Teaming up during a pandemic: how CC might help with distributing vaccines
Plus, how newly-formed clubs have dealt with virtual formats
Good morning, and happy Wednesday. On this pre-pandemic date in 2017, the activist hip hop group Shining Soul held a concert at Packard Performance Hall. (This year, concerts on campus are being live-streamed on Facebook and YouTube, and socially-distanced seating will be available to CC students, faculty, and staff.)
Today, we report on how institutions of higher education and El Paso County Public Health have been collaborating on virus mitigation and vaccine rollout. Also, some clubs formed within the last year explain what it has been like operating during the pandemic.
➡️ICYMI: On Monday, our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh gave her weekly forecast for El Paso County. She also explained Colorado’s updated dial framework.
🐯🏀Women’s basketball team under quarantine: After arriving back to campus from Colorado College’s recent games against Centenary College of Louisiana in Shreveport, La., one member of the women’s basketball team tested positive for COVID-19.
Now, 15 people, including players, coaches, and staff are under quarantine, which CC’s Vice President and Director of Athletics Lesley Irvine said could be as short as 10 days, per county and Center for Disease Control and Prevention guidelines. Student-athletes that live in large residence halls have been quarantined in Bijou West, while some have been quarantining in their own apartments.
Irvine added that CC’s upcoming games against Schreiner University have been cancelled while the team completes its quarantine.
✉️In Your Inbox:
CC is celebrating International Education Week to recognize the global outreach of education, the college’s international student body, and study abroad programming. Learn more here.
Yesterday, CC announced that the college received a $500,000 donation from the Inasmuch Foundation for the construction of the Mike and Barbara Yalich Student Services Center, which will be located next to the upcoming Ed Robson Arena.
Photo courtesy of Andy Fresen ‘23
How local colleges and universities are collaborating with El Paso County on vaccine rollout
When the COVID-19 pandemic began, many institutions of higher education were unprepared to tackle the coronavirus and virtual learning. Playbooks for how schools should handle the pandemic were scarce, and conditions worsened as many local health departments were overwhelmed by cases and abrupt closures.
But when rising local cases of COVID-19 forced schools to send most of their students home last March, Colorado College, Pikes Peak Community College, the University of Colorado - Colorado Springs, the U.S. Air Force Academy, and El Paso County Public Health began meeting every week to share strategies related to virus mitigation.
Maggie Santos, CC’s COVID-19 Emergency Manager and the Director of Campus Safety, said the meetings have mostly been about making sure that the schools and the health department are working together so that “none of us are starting from scratch.”
“If one of us is doing something, we share the information so nobody’s struggling,” Santos told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “We want to make sure that everybody’s successful in dealing with COVID.”
Stephanie Hanenberg, UCCS’ Assistant Vice Chancellor for Health and Wellness, wrote in an email statement to The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project that the meetings with the other colleges and the health department have been invaluable for support and for discussion about best practices for mitigating the pandemic.
As the pandemic has evolved, the schools have met on a variety of issues, ranging from testing strategies to quarantine protocols, though Santos said that each institution is different, and ultimately make their own decisions on what will be best for their respective schools.
But as vaccine production for public usage ramps up across the country, and those in education grow closer to next on the list, schools like CC and UCCS have been shifting some of their focus to a distribution plan.
What is the plan?
As Colorado moves deeper into Phase 1B of its vaccine distribution plan, which includes K-12 educators, a question that has surfaced in the weekly meetings has been whether colleges can help with administering vaccines.
Aaron Hueser, the Emergency Preparedness & Response Coordinator for El Paso County Public Health, has been strategizing with the colleges on how they might become points of distribution for the vaccine, which are institutions that agree to help health departments with vaccine rollout through memorandums of understanding (MOUs).
“We’ve got greater than 20 MOUs in different places,” Hueser told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “Some of them are businesses, usually really large businesses, and then also with many of the schools.”
Santos said that CC has had an MOU with El Paso County Public Health since “about 2016,” when mumps outbreaks alarmed health care providers throughout Colorado. She added that UCCS is also among the schools that established an MOU with the county.
Santos said that for CC, the talks about the vaccine are still in early stages — mostly about determining whether the college has the resources and personnel to become a point of distribution — and that she didn’t know if or when CC might be asked to become one.
“There’s no real commitment, as much as we said ‘call us if it’s possible, and we will see if we can do it,’” Santos said.
Whether CC can become a point of distribution seems to depend on vaccine availability. Given the current pace of local vaccinations, Hueser said that El Paso County Public Health has continued to tell people that the general public, which is the category that most of CC’s population will fall in, will likely begin to receive the vaccine in the summer. Still, he was hopeful that the approval of upcoming vaccines could boost that timeline.
“We’ve got a couple of vaccines that potentially could get approval in the next couple of months,” Hueser said. “And if that takes place, I think we can maybe even start speeding up what we thought we were going to be able to do.”
Where do we fall in line, and when?
Hueser believes vaccine distribution for staff and faculty in higher education institutions will likely fall in tiers. With essential workers like custodians and food service employees up next in Colorado’s vaccine distribution plan, Hueser said that he anticipated educators that don’t already satisfy criteria for vaccination would be in the same tier as students living in congregate settings on campus. Students living off-campus would be vaccinated in the tier that followed, and Hueser added that it would likely be March before the college could start vaccinating essential workers.
