January 28, 2020 | NEWS | By Isabel Hicks, Hank Bedingfield, and Lorea Zabaleta | Photo by Patil Khakhamian
As Colorado College jumps into another semester hampered by the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, questions fly about how the college will continue in-person learning while limiting spread of the virus.
L. Song Richardson, president of the college, explained the reasoning for continuing in-person classes amidst the current Omicron surge.
“Being together in person in the classroom where… our faculty and staff and students can come together as a community is so critically important to all of our mental health,” Richardson said. “So that to me is why we are prioritizing an in-person experience while we also continue to adapt to the shifts in COVID.”
Yet the college is not going into the semester blind and hoping for the best. The main reason CC is able to continue in-person instruction, Richardson said, is because of the COVID-19 Policy and Implementation Committee protocols to mitigate risk and slow the spread of the virus — and students’ commitment to following these guidelines.
“We have to learn how to cope with COVID now, just as a reality of our existence,” Richardson said. “We are moving to a point where [we are] living with this the way we live with other respiratory illnesses like the flu.”
Andrea Bruder, CC’s Chief Public Health Advisor to the President, spoke to the school’s newest policy to cope with COVID: requiring all students, staff, and faculty who are eligible to get a booster shot.
“Booster doses are safe and like a reminder to our immune system, as in hey, remember how to fight this virus?” Bruder said. “It gets your protection back up to higher levels… thereby allowing us to come together as a community and to be in-person and have in-person classes, campus activities, athletic practice and all the activities that we love so much.”
According to CC’s COVID-19 Dashboard, as of Jan. 25, 2022, 96.7% of students, 90.9% of staff and 98.0% of faculty are fully vaccinated against the virus. Being fully vaccinated means one has received their booster shot if eligible.
The other big changes are requiring at-home testing twice weekly for students and that KN95 masks (or masks with similar levels of filtration) must be worn indoors. CC plans to provide these resources weekly for students. Masks are available at the front desks in dorms and the Welcome Desk at the library, while at-home test kits can be picked up at the library’s Circulation Desk.
Bruder highlighted the adaptability of the college’s testing program.
“It’s a protocol that’s designed to adapt to different circumstances,” Bruder said. “If the incidence is high, and especially with a variant that is so highly transmissible, then we increase the frequency of screening testing to be able to interrupt a sufficient number of chains of infection that would otherwise result in large outbreaks.”
Bruder added that the testing program has been ongoing since August 2020. “The test kit procurement has been an ongoing process, and what we adjust are just the quantities of test kits that we order,” she said.
In addition to tests, Chair of the COVID-19 Implementation and Policy Committee Mateo Munoz said that CC has already purchased “tens of thousands” of KN95 and N95 masks, and estimated they had spent a little over a million dollars on COVID supplies for the spring semester.
What to expect if you test positive for COVID-19
The college has also acquired additional spaces to isolate COVID-positive students as needed, which include around 89 beds both on campus and the nearby Econo Lodge on Nevada. The building that housed the old Boettcher Health Center has been converted to hold 20 isolation beds.
Yet Munoz said that the majority of students who do test positive often end up “isolating in place,” meaning they stay in their dorm room or off campus housing. In last November’s surge, about 75% of students who tested positive isolated in place, Munoz said.
“We also expect that the recent changes in isolation CDC guidance and isolation, reducing it from 10 to five days for asymptomatic individuals, will help boost our capacity,” Munoz added.
For those unable to isolate in place, like some students with roommates or apartments reliant on shared spaces, life can look a lot different in that adapted housing. Zeke Lloyd ’24 tested positive over J Block, CC’s optional term from Jan. 3 to Jan. 21. He was given a converted dorm space in Boettcher to reduce the risk to his roommates.
Life in Boettcher could become a reality for many students, should an outbreak occur. If isolation capacity becomes overwhelmed, Munoz said the college would then potentially look into converting dorm lounges.
“The bedding wasn’t great, but outside of that, the rooms were kinda big,” Lloyd said about Boettcher. “The worst thing was the water was terrible. It was always like you couldn’t get any cold water to drink. So I was genuinely pretty under hydrated at the time and not eating super well.”
In order to take class comfortably Lloyd had to scrape together a left-behind chair and medical table.
