INITIAL PLANS EMERGE

Planning for a fall reopening of Connecticut colleges and universities began at the state level in the spring, according to Josh Geballe ’97 SOM ’02, chief operating officer of the governor’s office. On April 23, Gov. Ned Lamont announced the foundation of the Reopen Connecticut Advisory Group, co-chaired by former PepsiCo CEO Indra Nooyi SOM ’80 and Yale School of Public Health department chair of epidemiology Albert Ko. 

The Education Committee of the advisory group, co-chaired by former Yale President Rick Levin and former Yale Vice President for Global and Strategic Initiatives Linda Lorimer, was tasked with building criteria for higher education institutions to reopen safely. Geballe emphasized the role of Yale alumni, experts and administrators in the success of Connecticut’s pandemic response.

“Governor Lamont, throughout this whole pandemic, has understood that public health considerations have to come first. Our view is there’s no way to truly reopen the economy if you’re in a situation where the virus is running rampant,” Geballe said in an interview. “Our priority was to establish criteria for our colleges and universities to reopen safely and ensure that each of them, including Yale, were putting the necessary steps in place to reopen safely.”

Connecticut was the first state to produce such guidelines when Levin and Lorimer published a report on the necessary steps for university reopenings in early May. Presented to Lamont, the report recommended schools have robust plans to contain the coronavirus if an outbreak occurred on campus and plans to shut down again if necessary.

Levin said that Lamont thanked the committee for the report. Levin has not been involved in subsequent decision-making about reopening plans for Yale or other Connecticut colleges, he said. He declined to comment any further for this story.

Yale President Peter Salovey has been in regular contact with Lamont and Mayor Justin Elicker about the University’s plans for the fall semester, Salovey told the News in an email.

“Both the governor and mayor have been thinking a lot about higher education during the pandemic,” Salovey wrote. “They support going back to teaching and learning to the greatest extent possible while safeguarding the well-being of everyone on college campuses and in the surrounding communities.”

At the beginning of the pandemic, Salovey convened a public health advisory group as well. After initially advising about the shutdown of campus in the spring, that group turned its attention towards the University’s reopening plans starting in June, according to Yale Health Director Paul Genecin, who serves on the advisory team. The team worked with a host of other Yale bodies to make sure the reopening plan was logistically sound, including Facilities, Yale College, and all of the professional schools.

“We cannot escape the fact that we will have some COVID cases at Yale. Our goal is to prevent uncontrolled spread in this community,” Genecin told the News in an email. “Yale has created a unique system for its students and we will try to contain the spread of any infection through a series of behavioral expectations, changes to the environment, biweekly testing for students, contact tracing, isolation and quarantine.”

Genecin added that all of the elements of the plan need to function properly and in unison in order for it to be successful.

Representatives from Yale New Haven Health have also been at every meeting of the advisory group, Genecin said. Representatives from YNHH were unavailable for comment on this story.

ELM CITY COLLABORATION

PERSISTING CONCERNS

Still, some have concerns about the return of students, the decision-making process behind the plan, and the message it sends to New Haven community members.

“I definitely think the conversations were framed around how we can get students back safely and minimize the risk to New Haven, not necessarily maximizing the safety of New Haveners and questioning if it would benefit the city for students to come back at all,” Yale College Council President Kahlil Greene ’21 told the News in an email. “Conversations were, in my opinion, very Yale-focused.”

Greene served on the University’s Academic Continuity Committee, where he helped to hammer out details in the return plan. Other YCC members also served on college-level task forces concerned with the delivery methods for teaching. Greene warned there could be “severe consequences” for the Elm City if students do not “follow the rules and comply with testing” requirements and quarantine procedures.

Every Yale official who spoke with the News emphasized the responsibility the student body has to prevent an outbreak on campus and in the city and the importance of following the University’s rules on gatherings, masking and social distancing.

The lack of a coherent and mandatory testing system for graduate students, faculty and staff remains a concern for other members of the community.

Ben Oldfield, chief medical officer of Fair Haven Community Health Care, said his experience with the Yale plan comes through speaking with Yale staff members that are patients at the clinic.

“Recently, we have seen a lot of patients who have concerns,” Oldfield said. “The nature of the concerns are reasonable, but sort of general. What I’ve heard is, ‘Well, gosh, there’s going to be a lot more people at my place of work.’ … I do feel like it’s a well-thought-out plan and so I have had conversations with patients in the clinic where I’ve tried to explain the fact that I think this is a well-thought-out plan.”