Santos said the college is in the process of identifying those that fall in that first tier, and that certain groups of employees that have already qualified for vaccination per Colorado’s distribution plan have already been given opportunities to become immunized. Santos said medical workers at the Student Health Center, along with Campus Safety, who is responsible for the transportation of individuals that test positive with the virus, are among the employees that have already qualified to receive the vaccine.
Still, CC and its peer institutions in the Colorado Springs area look forward to the day that everyone in their schools’ populations can receive the vaccine, which Hanenberg said was essential to achieving herd immunity and UCCS’ main goal of having more and more students on campus.
The only way that the county could accomplish that was with help from the community, such as Colorado Springs institutions of higher education collaborating, Hueser explained.
“One of the big things that I’ve learned in the last 15 months or so being in public health is that nothing that public health does is done exclusively by public health,” Hueser said “If we don’t have the community behind us, it won’t work.”
Club Pandemic, only available online
From funding, approval and recruiting new members, starting a club at Colorado College is difficult enough during a normal year — but that is made all the more challenging during a pandemic.
“We had a few new people join us, but so far they haven’t really been active,” co-chair of Celecia K-Dance Lily Price told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “It has been a bit difficult in terms of trying to recruit more people and then also keeping them engaged with the club.”
Celecia K-Dance, a club dedicated to bringing Korean pop music to CC through dance, began in the fall of 2019, but grew momentum, as well as their official status as a club, during the pandemic.
Previously, Price said that her club was able to enlist new members through workshops, but now that recruiting was mostly confined to word of mouth, which she said was “a bit of a challenge.”
Leaders of the affinity group CC Adoptees, a community created this academic year dedicated to providing support to students with any relation to adoption or foster care systems, said that most of their recent recruiting has also had to happen through word of mouth.
“We all directly had to reach out to people individually that we knew were adopted,” Sara Dixon, co-leader of CC Adoptees, told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “And a lot of it was just having to ask people to tell their friends if they know that anyone else has ties. So that definitely impacted it, and made it a little bit harder to recruit people.”
But one good way for student organizations to advertise to new members is through Campus Activities Night, which this semester was held virtually on Feb. 2. Amy Hill, CC’s Director of Campus Activities and Student Orientation, said that around 35 student groups had “virtual tables,” and at any given point throughout the two-hour event there were around 100 people in attendance.
Olivia Belluck ’22, co-manager of the newly-approved filmmaking club CC Productions, said that for her and her group, Campus Activities Night was a “main” avenue for recruitment. She also said that CC Productions has been able to gain members through advertising on their Instagram page.
Not ‘virtually’ the same
Meeting remotely is much easier for some clubs than others. Lena Saunders ’23, co-chair of Celecia K-Dance, told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project that the club has been able to record covers and upload them to their Instagram, like they did before.
“We’re not particularly dependent on meeting in person,” Price said. “It would be nice, and it definitely adds a lot to the group, but it’s not a necessity in that respect.”
But for Belluck, members of CC Productions have had difficulty engaging over virtual formats, with some telling her that they are interested in the club but that they “don’t see how it can work during COVID.”
“When you’re in Zoom school, the last thing you want to do is get on other Zoom meetings and do activities through Zoom,” she said, adding that “to really make a good film, you need to have multiple people together at once.”
Cam Mongoven ‘21, the other co-leader of CC Adoptees, also said that Zoom fatigue “is really real for people,” and that it’s up to him and his co-leaders to keep up a “really good energy.”
Still, Belluck said that Campus Activities has been very supportive of clubs during the pandemic.
“Amy Hill is just like, she’s, there’s a very motivating presence,” said Belluck. “And it reminds all of us that, it’s good, we need clubs, even if people aren’t engaging, we have to keep pushing forward and do whatever we can to try and find something people will engage in.”
Hill said that due to the circumstances of Socially-Distanced Spring, funding for student groups has been “flexible.” For instance, clubs have been able to ask for Grubhub gift cards with more money than would usually be allowed to be given to members for meetings.
Dixon said that more funds being provided for food has helped build enthusiasm.
“Oftentimes we do use our club funds to somewhat bribe people, but also just to kind of build a community through shared items like food or drinks,” she said.
Looking forward
While club meetings are likely to remain virtual for the remainder of the year, Hill said that Campus Activities are in the early processes of developing protocols to allow for in-person events.
In those protocols, Hill said students would likely have to check in and check out for events, show the CC COVID-screening app upon arrival, have completed campus access protocol, follow all directions of event staff, and maintain regular risk mitigation protocols.
Belluck said she is looking forward to when people can gather in-person once again.
“We get to actually, when we do our festival, we actually have people together watching the films, and not just like watching it alone on their computer,” she said. “So I think that’s what I’m looking forward to the most, is just everyone being back together.”
Special thanks to Bailey Burrows ‘21 for additional reporting in this issue.
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.
📬 Enter your email address to subscribe and get the newsletter in your inbox each time it comes out. You can reach us with questions, feedback, or news tips by emailing ccreportingproject@gmail.com.