For sustenance in Boettcher, the college set up a grab-and-go market of sorts filled with processed foods and microwavable meals. There was nothing that took over five minutes to make, according to Lloyd.
“I have friends who were able to bring me food, but if I didn’t, it just would have been really tough to get through based on that,” Lloyd said. “You’re so bored and you’re stressed about the food system. It’s a terrible combination of things.”
The COVID Committee also changed its food policy for those who test positive and is no longer delivering to-go meals to those in isolation, except when absolutely necessary. While off-campus students are generally left to fend for themselves, many of whom rely on delivery services or friends for groceries, students on the Meal Plan are given the option of a grab-and-go market accessed from a side door of the Worner Campus Center, which is open from 1 p.m. to 4 p.m.
This is not very different from the options currently offered to COVID-negative students either. The college announced earlier this month that indoor dining options on campus would be takeout only for J Block and Half Block, and a change to that policy remains to be seen in Block 5.
With the hallmark of Bon Appetit, dependable options like microwavable Mac-n-Cheese, prepared salad, and cubed melon mingle with microwavable ramen instant noodles and bags of chips.
“It’s pretty atrocious because you still have to pay for everything. It’s more limited than the C-store even and it’s only open for like three hours and it’s a pretty long walk in the cold,” said Lloyd. “It’s just kind of sad.”
When Mahnoor Rehman ‘24 tested positive, she was too sick to make the trek and relied on Campus Safety to bring her meals. She had the added difficulty of not eating meat or lactose in her diet.
“I mean, I feel like I call them and tell them like, do you have this, do you have that, and they would be like, no, no, no,” Rehman said. “And at the end of the day, I would just get some sort of soup or something, which wasn’t enough because you need proteins and you need carbohydrates when you’re weak.”
Another change the school made for spring semester is automating part of the contact tracing process for students.
“Students really respond well to the convenience of getting a form and filling it out. So we’ve automated the initial part of it,” Munoz said. “We still have a contact tracer who will do follow up contacts and ask questions if it’s not complete… so that’s just one small change that will allow us to operate more efficiently.”
The switch comes after CC’s November surge when the high rate of cases overwhelmed college resources and El Paso County Public Health had to assist with contact tracing.
Looking back on J Block
The optional J Block for students started on Jan. 3, 2022, as Omicron surged throughout the nation. 72 students tested positive between Jan. 5 to Jan. 18, a time range that represents the majority of J Block, as the campus welcomed more than 800 students back to campus, around 40% of the student population.
These students’ stories offer a unique perspective which could potentially foreshadow how CC will confront COVID-19 as it begins another semester of classes.
COVID-stricken students were some of the first to live through the policies discussed above, sharing their concerns and insights. While some students survived their isolation periods with ample support from the school and minimal COVID-19 symptoms, other students suffered distressing symptoms and frustrating circumstances — mostly surrounding communication.
“Even in those last two or three days of my quarantine, I was getting texts and calls from like a number of different people on the COVID coordinating team,” said Liza Scher ‘22. “And they were all giving me different information. So it was like, just really hard to figure out what to listen to.”
For Claire Bogart ‘22, in the perplexingly unfortunate situation of testing positive for COVID-19 on two separate occurrences, each isolation brought its own challenges. In addition to receiving “threatening” weekly emails about her gold card for failing to participate in twice-weekly testing, the promise of wellness checks came up empty.
“On the website, and also when you test positive, it says that someone’s going to check in with you every day and help to provide you with anything you need, but that didn’t really happen over the course of either of my isolations,” Bogart said. “I feel like the communication was just really disorganized in general.”
For her second isolation, as a medical anomaly testing positive, then negative, then positive within a two-week span, COVID coordinators, with Drew Cavin at the helm, were as baffled as she was.
“I mean they said that they were confused. Drew said something like, it’s interesting and I’m honestly kind of happy that this happened, because it’ll force the issue of what we have to do in these situations,” Bogart said. “He actually said to go into a ‘soft isolation’ and I wasn’t sure what that meant.”
For others, the physical toll of COVID-19 stood out. Rehman was unable to receive a booster shot in her home country and, after traveling internationally to CC, tested positive almost immediately. Despite receiving two vaccine shots, COVID-19 left her so sick that she was unable to leave her room.
