Coronavirus Communications

University leaders discuss winter COVID situation at town hall

lblouin — Mon, 17 Jan 2022 14:04:02 +0000

University leaders discuss winter COVID situation at town hall lblouin Mon, 01/17/2022 - 09:04

With the arrival of the Omicron variant, winter 2022 is starting to feel a lot like winter 2021. Case rates are at the highest point of the pandemic. Masks are again part of our daily lives and many of us are even upping our masking game. And we’re again confused about what kinds of activities can be done safely and which are best to forgo until the surge subsides. To help get some clarity on the winter COVID situation — including what it means for life at ��-Dearborn — university leaders recently hosted a town hall with special guest Dr. Preeti Malani, U-M’s chief health officer. We’ve summarized some of the takeaways below, or you can watch the full one-hour event on the university YouTube channel.

Winter 2022 is not winter 2021

While some COVID déjà vu is understandable, there are some significant differences between winter ‘21 and winter ‘22. A year ago, vaccines were just becoming available to very limited groups; today we have a student vaccination rate of 84 percent (88 percent for Winter 2022 students with an in-person or hybrid class), and 95 percent for both faculty and staff. We know that with a booster, which the university is now requiring under its vaccination policy, we’re still well protected against serious disease. We have an on-campus clinic where students, faculty and staff can get a free COVID test or booster. We have the more effective KN95 and surgical masks available for easy pickup at multiple sites on campus. And we have a campus community that’s still doing a great job masking up, social distancing, and embracing an ethic that we’re all in this together. In other words, we have some really powerful — and according to the public health experts, adequate — tools for controlling viral spread and limiting serious illness. For these reasons, university leaders made the decision to continue with their plan for in-person learning this semester. “At the most, we have 1,250 students on campus at any one time, we have great ventilation systems, everyone is wearing a mask, we’re requiring boosters, so we are in a very safe cocoon on this campus,” Chancellor Domenico Grasso said at the town hall. Of course, university leaders are intensely monitoring the situation and have contingency plans in place should conditions change. But with low cases among students, so far, so good.

How Omicron is — and isn’t — changing things

Every stage of the pandemic teaches us new things about the virus and how we can respond. This summer and fall, during the Delta surge, so-called breakthrough cases among fully vaccinated people made up a relatively small share of cases, which gave fully vaccinated folks a path for returning to relative normalcy. Once booster shots became available, the outlook looked even better. But Omicron has abruptly changed the calculus in some ways. “What we’re learning is that getting infected or even vaccinated does not guarantee long-term immunity,” Dr. Malani said. “With Omicron, in particular, the vaccines are not 100 percent protective, but boosters do help that protection.” With this realization comes a shift from thinking about vaccines as protection against infection to protection against serious disease. “This vaccine was so incredibly effective that, in a way, we were spoiled,” Malani said. “But if you think about the flu vaccine, it makes the disease less severe. So you don’t prevent every infection, you prevent illness. So if I [am vaccinated and] get COVID, I’m not going to die of COVID. I might be inconvenienced for a few days. I think this is where we’re headed when we talk about endemicity. We’re not going to have life without COVID. But vaccination remains essential to making this a mild disease.”

Masking

Because the vaccines aren’t as protective against an Omicron infection, Dr. Malani says masking is again becoming a crucial part of keeping everyone safe. Here at ��-Dearborn, we require masking indoors, with a few exceptions, like when you’re eating or alone in an enclosed private office. And Malani says masking is still really important for protecting folks in your life who can’t get the vaccine yet, like children under five. It’s also probably a good idea to start wearing a better mask. Malani says cloth masks still offer some protection, but if you’re going to be spending prolonged periods of time indoors, you’re going to want to reach for a surgical mask, KN95 or N95. The Omicron variant is simply much more contagious, and both surgical and KN95/N95 masks carry an electrostatic charge that helps them filter out tiny particles. You can grab surgical masks for free in all of the deans offices, at the University Center information desk, the testing and vaccination clinic, the ELB advising office, the Facilities Operations reception area, and at Human Resources in the Administration Building. Free KN95 masks are available at the University Center testing and vaccination clinic or the Information Desk. By the way, the CDC recommends discarding KN95 or N95 masks after five uses.

