September 13th, 2021 Virtual University Status Update

[Music] good morning everyone and thank you for joining us for today's campus update briefing live from our beautiful university of arizona i'm holly johnson vice president of communications and today dr robert z robbins president of the university is going to provide important updates on the university's operations and as always he is joined by dr richard carmona 17th surgeon general of the united states and distinguished professor here at the university he's going to provide updates on the current state of the delta variant are public health conditions in the county state and campus we will take your questions or from the media at the end of today's briefing please make sure that you type your name and news organization into the panel when you raise your hand and i'll call on you in the order you do so with that i'll turn it over to president robbins thank you holly good morning thank you everyone for joining us again today i want to begin by noting where we are compared to this point in the 2021 academic year compared to last year when we had around 200 new cases daily our peak numbers of new cases was seven was september 14th of last year the start of the fourth week of classes that day we recorded 261 positive tests a positivity rate of 15.4 percent the peak positivity rate for the year was just two days later on september 16th with 245 cases and a positivity rate of 17.5 percent today as we begin the fourth week of classes for this academic year we're in a much better place on friday we only had 33 positive cases and a positivity rate of 1.7 percent we must remain diligent but this change from last year is a good reason for optimism continued testing is vital and our program has been designed with an emphasis on access so that testing is as easy and available as possible we continue to adapt this program to best serve the campus community and we're excited for takeaway testing to begin later this week cat's takeaway testing is a free covet 19 pcr sailing gargoyle testing option for all students employees and active designated campus colleagues you'll be able to pick up a testing kit at any on-campus location scan it to the system with your phone computer camera or tablet and return the kent once the sample is collected appointments are not necessary planned locations include the health sciences library the administration building facilities main management building global center mcclelland hall home to the eller college of management campus rec student union the student success district and for people with symptoms campus health is the place to go additional locations are in the works and more details will be shared very soon finally i want to again thank our faculty and staff members who have worked over the past weeks to assist colleagues and friends who are in need in afghanistan a recent story in the arizona daily star highlighted the work of julia ellison spate of the university center for middle eastern studies and julia smith who leads the university's federal relations office in washington d.c as of last monday they have been able to help ensure 10 afghan nationals were able to be evacuated and their work continues for at least 30 more people thank you so much to julie julia and their teams for this critical work before i turn it over to dr carmona this last weekend was very exciting having our first home football game even though we didn't get the win there was a lot of activity on campus including individuals coming to the mall i've been wanting to see a concert on the mall around the university and phil vasser if you didn't hear him gave a great performance out on the mall on saturday afternoon we also honored first responders at the 20th anniversary for 9 11 during the football game and davis mother air base was recognized during the festivities around the game and then yesterday there was a very very moving uh tribute to the life of coach lou dolson who meant so much to this university uh in our state so a lot of activity we have another football game this weekend but today we're focused on how we can safely maneuver yet another week uh and and come back next week and hopefully report that the numbers uh continue to get better so with that i'll turn it over to you dr carmona thank you bobby and uh our journey continues can i have the first slide please so as president robbins has uh as pointed out our numbers are looking pretty good early on and in comparison with uh guam california maricopa as you can see and pima county overall we're doing we're doing relatively well however that should not be a sign of becoming complacent we have to keep our guard up we have to continue to practice the best public health practices to be able to keep those numbers low again the population we're looking at early on is a relatively small one as we get busier and more and more people come in that will be the ultimate test and the challenge of course is that we still only have about over a little over half of our population fully immunized which continues to place us at some risk next slide so our covert testing results as you can see we've often spoke of staying below five percent and with the early small numbers we're seeing the numbers are low again we are concerned we want to continue to apply all of those best public health practices of mitigation to be able to prevent the spread the transmission on campus which we did very well last year so as we're going into this year now we have to stay focused on this mission to be able to keep the university open safely but it's going to take everybody's cooperation following the best public health mitigation practices including vaccination in order for us to continue to remain open safely next slide we look at our transmissibility levels and you'll all remember this from last year every week we reviewed this for you the zip code 85719 is in our geographic area it's a little higher than what we'd like pima county is about at a one and arizona is about a one that may reflect that we've had a lot more activity in our area as new students are coming in and so on so this is something we're going to track very carefully because it is a week-to-week barometer lets us know how we're doing and how much transmissibility of disease is in the community next slide we look at the vaccination rates as i said overall at the state a little over half uh particularly those 18 and over 76 percent what's really good is that 65 and over you know almost 100 percent and this is our more vulnerable population our seniors and those who have chronic diseases so overall uh we're moving slowly in the right direction but it is essential that we continue to urge inspire cajole uh everybody to get vaccinated as well as to adhere to the best public health practices so that we can continue not only to keep our university open but keep our businesses open keep our restaurants open be