Questions?
Please email coronavirus@uwaterloo.ca.
Public Health guidance and University of Waterloo operations may have changed. For the most up-to-date information, please visit our COVID-19 frequently asked questions.
The message provided here contains historical information and is no longer updated. Please refer to our Health Protocols page for the most up-to-date information on our process for handling student and employee disclosures of COVID-19 infection.
A version of this message was originally sent to employees by Kate Windsor, Director of Safety, on April 7, 2020. The message below contains update from April 8, 2020 and September 2, 2020.
This message updates the guidance concerning the actions you can take if someone tells you that that they believe they are suffering from COVID-19.
September 2
April 8
The following protocols – for student disclosure and employee disclosure – protect the privacy of individual Personal Health Information (PHI) and adhere to all applicable health and privacy legislation.
Record the employee’s full name and current contact information.
Inform the employee that you will notify Occupational Health about the situation and that Occupational Health will contact them for follow up.
Email Occupational Health with the information you have gathered.
Advise the employee to contact their health care provider. If they do not have one, they can contact Telehealth Ontario.
If the employee:
has travelled outside of Canada,
had contact with a recent traveller (returned in the last 14 days) or
You cannot legally tell others—including employees, members of your team, or students—about the disclosure.
In using either of the above protocols, you should not give medical advice – please ensure that individuals know they should be seeking appropriate medical help.
You must not pass personal health information to anyone beyond the identified contacts in each protocol. Specifically, you should not send any personal health information to anyone except:
Personal health information includes ANY identifiable information about the individual or information that would tend to identify the individual.
University personnel will take advice from appropriate public health bodies on the approach to contact tracing and communication on a case-by-case basis. While maintaining the individual’s health privacy, we will act on public health unit instruction to post notices of positive COVID-19 results:
Please protect the privacy of individuals by only sharing the employee’s name and contact information with Occupational Health. No other party inside or outside of the University is entitled to this information
Occupational Health stores all personal health information (PHI) confidentially as per privacy legislation and cannot release any PHI without the employee’s written consent.
Please email coronavirus@uwaterloo.ca.
The University of Waterloo acknowledges that much of our work takes place on the traditional territory of the Neutral, Anishinaabeg, and Haudenosaunee peoples. Our main campus is situated on the Haldimand Tract, the land granted to the Six Nations that includes six miles on each side of the Grand River. Our active work toward reconciliation takes place across our campuses through research, learning, teaching, and community building, and is co-ordinated within the Office of Indigenous Relations.