The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project Returns
Kind of
We’ve got good news and bad news.
The good news: The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project is back for a few special editions! The bad news: there is still a pandemic for us to report on.
So anyways… good morning and happy Tuesday. Two years ago yesterday, the World Health Organization released the Novel Coronavirus (2019-nCoV) Situation Report 11. The world had recorded less than 10,000 cases at this point and roughly 200 deaths. As of Jan. 30, 2022, there were nearly 370 million cases worldwide and over 5.5 million deaths.
➡️ICYMI: The Catalyst has been diligently covering COVID news since the newsletter stopped at the end of last summer, from Colorado College’s switch to at-home tests to the pandemic-related postponement of a hockey game.
✉️In Your Inbox:
CC’s president, L. Song Richardson, sent out an email Friday morning announcing that indoor dining would resume on campus with the caveat of “if we see a spike in COVID positivity, we may reverse this decision.”
Vibe Check
The fall 2021 semester marked CC’s first full in-person semester since fall 2019. So how’d it go?
All things considered, successfully. It didn’t quite look like a pre-COVID semester, with masks and regular testing being a part of the student routine, but some longed-for aspects of the college experience returned — parties, of course, being one of them. But club and intramural sports, Rastall’s dining hall, and academic guest speakers (among many other things) made their reappearance as well.
There was, however, the incident in early November following Halloween when weekly cases surpassed three digits.
The administration sent out several emails regarding the outbreak. One from the COVID-19 Policy and Implementation committee provided basic statistics of the surge and next steps while the president sent another tying it to Halloweekend parties and urging students to not become complacent.
The Catalyst reported on the surge as well, and found that several students wondered if the large on-campus hockey games could be responsible for increased case counts in addition to Halloweekend parties. More on that later.
The outbreak caught the school by surprise and “quickly overwhelmed” the college’s resources, Mateo Munoz, Chair of the COVID-19 Policy and Implementation Committee told The Reporting Project.
“We knew at that point that one person couldn’t manage to do all the contact tracing. So we started partnering with [El Paso County],” Munoz said.
In late November and early December, several other colleges of similar size followed suit; several being forced online for finals and leaving in-person spring semesters in jeopardy. Students, understandably, were upset; some more than others.
At Middlebury College in Vermont, a private liberal arts college comparable to CC, a December outbreak prompted students to ask for more testing and unlike CC, which tested all students during the November surge, Middlebury refused to do so.
In response, the editorial board of The Middlebury Campus wrote, “the Middlebury administration failed us every single day that they chose not to mandate testing, and the consequences are as evident as they could possibly be,” in an article entitled, “This was never inevitable.”
“It can, on the other hand, be incredibly frustrating to return to the newsroom week after week with the same concerns we wrote about months prior,” wrote Middlebury student Lily Laesch in an email to The Reporting Project, referencing several articles written by the paper dating back to September 2021 asking for more student testing.
Middlebury was forced online for the final weeks of its fall semester, alongside Cornell. Many colleges were able to stay in person throughout the fall semester but announced in December that their spring semester would start online due to the new Omicron variant.
Some CC students worried at the time that the block following Fall Break would be moved online, but the surge disappeared as quickly as it came. Block 4 continued in-person as planned.
Powering through
CC remained in person through it all; ending the semester with a total of 281 positive test results after administering 14,672 tests, resulting in an average positivity rate of less than 2% between Aug. 25 to Dec. 28. Notably, El Paso County’s positivity rate during this same period was roughly 10%.
However, compared to some of the nation’s other small liberal arts schools CC’s case count was significantly higher.
Claremont McKenna College in California had only 40 cases throughout the entire fall semester and Carleton College in Minnesota had only 14.
Phoebe Lostroh, a microbiology professor at CC and COVID-forecast-creator for The Reporting Project during its original run said there are probably a few reasons for this discrepancy.
She said one “speculation is that Colorado is a tourist destination so maybe we are getting exposed to a wider variety of people.”
Lostroh also said while we “are not unique” in being more liberal than our surrounding community, a “distinguishing feature” is that CC is within a conservative urban area with a relatively dense population.
“Unlike colleges in small towns we are exposed to a city of more than 700,000. And there are things to go do in Colorado Springs – not just grocery shopping but also clubs, restaurants, recreational things to do that put us in contact with people who are not observing the safety precautions we have on campus,” Lostroh said.