able to have a university of activities like the president said a concert on the mall or a football game or basketball that's starting in order for us to have that privilege to continue to do that to keep our businesses open to keep our unemployment down we must vaccinate and we must adhere to the best public health mitigation strategies next slide so uh you've heard about the cat's takeaway testing the president just uh reviewed some of that for you remember there's nine campus pickup and drop-off stations no appointment is required and there's symptomatic and asymptomatic options for this uh next slide so if you have any questions the covert ambassador team hotline is open to you as listed right here seven days a week seven to seven a lot of this information is posted on the website as well please don't hesitate to contact anyone uh and even student health uh dean's office all have additional information if you have any questions we're doing everything we can to be as transparent as possible so that everybody has timely information to make the best decisions in order that we keep our university safe keep it open and are able to continue to work with our community our businesses our housing so that they stay open and they are able to thrive in this community next slide so bobby i think at this point um i would like to just give a really big shout out to our incident command system and all of our faculty and staff who over the last year have worked tirelessly to do all of the things you've asked us to do to keep the university open safely and allow us to prosper and and you and i have spoken as well and one of the things that's very important we're an economic hub in our community you know and all of our people coming in eat at restaurants and they stay at hotels and they buy from stores and it's important that our economy continues to thrive as our education continues to thrive and we're kind of at the center of all of that you know with a population of 45 000 students and over 15 000 faculty you know we're a small city that uh if we can if we do it right we contribute significantly to our community and our state yeah i couldn't agree more rich and the the thing that i uh look at is i look at the numbers the comparison uh we are in better shape than we were last year but we've got to continue to do all the things we've talked about now for over a year and a half uh the the difference is we have the sort of safety net we were walking a tight rope last year without any safety net below us we were able to get through the year uh uh granted not in full immersion as we are now but this year we've we've got a safety net below us and that safety net is the vaccine and whether people choose to use that safety net or not is their choice but we're encouraging as many people as we can to get vaccinated because it's the only way we'll stop this uh and and really make covet 19 that particular virus uh uh a chronic uh situation for years to come obviously but that it won't be getting people uh sick uh you you and i look at the hospital numbers every night uh we're starting to get a little bit of relief there um but they're still most of the people that end up in the hospital or those that are unvaccinated um and i think this takeaway testing will really help because it'll make it easier for people to do uh we should probably invite mike warby back to do a demonstration on the saline uh swish and gargle uh if you haven't done it uh please pick up a kit and try it it's very easy you can do it uh in your own private place and then and return it and i think we're gonna get more people uh to uh to test by by offering this option uh and that's gonna be the key we're uh i i think the that we're at about 1500 to 1700 tests a day we need to be uh in the 3000 test today range which our uh scientists are geared up and ready to do that but we we we have to continue to lean heavily on wastewater-based epidemiology and those tests and then go in and target the areas that we find hits in wastewater but we also need routine surveillance testing of the general population and i'm hoping that this takeaway swish and gargle option will encourage more people to test right yeah well i i think spot on on that um really we need all the cooperation of all of our students who are coming back families and people you know as you know one of the things we've been discussing with the with the governor's office is that the whole idea of the economy and uh you know keeping our economy thriving is dependent upon our university staying open our students being here and so on so it really we're all you know we are all inextricably tied together in this challenge uh and and if part of us fails all of us fails so we all have to come together put the partisan issues aside stay focused on what's important before us and that is everybody getting vaccinated that is able to testing frequently and adhering to the best public health mitigation strategies that's not only the best success for education it's the best success for economy to continue to prosper because we cannot afford to shut down again and vaccination is our most important tool and everybody needs to understand that yeah so i i just want to highlight again we all have our masks we wear them indoors um i i would say that compliance with those requirements has been incredibly good so i'm appreciative to all the students faculty and staff who are adhering to our requirement that if you're indoors and you can't adequately and continuously maintain social distancing just wear your mask and uh that's been very successful but i want to continue to keep that message uh going because people will forget or we get uh uh we we get fatigued as you say about all these things we're so successful we're blowing through a lot of the disposable mask and i i would ask if people could wear the same mask all day long not just when they go out of class throw them away but try to use them all day we issued a couple of math to every student faculty and staff last year i understand these more permanent masks are on back order and we'll have those soon but i i'm so appreciative of everyone providing protection to themselves and everyone else around them by continuing to cover their face because breakthrough and infections are a real thing uh i don't i don't know what the percentages are but one is too many and rich it's probably headed toward the you know five to ten percent range of even if you've been vaccinated uh you can still get infected and you can still infect others so we need to continue to to um these mitigation policies and procedures uh until we get on the other side of this which i think is going to be uh many months into the future maybe years i think you're right bobby and of course we've spoken about that a lot of people were feeling very optimistic at the beginning of the summer but many of us also were very concerned that it wasn't going to end that