The first thing you notice, walking past the bars and restaurants in the Campustown neighborhood just across the street from Iowa State University here, is that no one is wearing masks.
On both Friday and Saturday evening at Cafe Baudelaire, a Brazilian burger joint, unmasked college-age patrons sat in tight clusters around tables or at the bar, in front of the taps. If you peeked inside the dark basement of Welch Avenue Station, a watering hole up the block, you could see patrons sitting in groups near the bar games in the back, the masks worn only by the bartender and servers. On the streets, students ambled along in packs of five or seven, a case of beer propped on a shoulder, or several 12-packs piled into a borrowed wheelchair that served as a makeshift shopping cart, heading to a house or an apartment somewhere to party.
“I mean, if they can get away without social distancing, they are going to,” said Phil DeLarme, a manager of Macubana, a restaurant specializing in fare to satisfy late-night cravings. DeLarme and his employees are wearing masks, but since the state has no mask mandate, he can’t force customers to wear them.
“All we can do is sanitize everything as often as possible and just try and keep the public as safe as we can,” DeLarme said. But every week, some employees can’t show up for work because they were around someone who was infected, and they need to get tested for Covid-19. Just recently, he said, “every bar on Welch Avenue here was shut down for a week or two, depending on how their employees tested.”
“People were just going out, knowing they were positive,” he said. “They didn’t care.”
And the academic year hasn’t even started.
Next month, the university and the City of Ames could take in some 31,000 students and researchers, including about 25,000 undergraduates — although the exact number is still unclear, as many might yet choose to enroll at a distance. The university has announced the precautions it’s taking: Students will move into residence halls and apartments in waves, each getting a test on arrival. They will be required to wear masks in classes, which will be held at half capacity. They will be encouraged to be tested if they exhibit symptoms, and required to isolate themselves if they test positive, among other precautions.
Will that be enough? People here seem to have a resigned attitude: None of those measures are likely to stop the spread of coronavirus among the students, they say, and that’s worrisome. But because Ames relies so heavily on students, alumni, and Cyclones sports fans, many locals say the university needs to reopen, no matter the risks. The city’s close relationship with Iowa State, evident even on a midsummer weekend, is like many town-gown relationships across the country. But the ambivalence in the era of Covid-19 is acute in Ames, where one analysis, by the personal-finance company SmartAsset, identified that college town as among the nation’s places most reliant on the spending habits of undergraduates. That symbiosis can put economic and public-health imperatives in conflict.
“We look forward to the students coming back, because we need it,” said DeLarme, noting that food-truck sales and to-go orders have not made up for lost business since the spring shutdown. “Honestly, I do think we will see a spike. There’s no way you can bring in even 20,000 students — let alone 30,000, with people coming together, people congregating — and not see a spike.”
Next Hot Spot?
If the health of Ames’s economy relies heavily on students, then so is the success of Iowa State’s strategy for avoiding a coronavirus outbreak.
Iowa is one of a handful of conservative states that never enacted a stay-at-home order. Officials believed that its sparse, rural population would prevent a surge in cases. In the past week, Gov. Kim Reynolds, a Republican, has encouraged Iowans to “mask up,” but has not issued an order requiring masks — and cities that have tried to enact their own mask requirements have faced challenges in doing so. According to the coronavirus tracker maintained by The New York Times, Iowa lands in the top 20 among states for Covid-19 infections per capita, with a total of about 42,000 cases. While many remote communities have seen few confirmed cases or deaths, towns with meatpacking plants have experienced explosions among their workers.
Could a college campus become the next hot spot?
John Lawrence hopes it won’t. As the vice president for extension and outreach at Iowa State, he leads the university’s reopening committee. From August 3 to 16, students will move into university residences, in stages of up to 1,200 at a time, and be tested as they arrive.
After move-in day, the university will rely on students to take “personal responsibility”: keeping a distance from others, watching their (and their friends’) symptoms, and coming in for a test when they think they might be infected. The university’s veterinary diagnostic lab, which will run the tests, can handle up to 2,000 swabs a day. Students who test positive will be ordered to quarantine; students who break that quarantine could be ordered to leave the university.
The university will try to keep students apart in their courses. Rooms will be filled to only 50-percent capacity. Large lectures will be moved online, and smaller courses will occupy the lecture halls, allowing students to spread out. Masks will be required, and faculty members will be able to remove any student who refuses to wear a mask. Labs and discussion groups will be held in person, for now. If the university starts to hit a spike, Lawrence said, even those classes may have to go remote or be paused.
Faculty members do not have to teach in person if they feel that they are at risk, but university officials are clearly emphasizing the importance of in-person instruction. “While no instructor will be forced to teach in-person classes,” says a June memo from Jonathan Wickert, Iowa State’s provost, “it is appropriate to remind ourselves that the hallmark of Iowa State’s academic experience is a rich, on-campus environment that includes world-class instruction.” Engagement between students and professors, he wrote, is “at the core of this ideal.”
