Campus Zero

Amy Morrison was at home when she got a call that made her heart sink.

It was Saturday, February 29. Morrison watched on her TV as county and state public-health officials provided an alarming series of updates about the spread of the new coronavirus:

A man from Kirkland, Wash., the Seattle suburb where Morrison and her family lived, had died after being infected. His was the first recorded death from the virus in the United States.

Two people from a Kirkland nursing facility had tested positive, and many more had symptoms. Another 50 people who’d been at the facility would need to be tested.

Workers from the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention were on their way to the region.

Morrison, president of Lake Washington Institute of Technology, a local community college, was horrified. The coronavirus had gained a foothold in the United States, and her community was the first hot spot, ground zero for the much-feared “community spread” that public-health experts warned could devastate the country.

But it was the call she got that afternoon that brought matters even closer to home. The college’s vice president for instruction told her that at least 16 students and two members of the faculty had been at the Kirkland nursing facility, the Life Care Center, that same week.

Morrison had steered the college through crises before. But this threat was unlike any that contemporary college leaders had ever faced: a soon-to-be pandemic, one that would ruthlessly exploit the close-knit character of college campuses if leaders didn’t take quick action.

On February 29, the phrase “social distancing” was not yet a part of the general lexicon. The most disruptive advice many Americans had been given was to stop touching their faces. Colleges had not yet moved classes online, cities had not been shut down, national borders were still open.

Morrison’s decisions in that moment could influence not only how many people got sick, but also how disruptive the virus would be for people who were not yet infected. Leaders of other colleges would be closely watching what Morrison did, and very likely using her decisions to calibrate their own.

The president had a million questions. Should her students isolate themselves? For how long? Who else needed to be warned about possible exposure? What about students’ privacy?

“There’s so much unknown, there’s so much concern,” Morrison said in an interview. “We tried to get answers to questions for which no one had answers.”

Morrison spent the rest of the day trying to reach state and county health officials, whom she hoped could give her some guidance. She knew that some students had been exposed, but she didn’t know what to tell them. When she couldn’t get through, she called people she knew who had contacts in the public-health department.

Still without answers the next morning, Morrison knew she had to act. She spoke by phone with her Board of Trustees and cabinet members and agreed to close the college for three days while it underwent a deep clean. Meanwhile, she learned that the number of students and faculty members who may have been exposed to the virus was now 22, up from 18. Finally, on Monday, March 2, she got an official recommendation from the King County public-health department: The exposed students and faculty members should self-quarantine for 14 days.

For her students, Morrison knew, self-quarantine would not be easy. Most are adults, and about half are enrolled part-time. They’re commuter students, there to get technical degrees in nursing, auto mechanics, cooking, or computer programming. They have kids to care for, jobs to do, groceries to buy. “They don’t have a lot of extra anything in their lives,” Morrison said. “It’s lost wages.”

She and other administrators checked in with them regularly by phone, text, and email, Morrison said. She wanted to make sure they each had groceries and medical care, and knew where the nearest emergency room was. It was difficult to get students tested for Covid-19 — and many of them never got a test, she said. The college, Morrison said, has a nonprofit foundation that gave $250 grants to students in self-quarantine to help them through.

By this time, the college was part of a national news story. Morrison moved her office into a conference room in Kirkland’s city hall so that she could be in close contact with city officials. In a windowless, cinderblock room with nothing but a big table and a TV, she took call after call from reporters at local and national news media. They wanted to know who was sick, what were the symptoms, and if they could speak to the people in quarantine. Morrison felt conflicting pressures. She wanted to keep her campus and the public informed, so people would know if they needed to take precautions. At the same time, she was getting emails from students who begged her not to release their names.

“That’s not an easy line to walk,” she said. She didn’t release any names or genders. Even the college’s public-information officer, who worked alongside her at city hall, never learned who all of them were.

Lake Washington Institute of Technology opened up on Wednesday after the deep clean, and for a moment it looked as if things might start to go back to normal. Morrison was confident that the campus had been thoroughly cleaned, and she sent a message to the college community saying she was “very pleased” to welcome students back to class.

But on Wednesday evening, Morrison got a call from a county public-health official. A faculty member had tested positive for the coronavirus. Morrison immediately closed the campus again. This problem couldn’t be solved in a day.

A few miles north, in Bothell, Eric W. Murray, president of Cascadia College, was paying close attention. Cascadia recruits students from abroad, particularly in Asia, so coronavirus had been on Murray’s mind. But now the crisis was getting closer.

On the day that Morrison decided her college would close for cleaning, the main feeder school district for Cascadia announced that its schools would close temporarily after a staff member showed flu-like symptoms. Students and employees of the college have kids in that school district; Murray knew they would now be needing child care.

“That ramped us up,” Murray said.

A few days later, Microsoft, one of the largest employers in the area, told employees to work from home. Murray knew then that it was just a matter of time before Cascadia would do the same. So he and other administrators started preparing.

Across Lake Washington, in Seattle, Jeffrey C. Jordan, vice president for student affairs at Seattle Pacific University, was also looking on. The Saturday that public-health officials announced the first death, he emailed his counterparts at the University of Washington and Seattle University.

“As I know you are both dealing with this situation (still remember our conversation at lunch just a few weeks ago!!), thought I’d send a quick email about our last meeting regarding our conversations about Covid-19,” he wrote. “I’m hoping that we can serve as resources (and support) for our respective efforts.”

“Know we have lunch coming up in a month or so,” he closed. “Maybe it should be at happy hour!!”