easily a lot of it because of non-compliance a lot of it because of conspiracy theories but all of those things tend to delay but on the breakthrough infections i think that's an important point that uh helps us also to be so positive about vaccinations because even if you're vaccinated a few people maybe five and a hundred are can still get infected but the likelihood of you going to the hospital being on a ventilator and dying is extraordinarily diminished and and so you have you have a mild infection uh and as you said 98 99 of the people who are in hospitals on ventilators and dying are people who haven't been vaccinated the data is in front of us every place so other than those people who are extraordinarily high risk because of you know being a transplant patient having cancer being on immunosuppressive drugs this vaccine works well and it even works in those people pretty well with the data that we're finding out now they don't get the response like a healthy person but they still have a degree of protection and as we get more and more through our antibody testing studies that are at the university we're finding out that even those populations benefit from the vaccination as well okay holly you have questions i do the first question comes from craig smith from k-gun morning at all um when you're citing uh how in terms of case rates you're you're doing way better than this time last year um you talked a little bit about the i guess the safety net from the vaccines and such but any other any other theories or maybe even hard data or even anecdotal information on why you're doing better is it general compliance vaccines what do you think i think it's a combination of all i'll let dr carmona uh answer that because he he uh he knows this stuff a lot better than i do but i i think craig it's a combination of uh the vaccines are providing some protection a lot of protection actually i think we're doing a better job of uh of adhering to uh the requirements for mask indoors i think people have gotten the the message you know stay away from people clean your hands frequently cover your face get tested and i think some of it is that we're not testing as much as we were last year now we were just ramping up the testing at this point last year so i don't think that that's the total explanation i just think that there are there have been so many people who've already been infected so many people who've gotten vaccinated uh that we're just in a better place than we were last year rich i i don't know what what other things i'm missing i don't that well you really miss anything bobby quite frankly and i think you spot on it's a multifactorial uh answer and you've pointed out all of those factors from vaccination uh people who have become immunized uh by being getting the infection essentially so we're moving gradually toward herd immunity we continue to practice the mitigation strategies social distancing where appropriate and asking where appropriate all of those things so i think each of them has an incremental value in reducing transmissibility and disease so i think that's the reason when we first started a year ago we were just getting all of these things lined up we were just setting up an incident command system you know and and uh putting together an organizational structure to that allowed us to be successful this past year it's also worth noting you know craig that what we do know is 51 percent of our student population um sorry 53 percent of our student population have uploaded their vaccination records so we know that 53 percent have been fully vaccinated and we also know that 51 percent of our employees have done that and based on the surveys that we did last year we think that that is much higher you know we projected about 82 percent in our survey had been fully vaccinated so i think that's also worth noting as the as a mechanism that may be keeping our our numbers relatively low yeah i think i think it's probably worth mentioning that uh you know when we uh had to close down a little bit last year and we had our labs open we had only essential students on campus our transmissibility was almost zero on campus we did very very well in that and then we look at dealing with pac-12 and athletics uh you know our athletic leaders stepped up right away and adhered to the programs they were the students were able to practice and all the different disciplines games and so on and we had no transmissibility there among intercollegiate athletics so you know we've got some really great successes uh because people adhere to all of the things that the president has just outlined our next question comes from catherine palmer and she submitted these via email so she wants to know president robbins does president biden's vaccine mandate announced last week change anything about the university of arizona's vaccine policy for students and staff and will any uae employees or students be required to get the vaccine yeah i don't think it changes anything right now you know in the chronicle of higher education early this morning i was reading about the same issue with the university of florida president and you know both florida and we in arizona have state laws or executive orders and then followed by state law that uh prohibit us from requiring uh vaccination in order uh to to get their educat education um i i do think it will be interesting i think we we have uh uh and i don't know if who's gonna be our legal analysts here but uh i i think that it's shaping up to be uh court battles about states rights versus uh federal rights um i i do think that it's a a step in the right direction to to try to get more people vaccinated because at the end of the day this is a choice that individuals make but it's also for the greater good of our society and until we get uh enough people vaccinated to get to that quote herd immunity which with the delta variant is a lot higher than we had originally anticipated with the original strain of coba 19. i think we've got to continue to do everything we can to get as many people vaccinated as possible and i i think craig's first question about why are we doing better if you look uh at the states where the vaccination rates are low the number of cases or the highest so it doesn't take uh you know even an epidemiologist to figure that out if you've got a population that's more vaccinated you're going to have less cases but the bigger issue i think is we need to get the whole globe vaccinated because if we don't they're gonna can't continue to be mutations uh delta looks like the uh the best mutation uh that the virus can do right now there are others they're uh you know epsilon their mu they're lambda they're they're other ones but delta has kind of figured out a way to be very crafty and be very contagious the good news is that the disease is less uh is less severe with delta than it was with the original stream you want to add anything