us a current state of affairs concerning the Delta variant. And I know that our listeners are going to benefit greatly from just sort of your wisdom and guidance and all the work that's been done collectively throughout the state and NG and at the university and in our local communities. Renee, what was some of your key takeaways from today's session?

0:27:07
I think this time it really underscored how our students were a part of this life-changing effort and how it has provided, as you say, clarity about job seeking opportunities as well as changing their majors and just their overall contribution and to be a part of this program and to think about that this could be a program that we continue, I think is cutting edge. And so I think that's a new bit of information that has come out of this podcast that we didn't hear in the past. And so I'm just so elated to hear that that's on the horizon for UNLV as a possibility.

0:27:47
And for me, in addition to that, just hearing how UNLV has been one of the front leaders in how we reopen safely and just making sure that safety remains at the forefront in all decisions that are made in terms of being open and just really pushing for not just staff but students and all of our stakeholders to remain safe.

0:28:09
Like you said, in Bryan we trust.

0:28:11
In Bryan we trust.

0:28:12
All right.

0:28:13
Thank you for tuning in to this week's episode of KUNV Let's Talk UNLV. For my co-host Keith, I'm Renee. For my co-host Keith, I'm Renee. Tune in next week, Wednesday at 12, on KUNV 91.5 Jazz and More. That's a wrap!

Transcribed with Cockatoo