Even after Bentley eased its COVID-19 restrictions this past Tuesday, March 23, many students feel unsatisfied with Bentley’s justification for why they had to impose such strict restrictions. To address this issue, we at The Vanguard reached out to Bentley’s Director of Emergency Management, Geoffery Bartlett, who provided additional details and reasoning about why current restrictions were enforced. Hopefully, this Q&A will answer many of your outstanding questions about the restrictions so that as a Bentley community we can all come to accept that although difficult, enforcing restrictions was the school’s best option.
What do you attribute the recent uptick in COVID cases on campus to?
There’s no question it’s related to changes in behavior. Public health authorities are seeing the same thing in broader society. People are exhausted with restrictions and, unfortunately, are letting their guard down. We confirmed as much during contact tracing, learning about unauthorized, unstructured, and unsafe gatherings that led to multiple positive cases among attendees.
We still know what works—distancing, face coverings, hygiene—and we know it’s worked in the past. Twice in the fall term we adopted restrictions and were able to turn around the case rates and flatten our on-campus curve.
What did the school have to take into consideration to make the decision to cancel spring break? to shut down activities on campus?
Our own experience and a growing body of evidence and recommendations from public health authorities all pointed to the risks associated with travel. A retrospective study1 demonstrated how spring break 2020 contributed to COVID-19 spread by comparing schools that had an earlier break to schools that canceled theirs. By the end of the fall term, we learned that 20% of our own cases on campus were traced to travel. In late February, half of the then-active cases were traced back to people who had recently traveled.
We weighed the clear risks of allowing spring break against our concerns about the emotional toll of a continuous spring term. Spring break isn’t just about beaches and parties, it’s an important pause in learning that is a part of academic success.
We also benchmark with peer institutions. COVID-19 is new to all of us, and as we work through new information it’s helpful to know that our counterparts are reaching similar conclusions. I’m not aware of a single school in the Boston area that didn’t come to the same conclusion as Bentley about spring break.
In the end, we concluded that the risks were too high, but we tried to restore some of the balance with no-class days. It’s not the same as a traditional break, but really nothing in the 2020–2021 school year is the same as any other.
What sustainable goals is Bentley trying to reach with the current shut down?
The goal is to get the number of new cases down to a level that we can support on an ongoing basis and doesn’t increase. To get there, we need to see that contact tracing is effective (and that people are being completely candid about their contacts), that we have a manageable number of new cases and contacts each day, and trends are declining.
Will these current policies have any effect on the fall semester?
The expectation of widespread availability of vaccination leaves us optimistic that we’ll have a full re-opening of our classrooms and residence halls in the fall. State and federal health guidelines will, of course, continue to evolve over the spring and summer, and those policies will guide all final plans. We will evaluate the need for face coverings and testing, and we’ll be prepared to continue these practices in some capacity, as needed. A group of higher education and health care leaders are working together to make additional recommendations for Massachusetts colleges and universities.
What would you say to students who are unhappy with the policies, i.e. no spring break and the current shutdown?
Our goal is to provide a healthy, safe and meaningful on-campus experience. I hope students understand that we’re trying to be thoughtful in our approach and make decisions based on data and consensus science. We know this is a challenging time and we realize limiting campus activities is stressful. We are constantly trying to balance public health concerns with the impact of restrictions on students. These policies are not always easy, but they are necessary to keep our community of students, faculty and staff together in the midst of a pandemic. We can’t ignore the fact that Bentley experienced a large increase in cases on campus that left us incredibly vulnerable to exponential case growth if we didn’t take steps to stop the spread.
In some ways, March through May might be our most difficult months. The fatigue is real, and the finish line is in sight, but the COVID-19 virus, and its variants, continue to present serious risks. It might be hard to see other places starting to reopen, but at Bentley we’re still experiencing the highest case rates of any time.
The power to change the situation is in the hands of the Bentley community, but it requires total cooperation. We all have different barometers for risks we’re each willing to take, but in a pandemic the decisions an individual makes are no longer just about personal risk. Communicable respiratory disease is a community issue that requires all of the community to be engaged all of the time.