The free COVID-19 testing sites will operate on a rotating schedule throughout Tarrant County.

If a Tarrant County resident feels they have been exposed to COVID-19 or feel sick, it is important to get tested.

“Testing remains an important tool in our efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19,” said Tarrant County Judge Glen Whitley. “The county’s testing is free and easily accessible, so there is no reason not to get tested if you suspect you may have COVID-19.”

Tarrant County is currently at the High Community Spread Level, meaning that more than 100 cases per 100,000 have been found in the past seven days.

Previously the Texas Division of Emergency Management had operated testing sites across Tarrant County but reduced their operations due to slowing demand and closed their last sites in June.

These COVID-19 testing sites will remain open as needed. Additional sites and times may be added. COVID-19 testing information is posted online. 

Testing locations

• Monday, 8 a.m. to noon, Northeast Subcourthouse, 645 Grapevine Hwy., Hurst.
• Tuesday, 8 a.m. to noon, Southwest Public Health Center, 6551 Granbury Road.
• Tuesday, 1-5 p.m., Bagsby-Williams Public Health Center, 3212 Miller Ave.
• Wednesday, 8 a.m.-noon, Northwest Public Health Center, 3800 Adam Grubb Road, Lake Worth.
• Thursday, 8 a.m. to noon, Southeast Subcourthouse Arlington 700 E Abram St., Arlington.
• Friday, 8 a.m.-noon, Mansfield Subcourthouse, 1100 E. Broad Street, Mansfield.

Published with permission from the Fort Worth Business Press.

The post Tarrant Co. Public Health Offers Free COVID Testing first appeared on Tanglewood Moms.

Photo courtesy of UNTHSC

That’s how we – students at The University of North Texas Health Science Center (HSC) at Fort Worth – interacted with you at HSC’s COVID-19 drive-through test sites. We stood at your car window, guiding you through the process or in full protective gear doing a nasal swab.

Some of you were nervous or confused. Others calm. Some of you looked sick. Others smiled and held up handmade signs thanking us. All of you trusted us take care of you.

This unique opportunity to serve our community arrived abruptly. COVID-19 forced our classes online and halted our clinical training rotations. HSC students and faculty quickly pivoted to staff phone banks, perform contact tracing, collect and donate protective gear to providers on the front lines and work with HSC faculty and staff to open and operate two COVID-19 test sites.

The first test site opened in the Medical District to serve first responders, then expanded to health professionals, transit worker and, eventually, the public. We opened a second site in southeast Fort Worth to increase access for underserved populations. In all, we put in more than 5,600 volunteer hours and helped test about 2,900 people

Creating a test site from scratch was a master lesson in logistics and problem solving. What was the best traffic flow? How could we communicate clearly and safely to people in cars? What supplies did we need? At the end of every day, we brainstormed how to improve the process for you.

Our experience prepared us to be your future health care providers like no classroom experience could. This was real. We were an interprofessional team of providers – student physicians, physician assistants, nurses and pharmacists – making decisions and working together. This kind of teamwork is the future model for high-quality healthcare delivery.

We divided our test site into three specifically marked zones: cold, warm and hot. A student in the cold zone delivered a test kit to a student in the warm zone, who took it to the hot zone, where a student or faculty member performed the nasal swab. A student safety officer in a green vest monitored each step to prevent cross contamination.

photo credit: Jill Johnson

Through this experience, many of us earned Pandemic Emergency Response and COVID-19 Testing microcredentials, verifying the competencies we have developed and validating our skills for future pandemic responses.

But our most valuable experience came from you. We saw the importance of listening, showing empathy through our words and body language, and the power of clear communication between provider and patient. We felt a profound responsibility to you.

Soon, we will graduate and begin health care careers, many of us here in North Texas. The lessons from COVID-19 will make us infinitely better health care providers in the clinics, hospitals, or pharmacies where we will serve you and your families.

Amanda Plein is a student in the Texas College of Osteopathic Medicine. Delissa Ramirez is a student in the UNT System College of Pharmacy. Madi Garrett is a student in the Physician Assistant Program.

The post A Letter from Your Future Healthcare Providers About COVID-19 first appeared on Tanglewood Moms.

I have a smallish 99.7 fever as I write. The same little fever that’s followed me around for 14 days now, like a shadow that is cast in a certain room and can’t be avoided. I took a 12-minute walk this morning around the block, as I have every morning of the last two weeks, to poke at the parameters of my energy. I ambled slowly, like someone from the Greatest Generation, passing under trees and looking up into the soft green hands of newly sprouted red oak leaves. I breathed in as deeply as I could until the coughing came. When I finally arrived home, my heart rate was up to 146 as though I had been jogging. I needed to sink into a chair for an hour before I could get myself into the shower.

