Coronavirus Update:
March 21, 2020

Dear Colleagues,

Once again, I want to thank you so much for your cooperation in suspending on-campus research activities until the city and state have a handle on the spread of COVID-19.

One of the challenges we are seeing is a growing shortage of gloves and masks needed by health care providers across the City of Lubbock.

I know that some of you have critical maintenance activity going on in your laboratories with animals, cell cultures, and longitudinal data collection. If you do, you will need the PPE in your laboratories. But some of your laboratories will be relatively idle for the next few weeks or months. For those who have PPE in your laboratory, specifically disposable gloves and N-95 face masks, we want to make an appeal for you to donate these materials to a campus-wide repository we can use to help resupply healthcare providers. The university will keep track of these donations, and we will ensure that your laboratory is re-stocked with the donated materials once this crisis is over.

I am attaching a spreadsheet to this email. If you can donate PPE to this effort, please fill out the sheet with the following information and return it to me: Your name and contact information, the building and room numbers of laboratories that contain gloves and N-95 masks, the approximate amount of the items, and the location of the items in the laboratory. We will have a crew from Safety and my office come around and collect the materials you indicate, and they will record the actual number of boxes of supplies taken. (Naturally, the supplies have to be in spaces that it is actually appropriate for Safety to enter). We plan to create a storage area in the Hub from which HSC will advise us on the distribution of materials.

Thank you for considering this request.

Sincerely,

Joe Heppert
TTU Vice President for Research and Innovation