The faces behind the masks: keeping CC supplied during a pandemic
Plus, how the psychology department’s rat colony has fared during COVID
Good morning, and happy Wednesday. On this barely pre-pandemic date in 2020, there were no confirmed cases of COVID-19 in Colorado. (Today, we are two days away from a full year of COVID-19 in Colorado, with the first official case of the virus in the state being announced by Gov. Jared Polis on March 5, 2020.) In this section next week, you may be seeing something new in our newsletters.
Today, we explain how CC has been purchasing personal protective equipment throughout the pandemic. Also, a sneak peek into what the psychology department’s rats have been up to since the pandemic began.
➡️ICYMI: On Monday, our resident microbiologist Phoebe Lostroh gave her weekly forecast for El Paso County. She also explained how Colorado’s most recent changes in vaccine prioritizations will affect the state.
✉️In Your Inbox:
On Friday, a student living on campus received a positive COVID-19 test result and is now in isolation.
On Monday, the National Collegiate Hockey Conference announced that the Gold Pan series between Colorado College and its rival Denver University would be cancelled, bringing both teams’ seasons to a close. The NCHC cited “a combination of positive COVID-19 tests, contact tracing and subsequent quarantining of individuals within the Colorado College hockey program” as the reason for their decision to cancel the series, which had already been postponed by the NCHC twice before.
On Tuesday, two students on campus received positive COVID-19 test results and are now in isolation.
On Tuesday, co-presidents Mike Edmonds and Robert Moore emailed the CC community in support for Asians, Asian-Americans, and Pacific Islanders after hate crimes against those communities have risen in recent weeks.
Photo courtesy of Cameron Howell ‘23
😷Purchasing PPE in a pandemic
When the COVID-19 pandemic began in El Paso County last spring, Colorado College leadership scrambled to gather the supplies and equipment they’d need to help mitigate the virus on campus.
“In the beginning we struggled, and sometimes it took us weeks to get the items,” Operations Manager for the Office of Information Technology Lucie Tennis told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project. “We were very overwhelmed, because everyone requested at once when we first launched, so it was just a lot.”
So last summer, the college established a centralized process for procuring personal protective equipment (PPE) and other pandemic-related supplies for the entirety of the college, which included guidelines for requests, an approval process, and a budget of over $500,000.
Originally, CC tasked the Prevention Working Team, one of the working groups the college established to help mitigate the pandemic, with purchasing supplies for the college in order to ensure equitable access to those resources.
But that group, which was chaired by Vice President for Information Technology Brian Young, ended its work last semester. Since then, Tennis, along with a group of campus representatives, have undertaken the task of purchasing supplies for the college.
The procurement and distribution process
Initially, Tennis said she was hopeful that the pandemic would only last a couple of weeks, but when it became apparent it wasn’t going anywhere, an official COVID budget was established by CC’s Finance & Administration department, and she was able to streamline a supply purchasing process.
When faculty and staff need supplies, Tennis said she and her group send out an online form for applicants to fill out that asks for the number of supplies needed, the purpose of the request, and where supplies should be delivered.
Those requests then go through what Tennis informally dubbed “the PPE procurement and distribution” group for approval. Decisions on whether requests will be filled or denied are based on need and availability.
“We established this group with the understanding that it’s a group that provides basic necessary PPE to be safe in the workplace, then anything extra really was up to the department,” Tennis said.
According to guidelines the group uses, CC staff and faculty are able to request a variety of supplies for the college to purchase, including face masks, gloves, hand sanitizer, and Plexiglas barriers. Some supplies, like KN95 masks, are limited to certain subsets of employees, which is generally based on the availability of those supplies and nature of their work.
So far, Tennis and her group have spent a little over half of the budget allocated for pandemic-related supplies for the 2020-2021 academic year. Tennis said that for the most part, academic departments and the Lloyd E. Worner Campus Center had made the most requests for supplies.
Sodexo to the rescue-o
Where CC struggled, Sodexo, the company responsible for custodial and disinfection services on campus, was able to step in and pick up the slack.
Director of Operations with Sodexo at CC Bronson Terry said that when COVID ballooned out of control, he reached out to some of the leadership at the college and offered assistance.
“I said ‘look, I realized that it may be very difficult to procure some of these supplies, and we are so far maintaining some of these supply chains, and if we can help in any way, please let me know,’” Terry told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
Terry said that procuring supplies for CC was still initially difficult, but because of Sodexo’s vendor relationships and size, the company was able to do so “with some amount of difficulty.” He said the items Sodexo purchased the most for the college at the beginning of the pandemic were hand sanitizer dispensing stations and disinfecting kits, because those were things the company had access to that CC didn’t.
