The bar that got barred: CC watering hole paused over pandemic concerns
Also, one CC senior on some of the reasons behind vaccine hesitancy
Good morning, and happy Wednesday. On this pandemic date last year, the Colorado Springs Fine Arts Center and the Office of Performing Arts at Colorado College announced the annual 3×3 Projects program, which was created to “fund creative collaborations from isolation” for creative teams in the Rocky Mountain West and Southwest regions. (This year, submissions for the project were due by midnight on March 5, with winning compositions premiering later this summer.)
Today, we report on a student bar that could have been (and might still be). Plus, one senior’s findings about vaccine hesitancy and risky behavior during the pandemic.
➡️ICYMI: On Monday, our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh gave her weekly forecast for El Paso County. She also explained the current vaccination rate in Colorado.
✉️In Your Inbox:
On Wednesday, college leadership released updates to its plans for an in-person Summer Session and fall semester. For the Summer Session, students planning to live on or near campus should submit their housing applications by May 1, and review their registration for courses by April 20. For the fall semester, housing selection has been postponed, but students should still plan for the process to conclude by the end of Block 8. Additionally, preregistration for fall courses opened on April 12 and will run through April 30.
On Friday, the college announced to the CC community that Anya Steinberg ‘21 had been named as one of two finalists in NPR’s “Student Podcast Competition: College Edition” for her introspective podcast about finding her birth father, “He’s Just 23 Chromosomes.”
Also on Friday, a staff member working at the Student Health Center received a positive test result for COVID-19.
On Monday, the college announced a “CC Conversation on the Intersections of Anti-Asian Racism,” a virtual webinar scheduled for Thursday, April 15 on how anti-Asian discrimination has been perpetuated throughout the history of the United States.
🏥Updates to CC’s on-campus vaccination clinic
Yesterday, the United States Food and Drug Administration, along with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, recommended a “pause” on nationwide usage of the Johnson & Johnson vaccine for COVID-19.
CC’s COVID-19 Emergency Manager Maggie Santos told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project last week that the Johnson & Johnson vaccine was originally the vaccine of choice for the college’s upcoming vaccination clinic, because she said that “some students may go home after the next block, and we want to get as many people as possible.”
Nevertheless, the clinic this Saturday will continue as planned, but now with the vaccine developed by Pfizer Inc., and the caveat that those who are vaccinated during the clinic will need to receive a second dose, which the college has planned for with another vaccination clinic that will take place on May 8.
Appointments for Saturday’s clinic must be made by 5 p.m. today, April 14, in order for there to be enough doses.
🤑Incentives to get the vaccine
Colorado College is incentivizing students to get the vaccine! Once you have been vaccinated, send an email to wornerdesk@coloradocollege.edu from your CC email account with “I’m Vaccinated” in the subject line to receive a code for $5 of credit on Amazon.
Photo courtesy of Cameron Howell ‘23
Student bar on pause for now
Back in 2012, Colorado College students had their very own student bar called “The Ninth Block” located in La’au’s Taco Shop. Unfortunately, that bar fizzled out a short time after it opened.
But this year, and despite the pandemic, a new generation of CC students came together and put in the work to revive the bar, this time to be called “9th Block,” for the spring semester
But ultimately, the bar was scrapped days before it was supposed to open.
The hustle
CC students Kevin Caruana ‘21, Josh Fry ‘22, and Will Foster ‘21 started the process of opening a bar that would have required a Gold Card for admission several months ago.
The bar was going to be located in the same place the “Ninth Block” bar had been. As such, the group worked closely with Joe Coleman, owner of La’au’s Taco Shop and of the Blue Star Group, a business group who operates several restaurants in Colorado Springs.
“When I met these lads, their energy, their enthusiasm, and their willingness to play within the rules that I needed allowed me to attempt to go forward with them,” Coleman told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
Foster told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project that he and his fellow students felt the bar was important to open this year because they knew “community building” was needed at CC, especially among the senior class, to celebrate the last year that was “taken away from them.”
For the most part, the process of opening the bar, Foster said, was one of figuring out logistics that “you don’t really think about.”
For example, Foster said he and his fellow students had to account for pandemic-related problems, like hiring “COVID monitors” to ensure patrons were heeding safety protocols.
The group of students also had to create extensive safety protocols for their bar.
“We basically looked at what the most COVID-strict restaurants are doing in Colorado Springs as far as their COVID protocols, and basically mimic those into ours,” Caruana told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
“Just seating everyone safely and making everyone feel safe has been our top priority the whole time,” Foster added.
But the biggest logistical problem the group faced was getting the bar approved by the Scientific Advisory Group (SAG), who Caruana said had “more stringent rules than even those COVID-safe restaurants in the Springs.”
Tragedy strikes
Despite months of planning, the SAG ultimately rejected the group of students’ request to open the bar this block, or even this spring.
Fry told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project that their reasoning “was entirely COVID-based.”
The Reporting Project attempted to reach the SAG for comment four times, but was ultimately unable to do so. But Acting Dean of Students Rochelle T. Dickey said the group ultimately determined the time was wrong for a bar to open near campus.
“SAG cited their reasons for not approving the venture; during this time of pandemic where positivity rates are increasing in our county, and there is still much uncertainty regarding new variant strains, opening a bar at this time is not advisable,” Dickey wrote in an email statement. “SAG stated the timing is just not right to move forward.”
