Check, Please
A team of vaccine card-checkers proved key to safely bringing 40,000 people back to campus in fall 2021.
On Aug. 6, 2021, 10 days before NC State was set to start the fall semester, an email from the university went out to all faculty, staff and students. Its subject line was blunt: “Get vaccinated or get tested weekly.”
That requirement meant that Student Health Services went to work on the next phase of its almost two-year effort in battling the spread of COVID-19 on campus. Nurses, immunization staff and others started checking the vaccination cards that were uploaded to the online portal to confirm an individual’s vaccination status.
Some records had trickled in over the summer and had been checked as they came in. But that still left some 20,000 to check, which the staff completed in about six weeks. And these weren’t cursory glances. Dr. Julie Casani, director and medical director of NC State’s Student Health Services, says her staff looked at every detail, including the person’s name, date of birth, which vaccine they got, the dates of the doses and where it was administered.
If there was an anomaly, such as a card missing the date of birth, Student Health Services staff reached out to the person to get clarity. Sometimes a record required more legwork. “We were looking at documents from China,” says Casani. “We were looking at documents from India, which were in multiple languages. The [European Union] has this specific document. We were looking at that, and that’s usually in two languages, English and the country of origin of the person. . . . Some of us learned how to read Sinopharm and Sinovac, which are the Chinese vaccines.”
Casani says they didn’t find many fake cards. Having that extra layer of assurance the uploaded cards provided was something Casani and her staff committed to early on. (Some universities only required an attestation from an individual that they’d been vaccinated, rather than proof.) The process, Casani says, was key in seeing that NC State’s campus enjoyed a somewhat normal fall.
What Progress Looks Like:
Twenty
That’s how many total staff it took to pull off that record-checking feat. A staff member could do about five vaccination cards an hour, given all the information they had to check.
7,000
The weekly average of COVID-19 tests administered on campus during the fall semester. That’s down from 11,000 a week last spring. The reason? More people were vaccinated, so fewer tests were needed.
500
The daily number of vaccinations Student Health Services was giving at the height of vaccination efforts on campus this fall.
84 %
The portion of the campus community, including staff, faculty, undergraduate and graduate students, who either were vaccinated on campus or submitted their vaccination records to the HealthyPack portal, as of Dec. 1 2021. This was up from 45 percent last summer.
“You convince, you convince, you cajole. You educate. And then eventually, if you think it’s important enough, you do a carrot-stick kind of thing. And you give alternatives,” Casani says. “So we gave alternatives with testing. And people started getting tired of getting tested every week. So they said, ‘What the heck, I’ll go get the shot.’”
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