“I think CC has very good testing and screening protocols in place, so I don’t think the reason can be that our safety protocols or screening weren’t as thoughtful,” she added.
Risks versus rewards
COVID is no joke and while the average CC student demographic is at lower risk than most Americans, returning to an in-person experience did not come without a very real, if slight, possibility of students contracting a serious illness.
Luckily, with a highly vaccinated population, the “vast majority” of CC community members completed their isolations without any additional medical care, Andrea Bruder, a CC professor and the Chief Public Health Advisor to the President told The Reporting Project.
“There have been some trips to urgent care or the emergency room,” Bruder said. “And to my knowledge, a very small number of overnight stays in the hospital.”
One student, Liza Scher ’22 said she was one of the people who got “super, super sick” from COVID.
“It sucked,” Scher said. “So don’t be stupid.”
But for some college students, actually contracting the virus is only one of their COVID-related concerns.
“They feel that one day they’re going to get an email that says pack up your bags, it’s time for you to go home,” the college’s president L. Song Richardson told The Reporting Project. She referenced how anxious students must have felt when they got the email in March 2020 that classes would be online until further notice and the fear that such an email would be sent out again.
It’s been almost two years since that initial email landed in the community’s inbox. Now, COVID still looms as an ever-present threat, but things on campus look a lot different than they did that first spring.
“You know, once upon a time, I think I would have said that we should not have events in person so that we need to protect class as the most important thing, but I am old enough now that I no longer believe classes are the main reason that students go to college,” Lostroh said. “So some of those events are as important to the students as the classes that they’re going to be studying. And so I don’t think there’s necessity to prioritize the academics over other kinds of gatherings.”
Omi-oh-come-on, please let it end
This year’s spring semester at CC is going to look a little different than the fall one.
What changed?
When the World Health Organization first classified Omicron as “a variant of concern” on Nov. 26, 2021, and it became clear the new COVID flavor was going to impact the United States, the CC administration began to adjust its plans. We’ll go into detail on this later.
The state of Omicron in Colorado and throughout the country is dire. There is not much definitively known about the new variant, but early research indicates it is more contagious and less severe than previous variants such as Delta.
The South African wave of Omicron seemed to fall as fast as it had risen, providing a glimpse of hope as the variant pounded the rest of the world.
In fact, by Jan. 22, 2022 some said the variant had reached its peak of cases in the United States.
Figure 1. 7-day cumulative rolling incidence of COVID-19 in El Paso County, Colo. The incidence for 2020 is in blue-filled circles while the incidence for 2021 is in open green circles. The incidence for 2022 is in purple. The red or yellow dotted lines mark the CDC thresholds for high or substantial transmission levels, respectively.
“The local epidemic of COVID-19 is very serious but improving,” wrote Phoebe Lostroh in a special Jan. 27 situation report for El Paso County.
“The new cases in the Omicron wave in the U.S. have reached a peak and we have, too. The summary graphic uses the thresholds recommended by the CDC for levels of community spread. The incidence for new cases is nine times higher than the threshold for the CDC value of ‘high’ transmission, which is still very serious for hospital capacity, but new cases are trending down.”
Figure 2. Percent positivity for nasal swabs in El Paso County, Colo. The county dashboard reports on the nasal swab tests for virus nucleic acids. The daily percent positivity is in light blue diamonds while the 7-day average is in filled dark blue diamonds.
“The percent positivity is extremely high but improving,” said Lostroh.
Figure 3. 7-day cumulative rolling new COVID-19 hospitalizations in El Paso County, Colo. The incidence for 2020 is in yellow-filled boxes while the incidence for 2021 is in open red squares. The incidence for 2022 is in orange.
“As was the case last week, local hospitals have too many patients and not enough care providers, not only for COVID-19 patients but for everyone who needs emergency services,” Lostroh said.
COVID semester take five
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 the 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” 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 of 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.
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 chip bags.
“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 ‘23, 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.”
Lostoh 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 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.
This newsletter was reported and written by Colorado College student journalists Isabel Hicks ‘22, Lorea Zabaleta ‘23, and Hank Bedingfield ‘22. Infographics were created by professor Phoebe Lostroh. Please direct questions, comments and concerns to ccreportingproject@gmail.com.