Make Meetings Safe Again: New Advisory Board Helps UGA in Fight Against Pandemic

At the beginning of the pandemic, in-person meetings and events were unsafe. During the pandemic, UGA clubs and organizations have relied on advice given to them from the Preventative Measures Advisory Board about how to hold safe events.

After COVID paused in-person learning at the University of Georgia during the Spring semester of 2020, UGA needed a way to help students make safe decisions and avoid spreading the virus.

“It ranges from somebody as a scientist, and they’re trying to do a study, and you want to bring people into a lab, and you want to run them through some things, that’s been a common request for us to look at the protocols,” said Dr. Nowak, Director of Center for Health & Risk Communication at UGA.

This led to the creation of the Preventative Measures Advisory Board (PMAB) a group of thirteen experts who help students and organizations make decisions that follow CDC guidelines and social distancing.

“People who want to hold fundraising events, or social events or 5k races, you name it on just about every kind of event that typically happens in a normal year, we have probably been asked to look at,” said Dr. Nowak.

PMAB takes requests from people associated with UGA and using UGA facilities. They listen to the requests and try to determine whether the event is safe, and offer suggestions to prevent a super spreader event.

“We don’t have the power to say thumbs up or thumbs down, but we can, and we have an occasion, when we felt really strongly that events shouldn’t be held, because there was a really high risk of COVID transmission, where we have said, our recommendation is you don’t hold this event,” said Dr. Nowak.

PMABs efforts on UGA’s campus seems to be working. Looking at statistics shared by UGA, positive COVID cases have been decreasing as the semester continues. Despite this, PMAB knows their work is not complete.

“I think we can all see the light at the end of the tunnel, and we’re getting closer,” said Dr. Nowak. “So it doesn’t make sense these days to forget about the fact that this virus is still out there and can still be easily transmitted.”