November 12, Operational Update
November 12 Update (Watch on Youtube)
Transcript:
President Feinstein (00:00):
Well, good morning, everybody. It's Thursday, November 12th, and this is our weekly
operational status update call. We want to thank all of you for joining us. A few
weeks ago, we notified the university community that we were preparing for a change
in our safer-at-home status based on the state's COVID-19 dial. And while that change
in status has not yet been announced, although I think it's coming soon, we have made
the decision to take proactive measures for the health and wellbeing of our campus
community.
President Feinstein (00:29):
So beginning Monday, November the 16th, we will begin implementing the state's guidelines
for safer-at-home orange status and Provost Mark Anderson and Vice President for Student
Affairs, Katrina Rodriguez will share additional information this morning about impacts
to our academic mission and student life in these final weeks of the spring semester,
excuse me of the fall semester. My cabinet and I have monitored conditions locally
and in Colorado since early in the spring semester, last year. And we continue to
watch trends, monitor impacts to our university community and make adjustments that
allow UNC to continue to serve its mission and provide support to students.
President Feinstein (01:13):
The health and safety of our students, faculty staff and community is my top priority.
It is also important to me that our students can be successful in their academic work
and make progress towards degree completion. We continue to work closely with the
Colorado Department of Public Health and Environment, Weld County Public Health, the
governor's office, and other stakeholders. And yesterday members of my leadership
team and I met with executives, epidemiologists, and public health experts from Greeley's
two hospitals and District Six Superintendent Dierdra Piltch. And we are sure that
measures that we are taken and that we will continue to take to protect our university
community are allowing us to limit the spread of the virus.
President Feinstein (01:57):
And I believe that our classrooms continue to be safe places to learn. When we see
the virus spreading, it is usually associated with relaxed adherence to social distancing
and masking guidelines. Throughout the fall semester, the university community has
done a tremendous job following guidelines and keeping our case counts low. We'll
hear more about that in a moment from Blaine, but we need to do more. And each of
you needs to do your part for our fellow bears. So thank you for your help in keeping
our fellow bears and our neighbors in Weld County safe.
President Feinstein (02:34):
Before I turn over the floor to Blaine, I want to remind everyone that there is a
board of trustees meeting tomorrow morning. It will begin with the finance and audit
meeting at 8:30 AM. And then we'll have a 9:30 meeting, which is our full board presentation.
I hope that all of you will tune in and you can stream the meeting at unc.link/trustees.
So with that, I'm going to turn the floor over to Associate Vice President for Administration,
Blaine Nickeson. Blaine.
Blaine Nickeson (03:04):
Thanks, Andy. Good morning, everyone. Just a fair warning here. Comcast is having
internet issues in my neighborhood, which is perfect timing when my wife is interviewing
vice chancellor candidates and my kids are both online for getting started for school
and I'm presenting to all of you. They're working on it, but I hope I don't get dropped.
I'll keep my fingers crossed for it.
Blaine Nickeson (03:29):
The status of the virus in Weld County, the state, and quite honestly, the nation
is not good right now. Colorado is experiencing exponential growth and spread of the
virus. Yesterday, the state added nearly 4,000 cases. We also had a record day yesterday
in Weld County for new cases. A month ago, statewide, we were adding about 600 cases
a day as we were starting on this climb up to the top of the roller coaster. We've
also seen our hospitalizations in both Weld County and the state spike. Tuesday, we
hit a sad new record in active COVID hospitalizations, we eclipsed the spring peak.
Blaine Nickeson (04:08):
I want folks to think about that for a moment. Record hospitalizations, coupled with
record new cases, day after day. As Andy said, he and I met with our local hospital
leaders yesterday, and they're extremely concerned both with their capacity challenges,
but as well as having enough medical staff and taking care of their medical staff.
Their staff's getting sick with COVID in numbers similar to the general population,
not because of what's happening in their hospitals, but because of what's happening
outside in the community due to that widespread community transmission. One of the
folks we met with yesterday was an epidemiologist for the Banner Healthcare System.
They're the entity that runs NCMC. She was adamant about wanting to dispel a common
myth. COVID-19 is far more deadly than the seasonal flu. Their modeling shows that
COVID has a 2.4% fatality rate, that's compared to half a percent in a bad flu year.
So significantly more fatal.
Blaine Nickeson (05:11):
I'm not sharing the information to scare people. Although, if it causes someone that
isn't taking COVID seriously to change their behavior, I'll take it. Rather, I want
people to think about the things that they care about and the impact that further
restrictions would have on those things. Will your favorite restaurant or brewery
or coffee shop survive another shutdown? Will your kids at school have to shut down?
Will you be able to go to church in person? What about your local gym? If we, as a
community, don't take immediate significant action, major restrictions are going to
be necessary to save our hospitals.