(Usually, I run 3 miles a day, five days a week, no problem. I’m 39 and have no pre-existing health conditions.)

The alert popped up on my app like a flash sale at Target: NEW TEST RESULTS AVAILABLE. No phone call from my doctor, just a message informing me that “SARS-CoV-2RNA NOT DETECTED. Negative results do not preclude SARS-CoV-2 infection and should not be used as the sole basis for patient management decisions.”

I just so happen to live on a street with five ER doctors, two of whom had COVID-19. One of them had told me unequivocally, “You’ve got it. There’s no question. Even if the test comes back negative, you’ve got it.” Apparently, there’s a 30% false negative rate for the tests. My doctor agreed.

Ok. Then. Well. I guess I’ll assume I have it, I thought. Easy enough. Clearly the symptoms line up. But why did I feel so, so — what’s the word? — offended? Yes, snubbed is what I felt, like I had applied for a job for which I had every qualification and then was rejected. DO NOT DENY ME MY BASIC HUMAN RIGHT TO BEING SICK WITH COVID-19. Nobody keeps Julie Rhodes out of clubs!

My husband Gordon was out jogging when my results came in. I was slumped in a chair on the back porch with big ridiculous tears coursing down my cheeks like I had just received a cancer diagnosis.

“What’s the matter?” he said.

“I DON’T HAVE COVID,” I heaved between short, gasping breaths.

“Isn’t that a GOOD thing?” he asked.

I wanted to punch his sweaty stupid beard-face.

A few days before my results came in, Gordon brought home a pulse oximeter. When I had gotten completely winded after changing the pink pillowcase on our daughter’s bed, we decided it would be good to monitor my oxygen. I had eggplant-colored nail polish on, which apparently disrupts the sensitivity on the device, so I rubbed it away from the single pointer finger on my right hand. My oxygen level was good, turned out. I was just having to work harder for it.

The next day, I took off all my nail polish with macabre focus. I heard they did that anyway in the hospital. I’d save them some time. I looked at my gym bag in the closet. What would I need to pack for an ICU stay? Do they let you have your phone? Gordon and I discussed strategy for leaving kids at home in the event of a midnight ER run. Would it be scarier for the kids to wake up alone but with messages on their phones, or would it be scarier for them to wake up to neighbors in the house trying to make things seem like “not a big deal”?

The second negative COVID-19 test was not as upsetting. Weird. I’m not sure why. It came the very next day. Gordon had somehow arranged a second test AND flu test after he found me crying like a cross-cut sorority girl on the porch, and the turnaround was lightning-fast. No COVID-19. No flu.

What in the actual hell.

A friend informed me there was only a 9% of getting two false negatives, which I have taken to mean, of course, that in fact I have leukemia. I stayed up until 11 p.m. the other night, alone in the bed Gordon has vacated, scrolling through Web MD pages of illnesses that match my symptoms. What ARE the chances of developing Leukemia right as COVID-19 is breaking out? Greater than 9%, I guess.

I’m not sure how this is going to play out. The bedrock of my angst lies in how much I CHERISH, no, INSIST UPON, neat, organized categories. Even the awful things in life can be named and put into groups, and this gives a sense of pitiful mastery. Verdicts like “guilty” or “dead on arrival”, and “COVID-19 Positive” are terrible, of course, but they provide a starting point of a kind, the end of one kind of normal and the beginning of another. A hard, clean break, like Container Store silverware dividers. But to see a lifeless body on a table and not be able to pronounce it dead, to know for certain the acquitted did commit the crime, to get two negative COVID-19 tests in the face of what appears to be overwhelming evidence — is such a harsh imposition of limbo. How do I operate in this particular non-category of maybe-maybe-not-COVID-19? Life’s a bleeding watercolor.

You are facing this smear, too. Every category of life — school, economy, health, faith — is in constant flux these days.

There’s a wonderful chapter in Barbara Brown Taylor’s An Altar in the World entitled “The Practice of Getting Lost.” She writes about the discipline of deliberately getting a little turned around every now and then during the course of a regular day in order to prep for the bigger, uncontrollable, inevitable life events that force you into real lostness later on. The “advanced practice of getting lost,” she says, consists of “consenting to be lost, since you have no other choice. The consenting itself becomes your choice, as you explore the possibility that life is for you and not against you, in spite of all the evidence to the contrary.”

Now is the time, at least for me, to consent. So, here I go: I’m lost. There. I said it. I’m lost and I don’t know what to do about it. (Well, sure, I’ll go to the doctor tomorrow and get some more tests. No guarantees I won’t be kicked out of the Leukemia Club too, though.)