Oldfield said that the Yale reopening plan was subject to health disparities between students living in New Haven and staff working alongside them on campus. The Yale student body skews healthier and younger than the staff who work in Yale Dining or Yale Facilities, for example. As such, staff — many of whom come from communities of color like Fair Haven and the Hill that have been hit disproportionately hard by the coronavirus pandemic in the city and nationwide — are more likely to have higher incidence of comorbidities like diabetes or asthma. These health realities, when paired with less stringent testing for staff, contribute to a “milieu where outcomes can be worse” if a staff member were to contract the virus, Oldfield said.

Yale officials made it clear that the University was not infringing on city health resources with its testing program. Yale is also undertaking its own contact-tracing program to relieve stress on the city’s contact-tracing workforce, Genecin told the News.

Oldfield likened the plan to a luxury car — since Yale is focusing so many resources on regular testing and contact tracing, the program is more likely to prevent an outbreak than something less robust, just like a more expensive car is likely to perform better than a cheaper one.

“The Yale testing strategy is a bit of a Cadillac strategy that will be very effective. I wish we had systems like that for other folks,” Oldfield said. “I would love to see Yale take a more of a leadership role in really expanding testing into vulnerable communities.”

There remains an obvious disparity between the availability of testing for Yale community members and New Haveners unaffiliated with the University. At Fair Haven Community Health, patients can get a test within one to two days and receive a result between 48 and 72 hours after that for free, Oldfield said. He added that earlier in the summer, when states in the South and West were experiencing spikes in cases, it took labs longer to turn around results for his patients. Throughout the country, limited lab capacity remains an issue for processing tests.

BEYOND YALE

Each Greater New Haven college has a slightly different plan due to differences in the number of students that live on campus and the availability of teaching materials to students at home. For example, art and culinary classes are being held in person at Gateway because many students do not have access to the equipment they need to learn. All five colleges with residential options have some students returning to campus, and all five will move to entirely online classes after Thanksgiving break.

Yale is doing the most testing of any college in the area, however. Students at Albertus and Southern were tested upon arrival, and a random sample of 5 to 10 percent of their student bodies will be tested weekly throughout the semester.

Still, each college’s overall goals are the same, and the city is working with each school to make sure its plan works for its particular culture and demographics, according to Jennifer Vazquez, director of public health nursing for the New Haven Health Department. Yale has the greatest percentage of enrolled students from outside of Connecticut of the six Greater New Haven colleges. During normal times, Yale also hosts the highest percentage of undergraduates in on-campus housing. 

“We do believe there are good plans in place. We continue to do education and track data very closely,” Vazquez said. “We want to provide support where we can, so we are very optimistic we will be able to continue to work well together.”

As of Monday night, Albertus, Gateway and Quinnipiac had not reported new coronavirus cases since classes began. As of Aug. 30, the University of New Haven had two cases among commuter students and, as of Sept. 5, Southern had reported two cases among on-campus students and staff and four self-reported cases among commuter students. As of last Wednesday, Yale has reported 11 cases since the start of August among students and staff.

Elsewhere in the state, UConn’s Storrs campus has seen 100 positive cases among residential students since testing started on campus on Aug. 14, according to data updated on Monday. 

Despite rises in cases on college campuses across Connecticut, state Rep. Pat Dillon SPH ’98 — whose district includes the New Haven neighborhoods of Dwight, West River, Edgewood and Westville — said that colleges should not blame students when things go wrong and make sure that students have the tools they need to prevent the spread of the virus.

“I don’t think it’s a threat to the city at all that people are coming back, and I don’t think it’s a threat to the students,” Dillon said in an interview with the News. “It just takes a lot of thinking.”

Dillon is also the deputy majority leader in the Connecticut House of Representatives, and her husband, John Hughes, is the assistant director of the Yale School of Medicine’s biomedical ethics program.

Dillon also said she was proud of how much progress the city and the state had made on containing the coronavirus since the worst days of April, but added that the progress “does not mean much” to her because cases could rise again if “we do not build safeguards.”

Still, Ward 22 Alder Jeanette Morrison wants students to feel welcome in New Haven provided they follow the rules.

“As long as [the students] are safe, they quarantine as expected and they do all of the testing that Yale has put in place. This is their home, too,” Morrison said. “I don’t ever want students to feel like they’re just visitors. They’re here longer than they are wherever they live, so I welcome them home.”