Ángel Cabrera Global Center in Fairfax Campus. Photo by Ron Aira/Creative Services
The Àngel Cabrera Global Center, formerly the Mason Global Center, is home to many of George Mason University’s international education programs and services. This fall the facility will serve an additional role – as the center of operations for Mason’s COVID testing.
The Cabrera Global Center’s open air parking garage will be the location for drive-through and walk-up sampling for COVID tests for Mason community members with symptoms as well as their close contacts.
The Cabrera Global Center, on the Fairfax Campus at 4352 Global Lane (between the J and K parking lots and Route 123/Ox Road), also will be the site for “surveillance testing” to track asymptomatic members of the Mason community. That testing will be voluntary for most but mandatory for those in the “high-contact” category – people who are likely to be within six feet of others for more than 15 minutes.
Those high-contact roles include COVID test samplers, student health clinicians, faculty and students in experiential learning courses, residential students, student-athletes, Child Development Center staff, campus police, and others, said Julie Zobel, assistant vice president for Safety, Emergency, and Enterprise Risk Management.
The diagnostic tests and surveillance tests, performed by nasal swab, are free. For safety and efficiency, testing will be by appointment only, from 9 a.m. to 4:30 p.m. Monday through Friday, beginning Aug. 17 for symptomatic residential students, Aug. 24 for symptomatic commuter students and uninsured faculty, staff, and contractors. Surveillance testing will begin Aug. 31.
The underground parking garage at the global center is an ideal location for sample collection from symptomatic patients, said Gregg Black, assistant director of Emergency Management and Fire Safety in Environmental Health and Safety. With drive-up patients there is less contact, and the garage provides shelter for the nurses collecting the samples.
In addition, the Cabrera Global Center will serve as a quarantine/isolation site for residential students who are awaiting diagnostic test results or who test positive for COVID. The former hotel has 140 spaces with private bedrooms and bathrooms. The part of the building that will serve as the quarantine/isolation area uses a separate air-handling system than what is used for the rest of the building, which includes classrooms and offices. Students were not assigned housing in the building this year.
“The Cabrera Global Center is an optimal solution for quarantine/isolation,” Black said. “Students who test positive for COVID will be able to recover in a space that is all their own and don’t have to worry about spreading the disease to others in common spaces like bathrooms.”
Mason’s Student Health Services partners with the Fairfax County Health Department lab, and others, for specimen analysis of symptomatic patients and close contacts. TruGenomix and Mason’s Center for Applied Proteomics and Molecular Medicine will handle surveillance testing analysis.
The university’s Board of Visitors renamed the Mason Global Center to honor Àngel Cabrera, the university’s seventh president, upon his departure in July 2019. Cabrera increased global learning opportunities at Mason through undergraduate research, study abroad and the launching of Mason Korea. The pandemic has delayed the formal dedication of the building.
A native of Spain and a Fulbright Scholar, Cabrera converted the former Mason Inn into the Mason Global Center and home of INTO Mason, an international Pathway and English Language program. Cabrera is now president at his alma mater, Georgia Tech.