Be kind, be flexible

By now, we’re all pros at rolling with the punches, but many university leaders pointed out that continued flexibility will be key for getting through the next few weeks and months. If a student tests positive and can’t come to class for a week or more, faculty can be more flexible with deadlines and spend a little extra time making sure a student doesn’t fall behind. Likewise, if a faculty member needs to switch to teaching online for a week or more, students need to roll with the change in schedule. If a staff member gets sick or has a sick kid at home, supervisors can work with them to make sure they feel supported and can get back to work as quickly as possible. “We’re trying to do everything we can to make this a welcoming place so students can get the great education that we’re known for — and keep everyone safe,” Grasso said.

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You can watch the full January 13 Town Hall event on the university’s YouTube channel.

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Mon, 01/17/2022 - 14:00

U-M’s Chief Health Officer talked about why she’s optimistic that in-person learning is a safe bet at ��-Dearborn, even during the Omicron surge.

High vaccination rates and an indoor masking policy have made it possible to continue in-person learning this semester.

How the pandemic experience is pushing teaching into the future

lblouin — Mon, 11 Oct 2021 13:54:31 +0000

How the pandemic experience is pushing teaching into the future lblouin Mon, 10/11/2021 - 09:54

You can’t say that Associate Professor of Statistics Keshav Pokhrel’s transformation of his statistics courses was completely a pandemic thing. Pre-pandemic, he was already interested in changing up his teaching approach, especially in his intro statistics classes, which always brought in lots of non-math and non-statistics majors. Getting students to be genuinely interested in the subject was the core challenge, one that inspired lots of hallway conversations with colleagues, student feedback sessions, and some meetings with instructional designers at the Hub. Then the pandemic hit. And while he hadn’t had a chance to implement many changes yet, by that time, he was conceptually fluent enough in new teaching techniques to see that his traditional formula of lectures, homework, quizzes and exams was likely going to fall flat in a remote format.

Initially, he started with recorded lectures, following one of the Hub’s main suggestions to break the videos into short, easily digestible segments. But the real breakthrough came after a conversation with a colleague, who pointed him to a student-focused New York Times feature called “What’s Going on in This Graph?” The Times' graphs and data visualizations focused on all kinds of subjects, from COVID trends to global economics to sports. But the thing Pokhrel really loved was the type of questions the authors paired with the graphs. “It was always very general, like, ‘what do you find interesting about this graph?’ Or, ‘what does it make you wonder about?’” he says. “The beauty of that is you don’t need any advanced mathematical background to answer a question like that."

Pokhrel decided he’d throw something similar at his students. One of the first was a dynamic U.S. population pyramid graph, an intriguing data set that prompts important socio-economic questions about aging baby boomers and today’s declining birth rates. He then asked his students to write about what they found personally interesting in the graphs, and he was blown away by their responses. “It was just intended to be a five or 10-point discussion post assignment,” Pokhrel remembers. “But they’d write pages and pages and they were commenting on each other's posts.” He tried again with other themes — the relationship between GDP and poverty, criminal justice, basketball. Again, he got these highly engaged responses. “And that’s when I started thinking, what if I made this my whole class? Like, what if I made my course project-based, instead of ‘remember this math, and put this formula here’? I became convinced that I had to connect the material to things that felt relevant to them.”

He began writing projects for his students — a time consuming but enjoyable task — and ultimately reorganized his course around a series of 10 of them. Now, the majority of the actual work his students do in the intro course isn’t formula-based statistics. It’s writing, interpretation and analysis of huge data sets. “Rather than asking them to memorize how to calculate a standard deviation, the focus was, ‘what does that standard deviation mean?’” Pokhrel explains. “My feeling was that if this is the only statistics course they ever take, they likely aren’t going to remember all the math. But I can teach them how to conceptually interpret and analyze data, and that’s something they can use in their lives and future careers.”

Not that Pokhrel has totally abandoned the math part. Statistics is a very quantitative discipline, and even if his students don’t memorize every formula, it’s important for them to understand conceptually how statistical computations work. That’s why he still has one assignment per week that requires some math done by hand, the old-fashioned way. And they spend a lot of time learning modern statistics software, which lets the computers do the complicated computations, but teaches students how to organize and model data in ways that reveal what it all means.

