A Washington, D.C., think tank recently laid out benchmarks for communities to guide them on reopening decisions. The local paper talked with county leaders, including UTMB’s Dr. Ben Raimer, to assess where the community stands in relation to the benchmarks.

President ad interim, Dr. Ben Raimer recently spoke with the press about actions the university is taking to deal with financial impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic. The Galveston County Daily News also covered the press briefing.

Laundromats are an essential business, but many have still closed to protect employees and customers, which means some people may have to handwash their clothes. Providing information for the story, UTMB’s Vineet Menachery says if clothes are more than six feet away from an infected person’s sneezing and coughing, they are safe to line dry.

Gulshan Sharma also comments in this local story about what seems to be a flattening of the COVID-19 curve, which is why UTMB is looking at reopening slowly and selectively.

When 24 state prison systems were asked how many ventilators they had at the ready, only Texas said it had any. In the story, they note that Hospital Galveston on UTMB’s campus has access to equipment such as ventilators. Of the 23 other states that responded, 19 said they had no ventilators and the rest did not answer the question.

UTMB’s Gulshan Sharma is one of the local health care leaders in this story who has seen what appears to be a flattening of the COVID-19 curve.

As part of the COVID-19 response effort, the Galveston National Laboratory is dedicating all lab space and researchers to the search for drugs to prevent the illness. In this story, UTMB’s Peter Melby and Patricia Aguilar discuss those efforts, which includes work done by Pei-Yong Shi.

There are many questions SARS-CoV-2 antibody testing, but most agree it is needed in order to gather data for epidemiological models. They could also indicate whether someone is immune to the illness. UTMB’s Vineet Menachery stresses that antibodies are not a definite indicator of how long someone is immune to secondary infection.

UTMB’s Vineet Menachery provides an answer to the question: can a person get COVID-19 more than once? This is one of many questions answered in this Q&A from Time.

Health care workers face personal challenges at home in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic as reported in this story from Brazoria County. One of the workers discussing those challenges is UTMB’s Sherry Marques at UTMB’s Angleton-Danbury Campus.