‘Going to Be That Much Worse’
Some new students, coming off a dismal spring, are hungry for a bona fide fall. Julia, an incoming freshman from Minneapolis, wandered Campustown with her high-school friends. “My senior year kind of got cut short, so I’m happy that now I get to have a college experience,” said Julia, who declined to give her last name. She cited what she saw as the stringent move-in policies as evidence that the university was taking the situation seriously.
Samantha McCulley, a senior in chemical engineering, was far more skeptical. “I’m not a fan,” she said, arguing that the university should issue stronger mandates on social distancing, masks, and other precautionary behaviors. “I think they are doing what they can, but I also think that they are just trying to make it so that if we have to go online, they don’t have to reduce tuition.”
Among locals at a Saturday-morning farmers’ market, you could get an even wider range of opinions. One woman in her 60s, who wore a mask, insisted that masks were a government method of control and that the virus statistics were fudged — or even a hoax. She wasn’t about to give her name to an East Coast reporter.
Helen Colvin, who earned a doctorate in human-computer interaction at Iowa State and now works for Wells Fargo, lives with her husband and child next to the Greek houses near campus. “The students — the ones who are left — still seem to be partying quite a bit and having large gatherings that I’m not really comfortable with,” she said. When students return in the fall, “it’s just going to be that much worse.”
She wishes that the university and the local school system would figure out a way to offer education online. “My kid is going to be going to school with kids of university professors, who are being told by the university that they need to have as much in-person contact with their students as they can.”
But most other people at the market were cautiously accepting of the impending fall term — or even hopeful about it. “This used to be packed,” said Bill Nichols, pointing to the empty street and sidewalks surrounding the market. He has lived all but his first three years in Ames. “The town is like a ghost town compared to what it used to be.”
Nichols has little hope that students will respect rules set by the university or the city. But, he said, if the fall term doesn’t happen, the university and the city are in even bigger trouble. He fears that students will flock to cheaper education alternatives, harming Iowa State.
As an apartment landlord — even one who has sworn off renting to undergraduates — he is focused on a flow of potential tenants. “There are vacancies all over the place in this town,” he said, “and people aren’t coming in for fall yet because of the uncertainty.” He has already had four renters drop out for the fall — not all Covid-related cancellations, but the virus economy is not helping.
Struggling Restaurants
Nearby retail storefronts have all suffered. Mindy Bergstrom, who owns a trio of hip boutiques on Main Street, said her business was down 60 percent at the beginning of the pandemic, but is now down about 30 percent. She believes the university is handling the situation as well as it possibly can.
“Restaurants are hurting more than retail,” she said, adding that she has a background in marketing from the corporate world, so she was able to quickly build an online store when the pandemic hit. “Restaurants really need people in the dining room.”
And restaurants in the area have struggled to stay open consistently. When coronavirus cases in Story County, where Iowa State is located, started climbing sharply, in June, some bars in the Campustown neighborhood were forced to close after employees got sick. Local health officials, noting that the bar scene had been a major factor in the spike, imposed rules on bars to try to limit contact: Patrons must be seated with their drinks at small, spread-out tables, and people are not allowed to walk around the bar to socialize.
The university’s president has held regular meetings with the mayor, the local Chamber of Commerce, and the city manager to discuss the challenges posed by the local businesses, particularly the bar scene, said Lawrence, the vice president leading Iowa State’s reopening efforts. As a gesture of solidarity, he said, the university will cut back on the capacity and events of its own food and entertainment venue on campus, called the Maintenance Shop.
“It sounds cliché, but we’re all in this together,” Lawrence said. “We’re trying to be as responsible as we could, so we could say, Look, we’re doing our part. What are you doing on your side of the street?”
Some business owners are trying to do their part by being vigilant. Claudio Gianello, the owner of Cafe Baudelaire and Macubana, has closed his businesses twice since the start of the pandemic — first, for several weeks at the beginning, and then, more recently, for nearly a week after coronavirus numbers started spiking again and someone on his staff tested positive.
He’s not sure whether he can endure another shutdown.
Now he spends his days in the restaurant watching customers carefully, making sure they don’t get too close, looking for signs of infection among college-age patrons. This fall, he plans to hire someone at minimum wage to walk through the restaurant constantly, sanitizing surfaces.
Cafe Baudelaire has been an institution in Ames for 30 years, having won statewide awards for South American-inspired fare. But the pandemic has tested its resilience. After the first shutdown, Gianello had to hire and retrain a whole new staff because many of his employees had found other jobs or were too afraid to return. (One waiter, delivering a chorizo Brazilian burger to my table on Sunday afternoon, asked if I had seen the bar scene up the street the night before, with unmasked students milling about. “It’s frightening,” he said.)
Gianello ponders that scene, too. With wavy gray hair, Gianello is well into middle age — when asked for a number, he just smiles and says, “over 50.” He knows he is vulnerable.
“I ask myself this question every day: Do I feel lucky?” he said, doing Clint Eastwood in his Portuguese accent. He follows the advice of his wife, a nurse who works at the local hospital, but not in a coronavirus ward.
“She’s out there, she gets updated every single day about what’s going on,” he said. “And we pray — and if it’s time for you to go, it’s time for you to go. What else can I do? I can’t sit in my house.”