This approach has worked exceedingly well in his intro courses, but Pokhrel has also been inspired to similarly reorganize his upper-level courses. At the beginning of the semester, he posts six to nine projects from a diverse range of subjects, and then lets the students choose one that they’ll work on the whole semester. Teams of three self-organize based on interest. And then they basically start digging into their data sets, with the projects broken down into two mid-semester “mini-projects” so he can check their progress. A final presentation and 15-page report, worth about 25 percent of their grade, replace the traditional final exam. Notably, in his upper-level courses, the students are doing a lot more computational and advanced software work. But as in his intro classes, the context is real-world problems and relevant applications of theoretical concepts. The result is his students are way more engaged.

In a necessity-is-the-mother-of-invention kind of way, Pokhrel says the pandemic definitely accelerated changes in his teaching approach that otherwise would have taken him years. And he personally enjoys this version of his course so much more, though he notes that compared to grading quizzes, it is more work for him to review individual, often lengthy, examples of student analysis. (He’s not going to argue, though, with the fact that his students are so engaged they’re actually “overdoing” assignments.) He also finds that, particularly in a totally asynchronous format, he has to watch out a bit more for students getting hung up on certain concepts. “If they get stuck on something, it can really set them back. It’s like a virus. It’s small, but it can have a big impact.” His remedy is to make sure they have ample access to him during office hours and quickie Zoom sessions, where he can usually help get a student over the hump in “just a couple minutes.” Then it’s back to the action of a dynamic statistics course that’s so much more fun than it was before.

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Story by Lou Blouin. Are you a faculty member who also has a story about how you've grown your teaching style or redesigned a course during the pandemic? If so, we'd love to hear about it. Drop us a line at ��Dearborn-News@umich.edu.

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Mon, 10/11/2021 - 13:40

A ��-Dearborn statistics professor shares how the sudden shift to remote education pushed him to make his statistics classes more relevant to students.

A colorful graphic featuring a headshot of statistics professor Keshav Pokhrel surrounded by charts, arrows, stick figure drawings and other statistics icons.

What Research Surrounding COVID Vaccination Ethics Tells Us

stuxbury — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 14:04:39 +0000

What Research Surrounding COVID Vaccination Ethics Tells Us stuxbury Mon, 09/20/2021 - 10:04

There’s a global pandemic. And scientists have found a solution to overcoming it.

But the COVID-19 vaccine, even when the nation's top immunologist says it’s safe and effective, isn’t receiving the acceptance needed to overcome the contagious respiratory virus.

To explore vaccine hesitancy and the ethics surrounding vaccination, Philosophy Assistant Professor Kriszta Sajber and Health and Human Services major Sarah Khaleefah are working side by side on vaccine-related research projects.

“Vaccination ethics answers questions that look deeper than the efficacy of the vaccine, questions that many of us have,” says Khaleefah, who recently gave an update on their work during the campus’ 2021 Summer Undergraduate Research Experience Showcase.

Their research uses premises based on the scientific findings of epidemiologists, immunologists and virologists and seeks answers to greater questions about what is valuable, beneficial and significant for human communities when it comes to COVID vaccination.

When enough people have immunity against the coronavirus, we reach the stage at which individuals susceptible to an infection become indirectly protected from the virus. This is called herd immunity: virus spread would slow and it would benefit everyone. Not only those who were vaccinated, but those who cannot obtain immunity through vaccination would be better protected, including the immunocompromised and children under the age of 12.

So it’s important to ask the question, “If we know the conditions under which we can create herd immunity, what actions are ethical to take for each of us individually?,” Sajber said. “When people approach this from their individual perspective, they tend to forget that the ‘herd’ can also come together to protect the individual.”

The ��-Dearborn researchers say philosophical research can help people find clarity in complicated situations and any concerns about the ethics of vaccination can be sorted out by looking at the logic of the arguments.

For example, if someone says that it is their right to refuse a vaccine, ethicists begin with the facts — not opinions or emotional reactions — to examine the claim.

“There are documented cases in which one person’s decision to refuse the coronavirus vaccine was the proven cause of coronavirus outbreaks in a nursing home or in family settings leading to deaths or severe illness among vaccinated individuals,” Sajber says.

