COVID-19 has caused a year of loss, resilience and progress
Anniversaries are frequently times of celebration. Others are more sobering points of reflection, a chance to look back on the journey we’ve been on and to look ahead. Thursday marked a turning point — a full year since our hospital system in Gainesville admitted its first COVID-19 patient.
That moment changed us all.
For the past 12 months, our health care workers, scientists and university faculty and staff have pulled together to teach, advance discovery, heal our patients and support our communities in unprecedented ways. It has been a year of service and impact.
It has been tiring at times, fraught with challenges. But we are tireless in the quest to defeat the virus and improve the lives of those who depend on us most for compassionate care and for answers to what ails them.
From developing masks made from existing hospital materials when demand was critically high to designing low-cost, open-source ventilators, from launching the UF Health Screen, Test & Protect initiative to help reopen campus to administering the first vaccine doses in Florida, UF faculty, staff and students and UF Health have come together to help serve each other, the community and the state.
We’re certainly not alone. We extend our deep gratitude to all who have adopted healthy habits to help curb the pandemic, and all who helped the community with coronavirus testing, child care, donating supplies and spreading cheer.
Our hearts go out to those who have suffered great personal loss this past year. Together we honor loved ones we’ve lost, and celebrate the resilience of all front-line heroes, including first responders and health care providers, who continue to forge ahead until the virus is defeated.
For all the hard times, we’re heartened by the progress we’ve made. Thousands of COVID patients have been given a new lease on life, coming to us from throughout Florida and beyond, often when they’ve been told they have no other options.
New approaches were introduced. A team of “champions” at the hospital was among the first in the nation to develop strategies for combating delirium in elderly COVID-19 patients, an all-too-common complication. Among the team’s innovations: connecting isolated patients to family via iPads.
UF Health physicians also moved quickly to ramp up telehealth services in the early months of the pandemic. New technologies also emerged. UF Health became one of the first in the world to use a novel device to help coronavirus patients breathe easier, greatly reducing their time on a ventilator.
On the research front, we led key clinical trials, such as a national study that showed combining an anti-inflammatory drug with an antiviral drug reduces recovery time and accelerates improvement for COVID-19 patients. And HiPerGator, UF’s world-class high-performance computer, got a major boost from NVIDIA in the spring, allowing scientists to keep pace with COVID and non-COVID data crunching.
UF Emerging Pathogens Institute researchers initiated testing for COVID-19 at UF as part of an epidemiological protocol. At the hospital, we also rapidly increased our in-house COVID-19 testing capabilities through diverse platforms, which accelerated the delivery of results for UF Health patients and enabled us to scale up testing for the campus community and shorten turnaround times. College of Pharmacy faculty stepped up to help, at one point making reagents that were in critical shortage.
What’s next? We’ve reached out to community leaders, including local pastors and leaders of other faith-based and cultural groups in east Gainesville and beyond, to expand access to vaccines and address vaccination hesitancy. The goal is to equitably distribute vaccines while helping those most at risk for a severe case of COVID-19.
We continue to collaborate with the state Department of Health in Alachua County to vaccinate those who meet current federal and state eligibility requirements, including helping staff the county’s largest vaccination effort to date at UF’s Ben Hill Griffin Stadium in conjunction with the Gators Athletics Department.
This is by no means a comprehensive list. To continue to reflect on just how far we’ve come, join us in looking back on our journey at https://reflections.coronavirus.ufhealth.org/.
We’re grateful for the support of our Gator community, here in Gainesville and around the world, who have made progress possible … and who have helped bring us all hope. And to all of those who have served on the front lines — whether you are greeting patients, transporting them, nourishing them or spending hours at their bedside administering life-saving care — we extend our most sincere appreciation.
As we Gators like to say, in all kinds of weather, we’ll all stick together.
— Ed Jimenez is CEO of UF Health Shands and Colleen Koch is dean of the UF College of Medicine.
