Responsibilities
Combatting COVID-19 will require an effort from the entire University of South Carolina community, and everyone will be expected to do their part to maintain a clean, safe and healthy environment in which all members of the Gamecock family can live, learn and play.
An interdisciplinary group of public health, clinical medicine, academic and staff experts from across the university, in collaboration with local, state and national officials and public health experts have worked for months on reopening plans.
Reopening campus is based on acceptable risk, the ability to reasonably contain the spread of the virus and properly care for those who are infected. Maintaining acceptable risk will be challenging but not insurmountable if following the risk mitigation measures set forth in the RMP.
As our understanding of the virus continues to shift and evolve, be aware that our
plans may change.
Public Health Measures
The campus has deployed primary public health controls to slow the transmission and reduce disease impact associated with COVID-19. These control measures include availability of appropriate personal protective equipment (PPE); environmental measures such as testing, enhanced cleaning and disinfection as well as physical distancing, and mitigation strategies such as comprehensive testing, contact tracing, isolation and quarantine.
Each of these measures serves to enhance the response capacity of the campus and the surrounding community. Controls are designed, implemented and monitored to contain, prevent and/or mitigate negative strategic, operational, financial, reputational, health and safety impacts on the institution.
Containment measures include surveillance, rapid identification of infection with immediate isolation, contact tracing, quarantine and — when available — future large- scale delivery of COVID-19 vaccines.
Our goal is to keep our community safe by keeping them informed during these unprecedented
times. It takes an entire community working together to accomplish one shared mission:
to flatten the curve through implementing strong public health measures.