With that known, Sajber works through the right-to-refuse argument. “When someone medically eligible with access to vaccinations does not accept a vaccine, they reserve to themselves the right to harm others. However, no one has the right to harm others. People do harm others from time to time, but we cannot say that this is their right. Therefore, from an ethical perspective, no one has a ‘right’ to refuse a vaccine. As a medical ethicist, my job is to examine the logic behind a claim like this.”

Sajber said her work isn’t meant to be overly demanding when it comes to vaccination — it’s to help people recognize that there are processes and tools out there to help make sense of our roles in limiting the damage of the coronavirus.

Khaleefah, a junior who plans to have a career in medicine, says she’s personally seen how complicated the issue of vaccination can be. There are discussions occurring at her mosque and in her family both for and against the COVID-19 vaccine.

“Religion is a huge part of my life. (Religious) scholars in my community are advocating for vaccines. But some people are still refusing to vaccinate,” she says. “Upon further investigation through interviews and literature review, I’ve learned that people are genuinely confused, scared, misinformed or haven’t found the answers they are looking for in order to opt in to vaccination. The answers are out and there are people who will listen, but not if you judge what they are feeling or make it about you. From either perspective (for or against), it’s not an individual issue, it’s a collective one.”

For Khaleefah’s research contribution, she’s combined contemporary scholarship in public health ethics with sources on the healthcare-related obligations implicit in the religious worldview of Islam. Her goal? To demonstrate the potential of a religiously-grounded vaccination ethics to assist with patient outreach, improve healthcare provider-patient relationships, and promote individual health and well-being in culturally and religiously diverse communities.

“I am grateful to have had this research experience. Dr. Sajber’s guidance is preparing me to go out and serve my community to the best of my ability.”

Khaleefah — who stood out as an outstanding student in Sajber’s Medical Ethics (PHIL 442/HHS 442) course and was later approached to take part in this research endeavor — is continuing her work with Sajber into the Fall 2021 semester. She wants healthcare professionals to understand the cultural viewpoint of Muslim patients because cultural literacy helps develop stronger patient-physician relationship and creates better health outcomes.

Sajber said the research Khaleefah’s done on campus will help guide her as she continues her path toward medical school and serving in the healthcare field.

“Sarah is passionate about healthcare and has learned how to develop informed, logically organized, conceptually nuanced and meticulously developed answers to complicated questions,” Sajber said. “Philosophy trains its practitioners to use the logical tools available to clarify bold questions and to apply their rational faculties to submit them to analysis. Medical schools are interested in people with this training because it shows that students are prepared to meet life’s challenges in the broadest possible sense of the term.”

Khaleefah says understanding vaccine ethics also helps us make sense of the vaccine policies and mandates we are beginning to see.

“If a person doesn't understand the ethics of vaccination, they might feel like a decision was unjust, even though it was the best decision for the group and we actually have a moral obligation to protect others,” Khaleefah says. “This research is very relevant and extremely important as we see science attempt to battle more and more infectious diseases with vaccines.”

With all of the divisive confusion about our role in overcoming the pandemic, Sajber says there’s one thing a worldwide virus has made abundantly clear: a newly apparent biological interdependence that characterizes humanity as a whole. The world would be a better place if we’d unite and fight the pandemic instead of each other.

“When I engage with people about vaccine hesitancy, many times their argument is aimed at denying what was revealed so painfully by the pandemic: the biological interdependence that inevitably ties us together. People want to make an individual choice or have autonomy,” she said. “But our vulnerability to have our bodies taken over and used by a virus is the very definition of not being autonomous. Getting vaccinated is, in fact, one of the few choices we have available to free ourselves from the lack of moral or personal agency that the pandemic forced upon us.”

Article by Sarah Tuxbury. If you are a member of the media and would like more information about “The Ethics of COVID Vaccination” research project, contact ��DearbornNews@umich.edu.

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Mon, 09/20/2021 - 14:03

Campus researchers explore complex questions regarding COVID vaccination during a Summer Undergraduate Research Experience (SURE) project.

