The majority of this week was spent working with COCOVID. On Tuesday, I attended a training to go over patient communication and the ethics of both the COCOVID and COPA study. Having learned about the IRB approval process and HIPPA requirements in the past, everything was as expected when handling sensitive health data. Consent and assent from both children and adults are important, especially when handling a biological sample. Interacting with the community is a major part of this job considering that with COCOVID there are weekly visits and sample collections and with COPA there is a yearly visit. All patient communication is done in Spanish, so for now I do not interview patients, just help with paperwork and sample processing. I am still in the process of picking up Puerto Rican Spanish and especially focusing on medical terminology.
During the COCOVID program routes, not only did I get to inadvertently explore the city of Ponce and get to know the community, but I also got to understand the people and their reaction to the COVID pandemic. For starters, masks are still worn by a majority of the population and there is little pushback compared to what I was seeing when I left Georgia. Part of the COCOVID questionnaire is to see if the participant has been vaccinated or not. To my surprise, almost all participants we visited were vaccinated and supported vaccination without hesitation. As of June 7th, the mask mandate has been dropped but I have not noticed a difference in mask usage.