by Dan Harms, Vice President for Academics – Last week, I had no idea what I was going to write about in the newsletter. So much uncertainty and change has swirled around us in the nation, state, campus, and home – what would be relevant by the time you read this?
One fact is evergreen: UUP employees work hard and pull through. We have had the messiest, most chaotic semester in living memory, and academics and professionals, tenure-track and contingent faculty, all pulled together to teach and assist our students under grueling conditions hitherto-unimagined. Further, not one employee at Cortland has, according to our dashboard, been hospitalized or lost their life to this disease. So, first, let me offer my congratulations on our survival and success.
Most of us haven’t had an opportunity to ask how our fellow campuses are doing. Let’s take a look.
The New York Times created a nationwide map of college campuses to show the number of COVID cases reported on each (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2020/us/covid-college-cases-tracker.html). It seems most of the data is self-reported as of November 19, so we should take the numbers with caution. Also, there’s considerable variation in certain metrics, such as whether the campus counts number of positive tests or number of positive individuals, and county health departments might make different requests of the campuses within them.
If you zoom in and out of the map, the names of different campuses appear and disappear. When zoomed out entirely, however, only one campus’ name appears over our state: SUNY Cortland. To be fair, this seems to be a product of how the map is generated; on the list further down the page, SUNY Oneonta edges out Cortland for the most reported cases in-state. Yet according to the SUNY COVID dashboard (https://www.suny.edu/covid19-tracker/ ), we have had more cases than Oneonta, ranking first in the system. This is in a state with colleges of staggering size, some of which have been in veritable COVID-19 hotspots.
Have our colossal efforts to repeatedly test the campus ratcheted up our numbers? Positivity of tests administered may be a better indicator of spread within a population. We do not have figures for colleges across the state, but as of today, Cortland (2.7%) ranks at third on the SUNY dashboard, behind Upstate Medical (3.9%) and Oneonta (3.5%).
I am not any sort of specialist on health or statistics. Some sources of data are contradictory, and many colleges may not be as forthright as ours about their numbers. We will certainly see an accounting later detailing how accurate or representative these measures have been, or if any measures we took as a campus might have made a difference.
No matter what we might find later, however, students will be returning to Cortland in less than two months. A cold Central New York winter will constrain more students to indoor settings, leading to greater possibility of transmission.
Cortland has been asked to submit a plan to SUNY for review for the February re-opening. I hope that whatever plan we present takes lessons from our campus, and successful efforts pursued at others, in order to preserve the safety of employees and students alike.
