Integrity, Safety and Compliance - August 11, 2020
Dear CU Boulder students, staff and faculty,
With less than one week before the start of move-in and two weeks before the beginning of classes on Aug. 24, I am writing to provide additional details on how we will monitor our daily COVID-19 readiness, including regular campus updates on our operating status and the ability to shift mode rapidly if the need arises. We will need to be flexible and understand that the campus will likely not remain in just one mode throughout the semester. We will respond to COVID-19 in a way that best protects our community based upon the latest information available to us.
Campus Modes of Operation
Expanded (current mode)—our current mode for fall increases the presence of students, faculty and staff on campus. While COVID-19 cases exist in the local community, public health orders permit in-person operations with appropriate mitigation. Face coverings are required and available for everyone on campus, and the campus environment features significant physical distancing measures. Testing, contact tracing and isolation are in place and achieving containment. The campus has enhanced heating, ventilation and air conditioning (HVAC), sanitation and physical distancing measures in place. Noncritical services and professional staff continue to work remotely. Our campus is operating at reduced physical capacity with an emphasis on faculty/staff support for research, teaching and student success and campus life programming.
Limited—restrictions due to public health orders or other constraints could require the campus to limit in-person operations to research and creative work activities. These constraints may include limitations on our testing, notification and ability to isolate. In this mode, the campus would be operating at limited physical capacity. Noncritical services and professional staff would work remotely. Academic instruction would be conducted remotely. Access for research-related activities would be based on risk assessments, training and the use of masks and other protective equipment.
Remote—due to new local or state public health orders, the campus could be required to shift to remote-only instruction with limited access to facilities and services for a set time duration.
Full—when the pandemic is largely contained, the campus and local community could return to normal operations. Campus emergency plans would be demobilized. This mode would represent a return to the “old” normal.
COVID-19-Ready Dashboard and Campus Updates
Our campus is developing and will be launching a public COVID-19-ready dashboard that will live on the COVID-19 information webpage by the end of this week.
The dashboard will include the state of Colorado status, Boulder County COVID-19 statistics and our current campus mode of operation. It will provide both a daily and a five-day moving average of positive CU Boulder cases that have been tested via our campus Medical Services testing operations.
Positive tests of campus affiliates will be identified through campus testing (protecting student, faculty and staff privacy) and will be shared with department chairs and instructors whose in-person classes involve a positive case of COVID-19; CU Boulder Medical Services will also maintain this information for use in our campus contact tracing and isolation efforts.
Our positive case results will also be shared in aggregate as part of ongoing Boulder County Public Health tracking of cases in Boulder County.
Our campus will share weekly status updates on Thursdays via CU Boulder Today. The updates will include dashboard highlights and a general summary of items of note regarding positive cases, isolation, contact tracing and mitigation measures.
Triggers for Operating Mode Decisions
The campus will monitor the factors tracked in our campus dashboard daily (and more frequently during critical times such as move-in) to provide the best recommendation possible to Chancellor DiStefano and campus leadership regarding our campus mode of operation.
Decisions do not rely upon a single factor, but instead take into account the campus and community resources and needs. We know that we will have COVID-19 cases. Our decisions will encompass our ability to respond effectively to those cases using the COVID-19-ready resources we’ve developed over the past months and will continue to evolve during the academic year.
Should a change in operating status become necessary, we will use the same notification methods used for urgent announcements such as inclement weather conditions, including updates on the campus website, email and text alerts to all campus affiliates.
Daily Meeting with Campus Leadership
A daily campus leadership meeting on current campus status is an ongoing feature of our pandemic response plan.
We are re-activating these daily meetings and will begin addressing daily needs related to campus and community health and safety beginning during move-in week.
This meeting will track our monitoring factors and inform key decision points on our modes of operation each day.
While the information we are sharing will be helpful in keeping us updated on our status this fall, I also want to reinforce the vital importance of our commitment to each other’s health and safety through our actions each day of the semester.
The pandemic is still with us and will be for the duration of the fall and likely beyond. It remains a dynamic challenge to our community, with local cases on a steady rise during the past few weeks. We anticipate we will identify multiple positive cases during move-in next week, and many of those cases will be of asymptomatic and presymptomatic people, which will enable us to more effectively limit the spread of infection on campus and in the community. We are confident our rapid campus-based testing, isolation and contact tracing capabilities will enable us to provide care for our infected students and reduce the risk of the virus before our semester begins.
Please remember that our public health and safety protocols apply both on and off campus and that our imperative to each other’s health is our top priority and critical to our ability to safely conduct ourselves during the fall.
We all are required to follow campus and Boulder public health and safety guidance, including completing the campus COVID-19 safety training, completing the daily health form before being on campus, minimizing our potential for infectious contacts each day, avoiding large gatherings, wearing face coverings, maintaining at least 6 feet of physical distance, washing our hands, practicing good hygiene and staying home when we do not feel well. All of us must be responsible and do what we can to prevent the spread of infection.
Thank you for protecting yourselves, each other and our community. By working together, we can continue to meet the ongoing challenges of COVID-19 head-on and adjust rapidly as necessary to maintain health and safety while continuing our academic mission.
We are Buffs together,
Dan Jones
Associate Vice Chancellor of Integrity, Safety and Compliance