“I had a really bad fever. I had an immense amount of pain in my lower body. And I couldn’t sleep,” Rehman said. “Being someone who already had COVID now, I think it’s really awful and people are just downplaying the symptoms.”
Despite the severity of her condition, Rehman chose not to contact the student health center, instead relying on a friend to purchase her over-the-counter medicine.
“I could have called the student health center, but I didn’t do so because previously the student health center hasn’t been much of a help for me. So I just took some painkillers and some medicines for the fever,” Rehman said.
Concerns about class and event policies remain
Despite a comprehensive plan to mitigate the risk of COVID-19 this semester, some are left with lingering questions about logistics of in-person classes.
The college’s policy remains that as long as you are fully vaccinated, individuals directly exposed to COVID-19 do not need to quarantine and can still attend class. Yet in last November’s surge, so many students began testing positive in the same classes that many professors made the choice to switch to online learning temporarily.
Munoz and Bruder said that professors have been instructed to make “contingency plans” so they can support COVID-positive students remotely and prepare for the possibility of going temporarily online.
“Every division head has been asked to develop a contingency plan to make sure that we have staffing, both in instructional support but also staffing across the college so we can support our students being in person,” Munoz said. “We’re also preparing for potential infections among faculty and staff. Everyone’s developed their own contingency plans… if we were to have a labor shortage due to infections.”
Professors have generally been left to their own devices to decide how to accommodate COVID-positive students and if there’s a need to move instruction online.
Bruder said such decisions “have to happen on a case by case basis” and that “there’s not a one size fits all approach.”
Phoebe Lostroh, associate professor of microbiology at CC, said the only guidance she’s gotten from the school is that she has to teach her class in person.
“I will say I find it ironic that I’m going to be teaching virology in Block 5 and I would feel much safer teaching online. And that’s not an option that’s being made available. We’ve been told in no uncertain terms that we need to be teaching in person,” Lostroh said. “So that feels like I’m teaching in an area of my expertise and my own expert evaluation of my own risk is not being respected by the college, so that’s too bad.”
Lostroh cited that there is not enough research about long COVID and who is at risk for it as one reason for preferring not to teach in person this block.
“I think that the college could be risking employees needing to be on long term disability because of acquiring COVID at work,” she said.
Even still, Lostroh commended CC for “doing everything that it possibly could” to protect the community from COVID, noting how they improved ventilation in buildings and have continued wastewater testing, in addition to standard protocols like testing and mask-wearing.
Some students have called into question the school’s public events policy.
Large, indoor hockey games at the Ed Robson Arena — that are attended by many Colorado Springs locals in addition to CC students — have prompted the school to address concerns that they increase viral spread on campus.
Bruder and Munoz said that KN95 masks are now required for all guests of the arena, in addition to the previous requirement of showing proof of vaccination or negative test within 72 hours. The arena has also temporarily suspended concessions to reduce the number of people taking off their masks to eat and drink.
Even still, one of the Tigers’ first games of 2022 was postponed due to COVID exposure within the team, according to CC Athletics Communications.
What success this semester looks like
Munoz emphasized that despite all the college protocols to keep campus safe, they won’t work without continued cooperation from students.
“This is a community effort, right? We have policies, we have technology, but without everyone’s cooperation, we cannot be in person,” Munoz said. “Everyone’s continued cooperation is essential. That’s why we’ve been able to do this and that’s why I think our leadership also felt confident that we could move forward with an in-person experience.”
Bruder added that just because there are cases on campus doesn’t mean we’ve failed.
“I want us to think a little bit about what success would look like this next month or so in particular, because we there’s a tendency to see rising cases and think of that as a failure. But that’s not necessarily true,” Bruder said.
“I think what success would look like in the next month or so would be that we continue to be in person through the Omicron wave with no more large outbreaks among the CC community, with no cases of severe illness, and sufficient capacity to support students who are isolating.”
As the world heads into its third year of life forever altered by the coronavirus, it remains to be seen how long terms like “risk mitigation strategies” and “reduce viral spread” will continue to be a part of our vocabulary.
A previous version of this story mispelled Drew Cavin’s name. We regret the error.