“It’s kind of unfortunate because the bar was only open to CC students and CC faculty, it wasn’t open to anyone else in the county,” Foster said.
He also said the students should have been more involved with the SAG.
“We were really unsure about what that was, and we never met with someone in person from that team and we never received any direct questions from that team,” Foster said.
Nevertheless, Fry said that he and his fellow students “definitely respect” the SAG’s rejection of their bar, and added that the decision was made in the best interest of the campus community.
But of course, the general consensus was that the rejection was unfortunate.
“It’s a total bummer,” Coleman said. “They put a tremendous amount of work in, a lot of work.”
Fry said the whole process involved “hundreds of hours” of work between the three students, and even some money from each. Fry also said the students would have preferred to have been rejected when the SAG was first notified of their intentions to open the bar.
Something to hope for
Despite being rejected for this semester, the trio said they are working in collaboration with the Colorado College Student Government Association to open the bar for some special events in the second half of the year.
Additionally, because the students have already done most of the footwork for the enterprise, they are still hoping to open the bar in the fall.
“As long as COVID is not an issue like it is now, we should be good to go in the fall,” Fry said.
Senior findings: pandemic behaviors are influenced by preference
Last Saturday, the United States celebrated an important milestone — breaking its previous record for vaccine doses administered in one day by over 500,000 doses, with over four and a half million doses being distributed.
But as the rate of vaccination has progressed in the country, some researchers, like CC’s own Bridget Galaty ‘21, have begun to study the thinking and decision-making of Americans who are hesitant to be vaccinated or who engage in behaviors that put them at risk for contracting COVID-19.
So for their senior thesis, Galaty, an economics major, conducted a survey of 795 adults on the preferences that influence Americans’ decisions to engage in risky behavior or be vaccinated.
What Galaty found from the nearly 800 individuals they surveyed was that vaccine preferences are formed by factors like the prominence of the virus, participants’ proximity to other vaccinated individuals, and political affiliations, with nearly 17% of participants saying they “never” wanted to be vaccinated.
Galaty conducted the survey using the Amazon Mechanical Turk service. In their sample, Galaty said 46% of participants identified as male, 53% identified as female, 0.6% identified as non-binary or third gender, and 0.3% self-identified as “other.” 80% of participants surveyed identified as white, 1.5% identified as American Indian or Alaska Native, 9.5% identified as Asian, 8.5% identified as Black or African American, and 0.2% identified as Native Hawaiian or as being from another Pacific island.
Additionally, Galaty said 9% of participants worked in healthcare, and 63% were college-educated. 46% identified as Democrats, 25% identified as Republicans, and 29% identified with some other political affiliation.
“Most of my subjects were between the ages of 24 and 60, which was one of the things I was kind of bummed about because I was sort of curious if young people or old people have different preferences,” Galaty told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “But I didn’t really have much there.”
When they looked at the vaccination preferences of participants based on political affiliation, Galaty found that Democrats wanted to get the vaccine around six months earlier than Republicans, who generally took longer to want to be vaccinated than participants who identified as Independent or as unaffiliated with any political party.
“So there was this really big political difference that I found,” Galaty said.
Having already had COVID-19 was also a factor that, on average, made participants want to wait to be vaccinated for nearly three months longer than those who had not previously contracted the virus.
Furthermore, Galaty found that male-identifying subjects, along with healthcare workers and Republicans, were among the demographics who were more likely to engage in risk-taking behaviors, which for Galaty included flying on airplanes, getting a haircut at a barber shop, eating in restaurants, and public events like parties, sporting events, or religious ceremonies.
“That’s probably partially related to the fact that they’re already working in healthcare, so they’re already getting exposed potentially in their day-to-day life,” Galaty said about healthcare workers who engage in risky behaviors. “They’re probably more likely to have been vaccinated anyway.”
Among the demographics Galaty surveyed, male-identifying and college-educated participants were among those who were most enthusiastic about being vaccinated.
Additionally, Galaty said participants who knew someone in their life who had already been vaccinated wanted to receive the vaccine around three months earlier than those who did not know someone who had been vaccinated.
Galaty said they were “a little bit bummed” they didn’t get more from younger people, because one of the things they did find in a small group of college-age individuals was that they wanted to wait longer to get the vaccine.
“Young people are the ones who have been doing these more risky things and so I think that sort of being cognizant that you have real consequences,” Galaty said. “Doing those risky things still has an impact on other people, and if you are going to do risky things get the vaccine at least, don’t be one of those people who doesn’t wear a mask, does risky things and doesn’t get the vaccine, because that’s just going to make things even worse in the long run.”
About the CC COVID-19 Reporting Project
The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project is created by Colorado College student journalists Esteban Candelaria, Lorea Zabaleta, and Cameron Howell in partnership with The Catalyst, Colorado College’s student newspaper. Work by Phoebe Lostroh, Associate Professor of Molecular Biology at CC and National Science Foundation Program Director in Genetic Mechanisms, Molecular and Cellular Biosciences, will appear every Monday.
The project seeks to provide frequent updates about CC and other higher education institutions during the pandemic by providing original reporting, analysis, interviews with campus leaders, and context about what state and national headlines mean for the CC community.
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