With the start of the new year came the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. The state, country and rest of the world have gone through quarantines, shutdowns, travel bans, restrictions and major social distancing guidelines. Almost a year later, while most quarantines and shutdowns have been lifted, extensive preventative measures are still in place, such as wearing face masks in indoor public spaces. Action has been taken to keep people safe and healthy and to slow the spread of coronavirus. However, there is still much more action that needs to be taken.
On the school, state, national and global level, people are taking action to end the pandemic. At NCC, the administration has been working hard to keep things running smoothly. There was both optimism and pessimism regarding people’s initial return to campus this fall.
“I felt confident that we were doing the planning necessary to be able to have an in-person fall semester,” said Kimberly Sluis, former vice president for Student Affairs and Strategic Initiatives and also former co-chair of the College’s COVID-19 Institutional Response Team (IRT). “I’ve been surprised, I think pleasantly, by just how seriously our students and faculty and staff, for the most part, have taken their role in keeping the community safe.”
Tension and anxiety ran high with regard to returning to campus. It took all summer for the IRT to plan for not only this semester but the whole academic school year. Members of the IRT did not want to push back the start date of the 2021-22 academic school year. This meant next spring semester couldn’t be delayed much.
“We really couldn’t delay it anymore than two weeks if we were going to employ the same basic structure of meetings and weekly schedule that we’re employing right now for fall semester,” said Peter Barger, assistant provost, director of Institutional Effectiveness and Planning and co-chair of the College’s COVID IRT.
In an interview with The Washington Post, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Director Robert
Redfield spoke of a second wave of coronavirus hitting this winter in the U.S. In addition, there may also be an overlap of the flu season with this suspected second wave, which may lead to more illnesses and leave people questioning whether they have the flu or coronavirus. Therefore, starting the spring semester later at NCC will allow coronavirus to run its course with the hopes of the virus not affecting any students, faculty or staff. To help prevent the spread of the flu and to stay healthy, everyone is encouraged to get their flu shot this year.
Looking forward to next semester, the IRT plans to continue enforcing the same preventative measures, practices and protocols. Among those include requiring everyone on campus to continue wearing face masks, social/physical distancing and more. As always, the IRT will add to or adapt their measures as they see fit to best meet and exceed the needs and safety of the campus community. This may include different modalities of testing, surveillance and monitoring. The return to pre-pandemic life is not yet possible. Barger stressed that we cannot get complacent.
“We are very happy about where we are today,” Barger said. “I want to encourage everybody—faculty, staff, students—to continue their trend behavior.”
Updated information can always be found on the College’s COVID website at covid.northcentralcollege.edu. The school reports the cumulative number of positive tests. However, Sluis emphasized that positive tests are not equivalent to positive cases. First, there is a potential chance of false positives. Second, it is possible people who have COVID-19 are not getting tested because they either don’t know they have it or have been exposed. Some people immediately start isolating because they know they’re sick and getting tested wouldn’t change anything. So, even if zero positive tests are ever reported on campus, that does not necessarily mean campus is COVID-free.
At the state level, Illinois had a rough start with Chicago reporting its first positive case of COVID-19 on Jan. 24. “We have locked down and encouraged masks and had a more coherent strategy from what I can see than a lot of states,” said Associate Professor of Biology Gregory Ruthig.
Although he said Illinois wasn’t looking so good in July and August, Ruthig also said that “it’s tough to use numbers as a real great metric of how we are doing” because there have been little mini waves of coronavirus across the country. As the pandemic continued, rural areas, which had initially dodged COVID, began to feel the same strain as urban populations.
“There seems to be a cultural divide on how seriously people have taken this,” said Ruthig. People in rural areas may not be wearing face masks and practicing social distancing nearly as much as people in more urban areas, like Chicago.
Compared to other countries, the U.S. has a poor deaths per capita number, according to Ruthig. We have around a quarter of the world’s COVID deaths but only make up about 4% of the world population. People who die with COVID-19 often die from another illness.