Graphic showing The Ethics of COVID researchers Philosophy Assistant Professor Kriszta Sajber and Health and Human Services major Sarah Khaleefah

Takeaways from the September 16 town hall

lblouin — Mon, 20 Sep 2021 12:52:00 +0000

Takeaways from the September 16 town hall lblouin Mon, 09/20/2021 - 08:52

The opening weeks of the fall semester have provided a much welcomed jolt of optimism on the ��-Dearborn campus. In a big change from last fall, around 80 percent of students are enrolled in at least one in-person credit. The latest student vaccination numbers look really good (details below). And we’ve had a very small number of COVID cases and no widespread outbreaks. The high spirits were definitely palpable at a Thursday afternoon town hall, where campus leaders shared their thoughts about the start of the Fall 2021 semester and answered your questions. If you missed it, you can view the full video. Or keep reading for some of the main takeaways.

The latest vaccine and compliance numbers look really good

Good news just keeps rolling in about student vaccination rates. Two weeks ago, we reported that almost 66 percent of all students had submitted records documenting full vaccination and had them verified, with that number rising to 72 percent for those with an in-person class. Now, the overall student vaccination rate stands at 80 percent — and 87 percent for students with a face-to-face class. When you include students who have an approved religious or medical exemption, we’re looking at 96 percent overall compliance with the vaccine policy for students with at least one in-person class. Dean of Students Amy Finley says the university has a “small army” of people who are still calling and emailing students to try to assist those not yet in compliance. That’s a big deal because as of September 17, students who remain out of compliance will be moved to an online section of their in-person classes (if one is available), or administratively withdrawn from the course and issued a tuition reimbursement. Also, we shouldn’t fail to mention that faculty and staff vaccination rates are great too: For staff it’s 87 percent, for faculty it’s 85 percent overall, and 95 percent for tenure-track faculty.

The plan for the rest of fall (and winter)

The end of the drop/add period last Wednesday means that students and faculty should be able to settle into their routines this week. As of Monday, the testing and vaccine clinic will now be open just on Tuesdays and Wednesdays for students, faculty and staff who need their weekly test. Door screening is also scheduled to end after Friday, though it may continue for a little bit longer in a few locations, like the Mardigian Library. Should COVID cases arise on campus, the university is following the same reporting, contact tracing and quarantining protocols it’s been using all along. But because of the high vaccination rates and high compliance with the mask policy, it’s likely any COVID cases on campus will result in fewer students, faculty and staff needing to quarantine. “The CDC says that those who are both masked and vaccinated do not need to quarantine in the event they are exposed to a COVID-positive person,” Dean of Students Amy Finley explained during the town hall. Chancellor Grasso also said there’s no “magic number” for a COVID situation that could trigger a full shift to remote course delivery, though the university does have contingency plans for that. Grasso said that decision would be based on a variety of factors, including trends, the positivity rates among vaccinated people, hospitalization rates, changing variants, the efficacy of vaccines and advice from medical experts within the U-M system.

Campus leaders are also looking ahead to the winter semester, and we should have more details about the winter plan in a few weeks when the course schedules are due. As with fall, the demand for in-person classes is strong among students, so Interim Provost Gabriella Scarlatta says the goal is to have about 60 percent of courses offered in-person, up from this semester’s 50 percent.

Other good-to-knows

Fall 2021 enrollment numbers were stronger than expected. Because of the ongoing pandemic and a decline among community college transfers, the university was budgeting for an 8 percent decline in enrollment. Final enrollment numbers won’t be available until later this week, but it appears the decline was smaller than expected. However, enrollment among FTIAC students (First Time in Any College) was up compared to Fall 2020.
Chancellor Grasso announced that he is working with Henry Ford College President Russell Kavalhuna on a new partnership modeled after successful collaborations between peer four-year universities and community colleges. Expect details on that soon.
Having trouble with your internet signal outside? Your WiFi woes could end soon. ITS Director Carrie Shumaker says there are plans to install “pervasive Wifi” all across campus, including parking lots. Facilities and ITS teams are standing by pending the delivery of a few final pieces of essential tech, which has been delayed because of the ongoing chip shortage.

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Want more details from the September 16 Town Hall? You can watch the full video.

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Mon, 09/20/2021 - 12:51

Campus leaders shared the latest vaccination numbers, enrollment news and observations from the first few weeks of the fall semester.

Metallic rooftops shine in a drone view of the ��-Dearborn campus on a late summer day in 2021.