Blaine Nickeson (05:48):
I was looking just this morning at the homepage of the Washington Post. And right
now it shows the dissonance of the situation we find ourselves in. There's two headlines
for two stories. They appear right next to each other. The first one is, "At dinner
parties and game nights, casual American life fuels the surge." The next article right
next to it is, "Hospitals near agonizing choice, who gets care?" As we talked about
this morning and Andy, others will talk about as well, UNC is taking some proactive
steps to align with more restrictive health guidelines that are sure to be coming
soon.
Blaine Nickeson (06:25):
We continue to do screening tests among residential students and athletics. Last week
we did around 400 tests. We had a handful of positives that we were able to swiftly
put into isolation and contact trace to identify folks that needed to be told to quarantine.
And in partnership with the state, the new campus and community testing site is up
and running at Nottingham Field. I've just heard from the company running the site,
that yesterday they did over a thousand tests. It's great news for our community,
both here on campus and the broader Greeley community as well. We're seeing a steady
increase in positive cases reported to us amongst the campus community. It's mirroring
what we're seeing in Weld County and the state. We're monitoring 82 positive cases
right now. That's up from 49 last week. Nine of those cases are among employees, with
the remainder being students. On campus, we're using 41 of our approximately 80 isolation
quarantine rooms.
Blaine Nickeson (07:20):
We continue to manage a robust caseload as it relates to the number of people within
our tracking protocol for isolation and quarantine. As of this morning, that's at
324 active contacts, but this semester we've resolved over a thousand contacts. The
team tackling this is working seven days a week, about 16 hours a day. They're doing
amazing work, but it's really taxing. Lastly, I just wanted to finish with, a few
weeks ago, I talked about the state's new exposure notification app that can be on
your iPhone or Android. It is something you have to manually activate on your phone.
It's secure and simple. In the first week we had about 10% of Coloradans set it up,
but we need to keep it up. It's estimated that even if 15% of the population sets
it up and uses it, we could reduce infections by 8%. That's pretty significant for
not a lot of effort. So please join me in setting up your phone. And again, to emphasize,
no personal or location information is tracked or shared, it really uses the secure
Bluetooth tokens that get handed off between phones, but doesn't share any information
about who you are or where you are.
Blaine Nickeson (08:34):
So that's all I have for this morning, Andy, and I'm happy to turn it back over to
you.
President Feinstein (08:38):
Thanks Blaine and I'm using the app and monitor that every day. I also went last Friday
to our new testing site over at Nottingham Field. Maybe someone can share that link
for everyone to make a reservation. Glad to hear that we were able to test a thousand
individuals yesterday. It's pretty quick. I think they had a learning curve over the
weekend and Monday, but I'm glad to hear that they're able to address those issues
and really make it a pretty seamless and fast process. It's an oral test. It's not
the brain tickler. So it's literally wiping a swab in your mouth and dropping it in
a vial. And then they send you an email response. Mine was about 36 hours later.
President Feinstein (09:27):
So I strongly urge you to do that. It's free. They're not asking for your insurance
information. So I think it's vital that if you have an opportunity in the next couple
of days, that you go get tested. So thanks, Blaine. With that, I'm going to turn it
over to Mark Anderson and Katrina Rodriguez. Mark.
Mark Anderson (09:46):
Thank you, President Feinstein. As Blaine and President Feinstein said, the spread
of the Coronavirus in Weld County has increased to levels that we've not seen since
May and June. Although there's so far had been no documented cases of transmission
within our instructional spaces, we do understand the concern that our community has
about these transmission rates. I want to thank all of our faculty for following the
health and safety protocols when teaching in person classes. It's been through those
efforts that we've been able to maintain and continue to serve our students well.
The faculty know best how to teach their classes so that students can achieve the
learning outcomes of the course. And over the course of this semester, they've also
learned how to do that within the safety protocols. We really very much appreciate
that.
Mark Anderson (10:39):
As President Feinstein said, although the county has not yet been designated as reaching
the safer-at-home level three orange designation, the campus is starting to implement
some of the protocols associated with that. CDPHE has changed the guidance with respect
to the orange. And so our current instructional practices fall within that guidance.
So we don't have to change any of our instructional practices, but as Thanksgiving
approaches, we want faculty to use their best judgment as how to best teach their
classes in the modality that they're using to teach their classes so that we can continue
to serve our students and so that the students continue to make progress towards meeting
the learning objectives of the course.
Mark Anderson (11:27):
What this ultimately means is we want the faculty, we're allowing the faculty, to
make a decision regarding how they will teach their courses following Thanksgiving.
All of our courses have met the Colorado Department of Higher Education Guidelines
regarding their designated modality. So if, within the context of meeting the objectives
of the course, the faculty believes that they can move to an all online environment,
then they should do that post Thanksgiving.
