Page 25 - Campus Technology, October/November 2020

The fall semester has begun, and we are finally seeing reopening plans play out at colleges and universities across the country. Of par- ticular interest are those that are pursuing an in- person campus experience. Will students comply with social distancing measures? Can the inevitable COVID-19 cases be managed and contained? The answers to those questions have been mixed. The Univer- sity of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, for exam- ple, was the first to switch back to fully online, after just one week of on-campus classes and a growing number of COVID cases. Other insti- tutions are employing temporary suspensions of in-person classes while infection clusters are brought under control. And some are success- fully remaining open with a mix of online and on-campus instruction.
To find out how the pandemic decision- making process works, Campus Technology spoke with Dr. Eric Monday, who is executive vice president for finance and administration at the University of Kentucky and also the chair of UK’s Pandemic Response Team. He has exten- sive experience in crisis management, going back to when he assisted with Louisiana State University’s response to Hurricane Katrina.
At the time of the interview, UK had about a week of in-person classes under its belt. And as of press time, it has remained open, thanks in part to robust on-campus COVID-19 testing and retesting procedures. As of Oct. 11, the uni- versity had conducted a total of 35,047 tests, with a 4.6 percent positivity rate.
Here, Monday talks about how UK’s Pan- demic Response Team is structured, what types of data they monitor, what kinds of challenges they have been working through, and how they are approaching contingency planning.
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M
se to COVID-19, its decision-making is principles of safety and empathy. Here, r process. BY RHEA KELLY
IC RESPONSE TEAM