Cindy Price, Seattle Pacific’s vice provost for academic affairs, had begun to hear from parents who were worried about their children who were either studying abroad or had forthcoming trips. But now the information that public-health officials were sharing made it clear that the virus had probably been spreading in their community for weeks. By Monday, March 2, The Seattle Times was reporting 18 cases and six deaths in the state. New cases kept popping up. And though the government’s guidance for how to stay safe still emphasized personal mandates about hand-washing and not traveling to Italy, petitions circulated that week urging local schools to close.

Administrators at the area’s colleges met daily to take stock of the new information as it came in by the hour. The idea of switching to online classes was on everyone’s minds. There was a precedent: The year before, a big snowstorm had forced colleges in the area to close temporarily. That experience helped them test their capabilities, but the pace and scale of this crisis caught them off guard.

At Lake Washington Institute of Technology, for example, administrators had a meeting on the calendar with Kirkland’s emergency manager to review what they would do if a community member tested positive. The meeting was scheduled for March 10. At Cascadia, the vice president for external relations emailed an executive assistant on February 26: “Would you please add coronavirus to next week’s agenda? People in the system are beginning to discuss plans in the event of a campus shutdown.”

Lake Washington Institute of Technology’s decision to move online was notable, while its direct impact was local. The college enrolls about 6,400 students whose livelihoods were now disrupted. But their nearby neighbor, the three-campus University of Washington, enrolls almost 60,000. And those students, many of whom hail from other states and countries, had questions.

At the university’s flagship Seattle campus, Ana Mari Cauce, the president, met with several dozen student senators on Tuesday, March 3, in a lecture hall. A student petition to close campus had collected 5,000 signatures within three hours of going online the previous Sunday. Students were worried about spreading the disease without even knowing it, the petition said.

One student asked what plans were in place for students living in residence halls and Greek chapter houses; another asked how students with underlying health conditions like diabetes would be supported.

There was space on campus to isolate students, explained Denzil Suite, vice president for student life, who was also at the meeting. Those who were sick or vulnerable should talk with their doctors, Cauce said. She has respiratory issues, she told the students, and her pulmonologist had reassured her that she could continue traveling and going to work, as long as she was careful.

Cauce advised students to keep washing their hands and to sneeze into their shoulders, and said their professors would be flexible if they needed to miss class. A student asked whether they would be able to get basic resources at the university if the virus spread further.

The university had stockpiles of food, Cauce said. If the bridges around Seattle became impassable, people could still be fed on campus — for how long, she couldn’t say. “Because we are concerned about things like earthquakes and tsunamis,” Cauce said, “we are prepared for the eventuality of being isolated.”

She anticipated the question that seemed to be on everyone’s minds: “The best advice we are getting is this is not the time to be suspending classes, to be suspending events.”

But two days later, Cauce called a special meeting. Suite wasn’t sure what to expect. He had been meeting regularly with the university’s leadership team and with a university advisory committee on diseases since late January, when several students who’d been in China showed coronavirus symptoms. (He was also one of the administrators to receive Jordan’s email about coronavirus the week before.)

The chair of the committee on diseases, Geoffrey Gottlieb, was called to the meeting, too. A professor of infectious disease at the university’s medical school, he had been working around the clock that week, attending meetings and continuing to see his patients. He studies infectious disease in West Africa. The closest analogue he could find to the deepening crisis, though, was from his time working in Chicago in the early 1990s, when hospitals were overwhelmed by the AIDS epidemic.

Suite and Gottlieb joined Cauce and several other members of the leadership team in her office. Suite said they talked for hours, well into the evening, about whether to move classes entirely online and how that would work.

Already, four students at the University of Washington had been tested for the coronavirus after showing symptoms. Fortunately, all had been negative.

“We were lucky,” Gottlieb said. “It gave us some lead time to prepare.”

But there was one fact that the group kept coming back to. Public-health experts on the campus, including Gottlieb, believed that the university would not make it through the next two weeks without a positive case. They did the math. Some of the university’s lecture halls hold 700 people. They are filled multiple times a day, five days a week. If a student got the coronavirus, it would be impossible to contain. Keeping the virus off campus, then, was dependent on not a single student’s being infected. That, too, was impossible.

Going online would bring technical and logistical hurdles. The administrators talked about how it would affect grading, how it would affect labs, whether the technology could handle it.

“As a student-affairs guy, I’m all about community,” Suite said. “The thought of increased distance, it ran initially counter to what my training and upbringing has been in the profession.”

But that consideration paled in comparison, Suite said, to the goal of preventing people from getting sick. In the end, it was up to Cauce. She decided that starting the following Monday, March 9, classes would move online.

For Cascadia College, the University of Washington’s announcement was a deciding factor. College officials announced that they, too, would move to remote learning, with some exceptions, like lab work.

At Seattle Pacific, too, it was hard to justify in-person classes when either the University of Washington or Seattle University was online. “If one institution were to go one way,” said Price, the vice provost, “you have to say, OK, why am I not doing this?”

By Monday, that question was ringing out far beyond Seattle. But even then, the magnitude of the crisis had not yet sunk in. At a press conference announcing the decision the previous Friday, Cauce sat behind a table flanked by Gottlieb and Suite. She told reporters that the University of Washington planned to reopen classes at the end of March. The dorms were still full, research operations continued, sports teams still practiced and planned to compete.

University life was practically in full swing.

“It’s not like all the folks that are not attending classes are going to disappear,” Cauce said at the press conference.

But the night before, university officials had gotten some bad news. An employee had been tested for Covid-19. The experts had been right; the university had its first positive case.

Next: What prompted colleges nationwide to follow Washington’s lead.

Case and death counts visualized in this article were derived from data made public by The New York Times.

Jacquelyn Elias is the news applications developer. You can follow her on Twitter @jacquelynrelias, or email her at jacquelyn.elias@chronicle.com.