“We need to get ready.”
Andre Le Duc, the University of Oregon’s chief resilience officer, emailed his colleagues back in Eugene on Jan. 25, 2020. He was reviewing the incident management program at University of California, San Francisco, when the people he was meant to speak with — several lead infectious disease experts — were called away to deal with a new global virus.

Three days later, Le Duc came back to Eugene and began preparing UO to tackle the same virus. A week before, the U.S. had reported its first case of the novel coronavirus, nearly a month after Wuhan, China, first reported a cluster of pneumonia cases.

The World Health Organization announced the name COVID-19 on Feb. 11, 2020, and the new virus quickly spread across the globe. Over a year later, as of Feb. 28, 2021, the world has seen over 113 million cases and nearly 2.5 million deaths from the coronavirus, according to WHO.

COVID-19 has undoubtedly made its mark on our community. Lane County has seen over 10,000 cases and 126 deaths from the virus, and the University of Oregon has had 1,499 students and employees test positive since June 2020, according to UO’s COVID-19 case tracking website.

Back in January 2020, when COVID-19 had not yet reached Oregon, UO suspended all university travel to China and started working to bring the few UO students there back to the U.S. 

UO President Michael Schill at the time said the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention “has classified the potential public health threat as ‘high’ and notes that the current global spread of the virus is likely to cause a pandemic.” 

Later that day, the Oregon Health Authority announced Oregon’s first COVID-19 case. There have been 154,878 cases and 2,206 deaths across Oregon since, at the time of print, according to the agency. 

UO moved winter term final exams and the first three weeks of spring term to Zoom. One week later, UO elected for an entirely remote spring term.

In April, Schill planned to have students return to campus for an in-person fall term. The school considered options like limiting the number of people in residence halls and offices, intensely cleaning university buildings and testing students and employees.

But the pandemic continued through the summer, and UO announced in August that most of fall term would be remote, though first-year students would still live in the dorms while being tested for COVID-19. Winter and spring terms would also be primarily remote, though with some hybrid options. In Schill’s message announcing that spring term would mix remote, online and in-person classes, he shared his confidence in returning to predominantly in-person classes in fall 2021.

Le Duc, head of the IMT, has been leading the university’s response to the pandemic. Before the pandemic, the team consisted of about 35 individuals who met monthly, reviewed plans and practiced exercises for planned and unplanned scenarios together, including commencement and the Olympic trials. Currently, the IMT includes almost 250 faculty from disciplines across the university.

Because the core IMT team members trust each other and train together, UO saved a lot of time at the start, Le Duc said. The members have muscle memory that allows them to activate quickly to address the community’s needs.

“It doesn’t matter how much money you have, how many resources,” Le Duc said in an interview. “You can never buy time. So you always want to be looking at how agile you can be, how fast you can move to really maximize your time.”

Benjamin Clark, an associate professor of public administration at UO and co-executive director of UO’s Institute for Policy Research and Engagement, has been working within the IMT’s community response branch. From his experience working within IMT, Clark said UO’s response to the virus has followed a public health-oriented approach.

“They have taken a very proactive and measured response using science as the basis of their decision-making,” he said. “While no response to this pandemic has been perfect, I feel very confident in the leadership we have at the university.”

Clark said university administration has been responsive to IPRE’s work, and UO has taken his research and used it to identify necessary resources to scale up its testing and contact tracing efforts. The institute has also identified target spots on campus and in the community for COVID-19 messaging. 

Ellen Peters is the director of UO’s Center for Science Communication Research and an expert on science communication. Early on in the pandemic, Peters observed that the UO communications team wasn’t trained in science communication, and she didn’t really like their COVID-19 messaging.

So, with the university’s blessing, she organized a team of faculty from across UO colleges to come up with high-level strategic advice for the UO communications team. This group, which she calls the Faculty Engagement Team, eventually set up a weekly consulting hour for groups working with coronavirus communications. UO used the team’s advice pretty extensively, Peters said.

“I don’t know of any other university around the country where people have been as willing to listen to faculty expertise about things that matter,” she said.

Melissa Graboyes, a professor of African and medical history at UO, has been involved with Peters’ engagement team. Graboyes doesn’t think UO has meaningfully integrated its faculty expertise and input throughout the pandemic.

In late February 2020, Graboyes was on leave in Milan, Italy, one of the first regions outside of China with recognized sustained community transmission of COVID-19. Because of her early experience with quarantine measures, she felt that everyone in the U.S. was “massively underestimating the threat and massively underestimating the impact it was going to have on all aspects of life.”

In an open letter to Le Duc and the UO community, she and two other UO professors in Italy at the time urged the university in March to shift to online classes ahead of diagnosed cases in the Eugene area.
Graboyes said she was met with resistance by university administration for starting a public conversation about the virus, and even now, she doesn’t think UO is considering all faculty input.

“Sometimes when we did give feedback on the university’s response — and I count myself in this category — we were criticized for it, and [they] said that we were not being team players and we should keep our criticisms to ourselves,” Graboyes said. 

The trio wrote a general letter to the Oregon and Eugene communities on March 12 about how they should prepare for the virus, and Graboyes independently wrote a letter to UO leadership and SEIU union leadership addressing risks to employees working on campus. She also ran an anonymous survey of over 2,300 UO community members in June, finding mixed opinions and expectations for the fall 2020 term.

“I think that is a really alarming way for a university to be run in the midst of a really difficult time, where you want to be grounded in good, clear, transparent conversation and communication,” she said. “It feels very shortsighted to me.”

Graboyes sees other areas where the university can improve on its COVID-19 response, including expanding UO’s Monitoring and Assessment Program for testing, preparing for a vaccine initiative, working to communicate more effectively about the virus and having a more open conversation with the community.

Graboyes and Peters both want to see UO specifically target messages to people who are hesitant about getting the vaccine. 

Peters said she wants to see UO set up a way for people to get vaccinated on campus if the vaccine supply gets large enough.

Addy Alfred, secretary of Student Health Advocacy for ASUO, said she also wants to see UO offer vaccinations to students. Alfred appreciates that UO offers testing for the community but would like to see them encourage students to get tested.

The university is working with Lane County to help plan mass vaccination sites, Le Duc said, which will include one site at the Lane County Fairgrounds, one at Lane Community College and one at Autzen Stadium. UO is also working to establish a “vaccine corps” of students to work at those sites.

Looking back, “hindsight is 2020,” Le Duc said. He wishes UO could have moved faster and pushed its community partners — including Lane County Public Health — to integrate sooner, but since the IMT activated in January, there wasn’t much room to go faster, he said.

Le Duc said the IMT is constantly looking to review what it did well and what it could improve. He’s especially proud of UO’s ability to move from just an idea to a fully operational testing laboratory — the MAP lab — in just six months. This type of facility could take up to two years normally, he said.

Le Duc also wants to improve peer-to-peer communication about the virus within the UO community. “An email, a message, an article isn’t enough,” he said. “We need actual engagement.”
Alfred said UO has kept students informed about COVID-19, especially early in the pandemic, but students often neglect to read emails and updates from the university. She’d like to see UO develop messages that students are more likely to read — even communication from professors would help, she said.

Alfred said she cut UO a lot of slack last spring in terms of moving slow or waiting to make decisions regarding remote learning. Peters agrees that there isn’t much anyone could do with such imperfect information.

“Have they always gone as fast as I wanted them to? No,” Peters said. “Do I see ways that they might have been able to go faster? I don’t know.”