The biggest challenge throughout COVID, Terry said, is that related supply prices have skyrocketed. Nitrile gloves, he said, before the pandemic were $2-3 dollars per box. Now, he said the company pays $30-40 per box. There’s also a specific disinfectant wipe, used only in COVID-positive areas, that had escalated already to $90 a tub at the beginning of the pandemic and now goes for $250 for a single tub.
For other products, however, the market has recovered. Hand sanitizer, which Terry said was “like gold doubloons” at the beginning of the pandemic, is now readily available after some vendors have increased their production.
A calm during a storm
Since the early months of sanitizer and personal protective equipment shortages, Tennis said that it has become easier for the college to buy the supplies it needs as prices have gone down and availability has gone up.
Now, the college is using inventory sheet tracking and reassessing current inventory levels every other week. Tennis said they are “keeping it fairly lean” and ordering as needed because availability isn’t as much of an issue. Some items, like masks and sanitizers, are stockpiled a little more in case of an outbreak, she said.
Additionally, Tennis said that the frequency of requests for supplies has died down. By November she said her group felt okay “not hoarding” supplies, and by December the requests had significantly decreased in frequency, from 10 a day, to maybe five a week.
“So it’s definitely a lot calmer, it’s easier on the nerves,” Tennis said. “I don’t have panic attacks anymore.”
🐀 Oh, rats, they’re still on campus!
As one of the only people in the building, Kris Barney, the animal colony keeper for CC’s rats, walked down the quiet hallway of Tutt Science Center, and turned right into room 301. As he walked in, dozens of little feet scurried in their cages, intrigued by his presence after three days of solitude. After Barney refilled each water bottle, changed beddings, and gave each rat at least four days worth of food, he disinfected everything that he touched, despite being one of the only people to go in the room for months.
When the pandemic shut CC down last spring, the psychology department had a decision to make — let their lab rats live on, or shut down the colony and euthanize them humanely. After a discussion with CC’s Institutional Animal Care and Use Committee, psychology professor Lori Driscoll said the department decided to keep the colony throughout the pandemic, with a few tweaks.
Now, there may only be one person where the rats are kept at a time, as the space is quite small. Also, the colony’s population during the pandemic went from an average of 60 to 70 rats to 22, Barney said.
For Barney, that meant that what was normally a daily routine for him became something he only went through once every four days, after he decided to cut down on time he spent inside the building.
Until Block 5, the rats were not visited by anyone beside select psychology department faculty and staff, which Barney said seemed to have impacted the overall behavior and demeanor of the rats.
“They don’t seem as active as they typically are or were when I was going in every day,” Barney said. “They’re a lot more docile and not as active.”
But now, Barney said he is visiting the rats more often, as classes with laboratories incorporating rats are ratcheting back up and the psychology department has begun to replenish the colony’s population for students that opt to participate in on-campus laboratories with rats.
Starting up rat labs during a pandemic
Because many of the rats had become less socialized in their time alone during the pandemic, paraprofessional Jess Keniston said she had to help the rats transition so they would be more used to human interaction and less likely to be aggressive toward students.
“I gentle them, which is I just go in every day and I pick up each rat for a little bit of time, so that they are ready to be picked up by students,” Keniston told The CC COVID-19 Reporting Project.
The difference between the Introduction to Psychology class’ rat lab this block versus what it looked like before the pandemic is mostly that the laboratories are optional and are done by only one student, as opposed to the usual pair.
Kristi Erdal, a professor of psychology who is currently teaching the introductory course, said that the room has been arranged so that everyone has their own desks six feet apart, Oscar boxes to train their rats, levers, and food cups.
“None of that exchanges hands or goes to another rat or goes to another human. It’s all, you know, one rat, one human, together, the whole block,” Erdal said. “And I think that puts everyone’s mind at ease, just knowing that there’s no real way that people are going to share any germs.”
Erdal said the department has been closely following the science regarding whether or not rats can contract COVID-19 all year.
“Even up until last month, there wasn’t any explicit studies that said ‘okay rats can contract COVID,’” Erdal said. “But we all knew they’re mammals, there’s no reason why they shouldn’t be contracting COVID like other mammals, so we were not at all thinking that they couldn’t.”
However, Erdal said that this did not dissuade the department from using the rats because of the precautions taken by humans. Driscoll said that the department expects any risks to the rats to be minimal.
Overall, the department is happy to be reintroducing the popular rat laboratories to in-person learning. Keniston said the labs are a major reason for why people take the class.
“I think having that still be part of Intro to Psych makes the class so much more rich than it was when it was just online,” Keniston said. “I’m hoping that we’re being as safe as possible for all of our sakes, including the rats now.”
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.