But I’m agreeing to this lostness for today. I’m using my notary stamp on the limbo, at least for this moment. It’s a choice I am making of my own free will to stop, be still in the forest, and look up past where the red oaks hang.

And now for the possibilities.

photo credit: Anthony Chiang

Julie Rhodes is a freelance writer and actor in the Dallas/Fort Worth area. She writes regularly for Madeworthy magazine and the Tanglewood Moms blog.

The post The Limbo of (Maybe) Living with COVID-19 first appeared on Tanglewood Moms.

As the Assistant Director of Composition at Texas Woman’s University (TWU), a position that requires me to oversee part of our growing dual credit program, I’ve spent a lot of time in dual credit classrooms. I’m also part of a larger research study to assess the learning of students who placed out of our general education courses using AP, CLEP, or dual credit. Each part of this trifecta is separate and distinct. To be clear, each of these options is defined as follows:

Advanced Placement (AP) exams are held every spring. Students who earn a certain score on these exams may be able to use their score to satisfy a general education course requirement at the college or university of her or his choosing.

The College Level Examination Program (CLEP) administers another standardized test to certify students for college readiness. Unlike AP, CLEP exams can be taken year-round and are available to non-traditional students, such as military member

Dual credit is the most difficult to define credit-seeking avenue — also referred to (and comparable to) dual enrollment and concurrent enrollment, although each presents a different model of instruction. In most dual credit scenarios, a high school and a college have formed a partnership for which teachers with select qualifications enter into a contract with the higher education partner and teach to more rigorous, college-appropriate learning outcomes than what will be taught in a non-dual credit course.

While all these approaches have merit and most have experienced growth in the last decade, dual credit has exploded in Texas. Research from the American Institutes for Research (AIR) has shown that “Between 2000 and 2016, the count of high school students taking at least one dual credit course rose from approximately 18,524 to 204,286, an increase of more than 1,100%.” Additionally, 93% of Texas high schools offer some sort of dual credit opportunity.

Whether a student chooses AP, CLEP, or dual credit, she or he is making a financial investment, first and foremost. The spirit of these options is to make higher education accessible and affordable for especially bright, college-bound students. The real appeal, I think, is the relatively low cost of an entrance exam or a reduced tuition rate for dual credit-seeking students. For the 2018-2019 academic year at TWU, we charge $150 per course, a savings of $1048.

Will this course credit transfer anywhere?

It’s hard to say. The reality is that the dual credit your student pursues is only guaranteed to transfer if she or he enrolls in her or his dual credit-administering institution. While it is often the case that credit will transfer from one public university to most other public colleges or universities, there is no guarantee. Your chances of transfer may also decrease if your child attends a private institution, a college out of state, or one of the Ivy League schools. The same is true for AP and CLEP credits; however, you can request information on the possibility of transfer by calling the college’s admissions office.

Does the student stand a good shot of passing the course?

While the prospect of an unsatisfactory score is disheartening, the financial investment is relatively low. I believe AP and dual credit courses are safe training grounds for failure and future success. With dual credit in particular, most colleges will allow students to withdraw from a course early in the semester, thereby preventing any lackluster grades from appearing on official transcripts.

Personally, I encourage most students and parents to give AP and dual credit courses a cautious but earnest shot, offering the caveat that instructor autonomy and a wide range of student abilities mean that experiences in these courses will vary greatly. I am also a firm believer in enjoying the traditional approach to satisfying general education requirements. In these first- and second-year courses, students are sampling different degree paths and learning more about who they are as learners and citizens of a larger intellectual community. Though not the cheapest route to a degree, there is something to be appreciated about the design of a liberal arts and sciences education. My hope for all students pursuing higher education is that they learn to slow down, to savor their intellectual curiosity, and to discover what subjects set their worlds aflame.

Jackie Elliott is the Assistant Director of Composition at Texas Woman’s University (TWU). She wrote for newspapers and magazines around the Midwest before settling down in the Lone Star State. Since she moved here in 2013, she’s written for The Fort Worth Star-Telegram, Indulge, K Magazine, The Dallas Morning News, and GuideLive. Currently, she writes for those fun guys running The Fort Worth Weeklyand is a valuable member of the TanglewoodMoms.com team. When she’s not writing, she’s reading up on new trends in health and psychology research. For fun, she cheers on her husband, Buck Elliott, teaches yoga at Yogali off E. Lancaster, practices poses with her amazing bonus daughter, “E,” and tries to keep up with her toddler, “B.”

The post AP? CLEP? Dual Credit? Advice from a Professor first appeared on Tanglewood Moms.