“There are comorbidities that are associated with getting sick from coronavirus,” said Ruthig. Merriam-Webster defines comorbid as “existing simultaneously with and usually independently of another medical condition.” That means someone sick with COVID-19 may end up acquiring, let’s say, pneumonia and then dies from pneumonia. Under normal circumstances, the person would not have acquired pneumonia and died, rather it would because of COVID-19. Ruthig compares it to someone shoveling the snow in a snowstorm and then suddenly dying from a heart attack. That person would not have gotten a heart attack and died if it had not been for the snowstorm, therefore it would be listed as a snowstorm-related death. “Those are tough, and they’re certainly controversial,” said Ruthig.
Moving on to action at the state and national level, Ruthig described what the duration of this pandemic might look like. “If you allow a spread to happen faster, more people get sick, more people die (and) the epidemic goes away a little faster,” Ruthig said. However, this may not be the case with COVID-19 due to the fact that people might be able to get reinfected. If people can’t become resistant, then we cannot “flatten the curve,” so to speak.
“I tend to be in favor of reducing transmission, even if that prolongs the duration of this a little bit because fewer people get sick and die and that’s what’s most important to me,” said Ruthig. Wearing cloth masks is effective in keeping people from spreading anything and somewhat protective from keeping the wearer from getting anything.
Ruthig sees the future for now as us continuing to be careful, wear masks, wash our hands and avoid big crowds, but hopefully, still return to school. He says the vaccine is critical in order to get out of this pandemic. However, if people can get secondary infections, then the antibodies produced in response to the first infection won’t work in fighting the second.
Therefore, we cannot rely on herd immunity if a vaccine ever comes out. “Herd immunity occurs when a high percentage of the community is immune to a disease (through vaccination and/ or prior illness), making the spread of this disease from person to person unlikely,” according to the Association for Professionals in Infection Control and Epidemiology. “Even individuals not vaccinated (such as newborns and the immunocompromised) are offered some protection because the disease has little opportunity to spread within the community.” If secondary infections occur, then this idea of herd immunity no longer applies.
According to Ruthig, getting a vaccine to build antibodies may be better at preventing a secondary infection of COVID-19 than getting antibodies from a primary infection with it. However, the research is still insufficient in determining whether secondary infections occur with this particular coronavirus. Even so, vaccines are on the horizon.
“Vaccine development usually takes on the order of 10 years and we’re doing it in eight or nine months,” Ruthig said.
There are currently four vaccine candidates in Phase 3 of clinical trials being tested in the U.S., according to the National Institutes of Health. In Phase 3, the vaccine is given to tens of thousands of people, about a third of which are usually given a placebo group to act as a control.
Some people volunteered to be injected with coronavirus to see if the vaccine worked, but ethicists decided that would have been unethical since there’s technically no cure/rescue drug for COVID-19. “We just have to wait to see that the people who got the vaccine are at least 50% less likely to get infected than the people who got the placebo,” Ruthig said. “The faster that people get infected, especially the placebo group, the faster that we can make that statistical claim that these (vaccines) are statistically better.”
Animal vaccine trials have been successful, according to Science Mag; now we just have to wait and see if human trials yield the same result. When it comes to vaccines, there are two things that scientists look for. One, Ruthig already mentioned, there needs to be at least a 50% reduction in people getting infected who are vaccinated compared to people who are not, and two, the vaccine cannot make anyone sick.
According to NPR, a U.K. volunteer candidate acquired a spinal infection in a COVID-19 vaccine trial. The study has since been paused for review. More recently, CNN reported Johnson & Johnson paused their COVID-19 vaccine trial after a volunteer in the study acquired an “unexplained illness.” The company has yet to release the identification of the illness.
Until a vaccine is produced, life as we now know it will not change. “We cannot stop the preventative measures that we are doing right now until we have a vaccine,” said Ruthig. The tricky part after successful vaccine development is distribution, such as how many vaccines should be created and who gets them first. Ruthig suspects healthcare workers will be at the front of the line, followed by vulnerable populations—most likely the elderly and immunocompromised patients—and putting young healthy people at the end of the line.
This year, Redfield testified before Congress that everyone in the U.S. who wants a vaccine will be able to get a vaccine around fall of next year. This is true only if the vaccines work, but more data needs to be collected to know for certain what the future holds. But until then, we need to continue following COVID-19 safety guidelines.
“Student behavior is what’s saving us right now, and that’s why we’re doing better than some other schools,” Ruthig said. “It’s the combination of a bunch of people’s efforts that’s keeping all of us safe.”