Mark Anderson (12:04):
We would like the faculty to inform their students about the teaching modality and
any changes to the modality that you might think are warranted by next Monday, November
16th, and also let the Dean of your college know. And that is so that we can continue
to support the students and support you in your teaching activities. Again, we want
the faculty to be able to use their judgment, to make a decision on quality the course
will continue for the rest of this semester and communicate that to students so that
they can prepare for the remainder of the fall semester. Communication will be coming
out, the details, that's a little bit more later today or early tomorrow.
Mark Anderson (12:51):
Earlier this week, the faculty senate endorsed a change to the grading option to include
the satisfactory, unsatisfactory grading option for students for this fall. This policy
is equivalent to the SU grading option that was endorsed by faculty senate for the
spring semester. Again, details about the change in the grading option will be made
available later today or tomorrow. And we strongly encourage all students who are
considering changing their grading option to first talk to their advisor, to make
sure that they understand the overall implications of changing to an SU grading option
in any course relative to their personal situation. So again, faculty senate has endorsed
the SU grading option similar to the one we had in the spring, but we encourage all
of our students to talk to their advisors prior to selecting that as their grading
option. More details will be following on the SU grading option.
Mark Anderson (13:57):
Finally, I want to acknowledge the continued good work of all of our faculty. We have
two really outstanding things to acknowledge this week. Professor Tracy Gershwin in
the School of Special Education is the PI on a recently awarded $2.4 million grant
from the Colorado Rise Programs. Tracy and her colleagues in this program, will be
working with District Six to provide support to at-risk students, particularly in
PK through kindergarten and our partner teachers within District Six. So congratulations
to Tracy and all of her colleagues in Special Ed who will be working on that program.
Mark Anderson (14:40):
In addition, Professor [Athur Zia 00:00:19:34] received an honorable mention for her
book titled, Resisting Disappearance, Military Occupation in Women's Activism in Cashmere,
and this book received an honorable mention from the 2020 Gloria E [Alsdoua 00:19:34]
. I apologize if I mispronounced that. The Gloria E Alsdoua Book Committee. So this
is quite a significant honor for Professor Zia. So congratulations to Athur. And with
that, I will turn the podium over to my colleague, Katrina Rodriguez.
Katrina Rodrigez (15:17):
Good morning, everyone. So great to be here with you this morning. To continue the
conversation in terms of our student life and students on campus, in terms of our
dining facilities, they will remain pretty much like they have. We will have some
limited dine-in capacity, but minimal compared to where we have been. And so in the
orange, we're going to continue. We will have a little bit less staffing in our Einstein's
retail in the UC, as well as the Missioner Coffee Corner, we will have a little bit
of limited staff, but still, those spaces are open and we want everyone to be able
to access those as they have in the past. In terms of our campus recreation, we will
be limited to 25 guests per room and campus rec is already making those adjustments.
So it is open to faculty, staff, and students, again, as it has been, just be a little
bit reduced capacity. So I'm happy to have that still working for us.
Katrina Rodrigez (16:32):
We also, for our club and intramural sports, it will be out outdoors and we have to
have groups of less than 10. So again, some of those popular... Well, it's getting
cool. So maybe not so much right now, but some of the hammock Hangouts and those kinds
of things, we'll just have to limit some of the size on that. Like the rest of campus,
we will be reducing the staff in offices to 25% capacity. We've been at 50%. So we
will be making those adjustments.
Katrina Rodrigez (17:07):
We do have a number of small offices or some of our centers that might have one or
two individuals and a few students who staff those spaces. So reducing that to 25%
may mean that we'll be shifting our hours for a few places where we know we've seen
an uptick in students who've been exposed to the virus or who may have contracted
the virus. We may be closing some of those spaces temporarily, so we can do some additional
cleaning and give time for a quarantine and isolation to occur. And then we'll be
opening those spaces back up. So we will continue to broadcast that information so
that the campus community is aware of what is open at what time.
Katrina Rodrigez (17:55):
The other thing I want to articulate is that we are excited to keep our residence
halls open throughout this rest of the semester and certainly after Thanksgiving break,
have students join us and remain in the residence halls. And additionally, for any
students who require winter break housing, we do have that available. And so if you
will contact our housing office, we will be happy to accommodate anybody who would
like to have that winter break housing. So we are excited for all the opportunities
that we can still provide to students. We'll have a number of virtual opportunities,
as we have in terms of virtual programming and conversations.
Katrina Rodrigez (18:42):
So look forward to that and we will continue to share various aspects and operations
that will have any adjustments as we go along. To let you also know, all of the rest
of the services, our disability resource services, counseling services, career readiness,
all of those spaces, Bear Pantry is still open for a grab and go. So you certainly
may continue to use those services. So please just know that students have access
to everything they have had. It just may be shifting just a little bit. So with that,
I'll turn it back over to Andy.
President Feinstein (19:22):
Thanks Katrina. Thanks Mark for your presentations. I want to make everybody for tuning
in this morning and as always stay safe, be healthy, and we'll see you here again
next week. Take care, everybody.