dr carmona oh i think that was spot on what's going on okay great the next she has one more katherine has one more question and she wants to know if you have any comment on the university of arizona's u.s news ranking dropping below the top 100 national universities this year yeah so i you know this is uh this is an answer that uh you know i i said when i got here i i hope that we would get into the top 100 overall universities last year i think we were ranked 97th this year we we dropped to 103. uh i also thought that we should be in the top 50 public universities and we made it to into the top 50 last year and we remain in the top 50 this year for public universities at number 46. every year or every couple of years u.s news and world report um change their methodology for how they rank people and we're clustered together this year uh i think there are 14 universities that are tied for 103 so we're we're roughly in the same ballpark we were last year and there will continue to be method methodological changes that occur um i'm very proud of what we're doing in terms of research expenditures dr cantwell and the whole team around research has done a fantastic job of of continuing to increase research expenditures and that's part of the the equation and how u.s news and war report gives out rankings the area that we continue to need to work on and invest in and be diligent about is student success retaining our students from that critical first year to the second year is really really important uh and and there's definitely opportunities for us to improve and i know the provost and everyone at the university is investing money time programs innovative ways to help our students be successful because if you can retain them past that first year and continue to provide support the goal of course is to is to help our students graduate get a degree go on to a graduate or professional program go get a job realize their hopes and dreams and go out and make the world a better place that's what we want and we want it for every one of our students no matter where they come from and a lot of our students come from places that you know i was with students last night who uh are really disadvantaged and are being given opportunities through programs through the private sector for after-school programs and education programs and teaching them music and getting them involved and we need to start this not only when they get to the university of arizona we're going to do that we're committed to doing that but we've got to be out in the community helping starting in grade school certainly by middle school getting these programs in place and helping these students uh get a chance get a chance to come to the university of arizona and be successful so that's where i think once we once we get better outcomes with student success and helping our students uh stay in school and it's multifactorial i mean their their tuition is one thing but then they're they're cost for fees and books and places to live and things to eat we've got to have a holistic approach to help our students be successful and the rankings will follow if we if we focus on the mission and the fundamentals of living our values every day we have one follow-up from craig smith go ahead greg uh on a rather different topic in terms of the folks that you are you're helping escape afghanistan can you tell us a little bit more i i don't know we want to expose identities or anything but a little bit more about the the nature of the people the nature of their relationship with the university um are they americans that were working there afghans dual citizens etc yeah i think it's a combination of uh a lot of different things holly i don't know if you've got more details you know i i usually to say too much but uh um i i just want to re-emphasize how important this work is and how appreciative i am to julie julia and everyone who's who's coming together to help these poor people hey craig i will put you directly in touch with julia after the briefing today because i think she can give you a lot more information than the three of us could provide you okay thank you sure and with that i think that's our very last question president robbins wow i know 31 minutes today okay well uh as always i um i appreciate everybody joining these i i i will mention too i got to go to uh got to go to a lot of events uh over the past weekend and one that was incredible was uh adaptive athletics uh hall of fame inductees and i had i'd met a young man um uh who played wheelchair tennis for us here at the university and went on uh it's just coming back uh from japan and he told me he's off to brazil to compete and he said he tunes in to this to this briefing either live or watches the recording so um you know sometimes i don't think anybody's watching but there are a lot of people who are watching these briefings and so i i appreciate all the people that support us to put this together and and certainly uh holly your expertise over the years and and rich for your time i don't i don't know how you do all that you do uh working with the governor now and all the different things that you have to do but i i really appreciate you making time to be on these briefings and to work continue to work with our incredible ics team that that you established for us here so with that i i look forward to this week i wish everyone the best of success to stay healthy safe and enjoy uh learning at the university and working towards your degree but just remember please go pick up your tests you know test trace and treat we started with that last year it's still valid and our best chance uh to get through this in a safe manner uh in in this takeaway testing um please please try it and i and i think we'll we'll increase the number of tests that we do and what we're looking for of course are those asymptomatic people who have no idea that they're infected and are infecting others and and this delta variant is so much more contagious it may be a milder form but you're going to continue to infect people and every time you infect someone they're going to infect 10 other people so the testing is really really important for us so please avail yourself to the to the uh we're trying to make it as convenient as possible go by try one of these it's pretty easy uh i was kidding with uh with rich the other day one day we're gonna have a test where every day when you brush your teeth your toothbrush will uh will turn a positive color if you have an infection and if not you know you don't have the infection uh that's kind of far-fetched but all you entrepreneurs and innovators go out there and create that test um but until next week remember uh mascot backs up and as always bear down see you next week

Channel: The University of Arizona

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Length: 34min 10sec (2050 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 13 2021