If You Test Positive for COVID

What to do if you test positive for COVID at the AEJMC conference

What to do if you test positive for COVID at the AEJMC conference 

 

AEJMC hopes that all its members and conference attendees enjoy the conference without health worries. If, however, you should test positive while at the conference, here’s what to do: 

 

  1. Remain isolated in your hotel room to avoid infecting others. Do not attend any conference sessions. 
     
  1. If you are due to present a paper or a poster or if you are scheduled to be part of a panel, you have two options: 
     
  1. Find a proxy who could present for you. This could be a co-author, a faculty or graduate student colleague from your college or university, a member of your division or interest group, or someone who is familiar with your topic. In such cases, as far as AEJMC is concerned, your work was presented, and you can represent it on your vita as having been part of the conference. 
     
  1. Record a video on your phone or computer of you presenting your work, upload it to a hosting site, such as YouTube or Vimeo, and notify the chair of your session. This will not work, obviously, if you test positive three hours before your session begins, because your session chair may be attending other events and may not see an email message. However, if you test positive on Wednesday and your presentation is Saturday morning, there may be enough time for the chair of your panel to access and play your video during the session. 

 

What you should not do, however, is try to present “live” via Zoom or another teleconferencing application from your hotel room. The Wi-Fi available at the conference hotel does not provide enough bandwidth for up to 14 simultaneous sessions to stream in presenters at one time. Although a few divisions and interest groups chose to pay for enhanced WIFI to bring in outside professional speakers who are not members of the association, adding enhanced WIFI to all conference rooms, allowing for a fully hybrid conference, would have cost the association so much money that it would have had to raise registration to $650—an amount far beyond what it has ever charged.  
 

  1. Notify people you had close contact with so that they can test. A limited number of free COVID testing kits will be available at the AEJMC registration desk. You may use #AEJMCHealth on Twitter to help notify conference attendees. 
     
  1. If you think you might be a candidate for an antiviral drug, such as Paxlovid, call your primary care physician. The drugs, which can reduce or shorten the length of symptoms, are not appropriate for everyone but are available at some Detroit pharmacies. 
     
  1. Notify the AEJMC staff. Please send an email to aejmc@aejmc.org, explaining when you tested positive. Please let us know if there if you need support you need. 
     

If you need medicine, there is a pharmacy very near the conference hotel: CVS, 200 Renaissance Center, Detroit, MI 48243, 313-567-3523. This location is open from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday and 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. on Saturday. The store is closed on Sunday. The pharmacy is open from 9 a.m. to 5 p.m. Monday through Friday, except for a closure from 1:30 to 2 p.m. daily for lunch.