CNU’S VIRUS RESPONSE CRITICIZED

Student employee, alum say they pushed for more transparency

Keeping COVID cases down at Christopher Newport University was going to be an uphill battle. While other schools in the area, such as Old Dominion University and William & Mary, had the capacity to test their students regularly, CNU did not.

Federal and state health officials had advised CNU early in the pandemic that the testing available then would not help the school because it didn’t provide “valuable quick information,” said the university’s top spokesman, Jim Hanchett. He also noted the school lacks an on-site medical center, which some colleges have.

CNU instead had to rely on its own community tracing and quarantining efforts. However, according to students who spoke with The Virginian-Pilot and Daily Press, CNU has lacked transparency throughout the semester and suffered from inconsistent quarantine policies.

The biggest example was the school’s limited COVID dashboard. At the beginning of the semester, CNU’s dashboard only showed the current active cases, while other schools published significantly more information such as cumulative case counts and number of COVID tests performed. Experts say these more comprehensive dashboards help students and staff protect themselves and keep outbreaks from growing.

Because of CNU’s lack of reporting, when 57 students were in quarantine on Sept. 25, the CNU student body had no idea — until an alumnus and student employee teamed to release the info. The employee said this pushed CNU to make more data public, but the problems didn’t end there. Many students see the poor data reporting as part of a larger pattern in how CNU has handled COVID.

Without testing capacity, experts say CNU was at a disadvantage from the start.

“It’s hard to have a successful time on campus if you aren’t able to test because you aren’t able to track down as many cases,” said

“I was trying not to expose any other people, but I couldn’t stay in because I still had to go get meals.”

— Alexis Holland, CNU student

Anne Ridenhour, co-chief of operations at the College Crisis Initiative, an organization that researches how colleges and universities across the country have responded to the pandemic.

But Hanchett is confident the school has done its part to contain the virus.

“There has never been a time when we did not have appropriate capacity for what we were dealing with,” he said.

Releasing the numbers

A CNU student and employee, who spoke on condition of anonymity for fear of retribution, had access to an internal Google spreadsheet listing the quarantine rooms that needed food delivery.

“People are going about their lives as normal,” he remembered thinking when he saw more than 50 students listed on the spreadsheet. “But there’s a ton of people in quarantine.”

Concerned, he reached out to Adam Fendley, a CNU alum who had been outspoken about the school’s COVID response on Twitter. Fendley had been upset with CNU’s dashboard from the beginning, describing it as “very bare and sparse.”

His concern was understandable; thorough dashboards, such as the one at William & Mary, play a major role in keeping the community safe, Ridenhour said.

“Having the dashboard reflecting what’s actually happening on campus is important because it’ll help students kind of like check their behavior,” she said. “When you’re able to see how many cases are on campus or how many students are in quarantine, that helps you better make better choices.”

Fendley decided to take action. “I basically had no confidence in (the CNU IT Department’s) ability to move fast and change things when they need to be changed,” he said. “I figured it would probably just be faster if I just put something together myself — and it turns out it was.”

Taking CNU’s daily case count, Fendley published a line graph online so students could see how the numbers were changing over time. When he tweeted the website, it got 196 likes, with one student remarking, “if only the school had done it so you didn’t have to.”

At first, his website was simply repackaging CNU’s data and didn’t provide any new information.

Until he connected with the student employee who had daily quarantine numbers. On Sept. 25, Fendley updated his tracker to include them.

“Thanks to this individual’s information, we know that there are a huge number of students in addition to the official count who are self-quarantining on-campus. ... CNU is not reporting this,” Fendley tweeted.

By Oct. 6, CNU created an updated tracker, adding weekly averages for students in isolation and quarantine (students with confirmed cases are in isolation, whereas quarantine is for people who have been exposed but have not tested positive).

Since the start of the semester, there have been 172 positive cases, according to CNU’s dashboard.

Hanchett said the dashboard was expanded as CNU’s “capacity to produce more information built up over the course of the semester.” He “couldn’t really say” if Fendley’s website had anything to do with the release of quarantine numbers.

“We heard from some faculty and some students, and if they were influenced by anything that was going on outside the university, I couldn’t tell you,” Hanchett said.

The student employee, on the other hand, was confident Fendley’s chart prompted CNU’s update.

“I think that was a direct response,” he said. “They’re still not super transparent about their numbers.”

Both he and Fendley remain critical of CNU’s data reporting. Fendley has repeatedly voiced his complaints on Twitter, saying CNU should publish the data in an easier-to-read way so the public can see how cases have changed over time. The student employee added that quarantines are still only reported as weekly averages, meaning you only see spikes in quarantined students a week after the fact.

“If there’s interest in revising, ... that’s definitely something we would consider,” Hanchett said.

The quarantine that wasn’t

But Fendley’s and the student employee’s complaints weren’t isolated. CNU students have been outspoken on Twitter, with many claiming the school’s quarantine policies were inadequate.

CNU student Grace Goodley has firsthand experience, testing positive for COVID-19 at the beginning of October.

Her roommate, Andrea Errico, tested negative. Errico said CNU instructed her to quarantine for 14 days in their off-campus apartment, with Goodley allowed to use their shared spaces as long as she wiped them down.

“But then I got into kind of murky water,” Errico said. When her 14 days were almost over, her CNU-assigned caseworker had some “hesitation” about letting her go.

“She was like, ‘I’m slowly working on your case with the school. There’s still some discrepancies,’” Errico said. “I was like, ‘Oh boy, like what does that mean?’”

Goodley and Errico said they were contacted by Virginia Department of Health contact tracers, who informed them CNU’s quarantine policy was incorrect. As long as the roommates were sharing a common space, Errico wasn’t truly quarantining. She was still exposed to Goodley and risked exposing others after her 14-day quarantine.

According to Irene Ferrainolo, the Population Health Manager at the VDH, CNU’s advice to students about how to quarantine is not meant “to supersede that of the VDH contact investigators/ tracers.”

However, students say it’s often several days before the VDH contact tracers reach them, meaning they have to rely on CNU’s initial instructions.

“I was just following CNU’s protocol,” Errico said. After being contacted by the VDH, Errico had to redo her quarantine for another two weeks.

Texts between Goodley and the CNU case worker assigned to her after her diagnosis suggest other students had also been instructed to quarantine incorrectly. Goodley said CNU then updated its policy for off-campus students, now requiring a 24-day quarantine instead of a 14-day one. The change came more than a month into the school year.

When asked about Goodley and Errico’s situation, Hanchett wrote in an email, “This scenario would be inconsistent with our protocols on campus and our recommendations to off-campus students because of the VDH guidance.”

“For those who live off-campus, we advise them of the prolonged quarantine periods if they choose to remain in the same household as a positive roommate,” he wrote. Emails shared by Errico indicate the school didn’t follow this policy in her case.

Changes coming

Other students also were confused by CNU’s quarantine policies. Although the school’s dashboard says its quarantine count includes people “determined to have been exposed to a person who is awaiting the result of a test requested by a health professional,” several students’ experiences suggest otherwise.

When Alexis Holland’s friend showed symptoms of COVID-19, Holland contacted the school and asked what to do. She was told that until her friend received a positive test result — which can take several days — CNU would not place her under official quarantine. This meant that Holland, who lives on campus, would not be able to get meals delivered to her door.

“I was trying not to expose any other people, but I couldn’t stay in because I still had to go get meals. And, had it not been a weekend, I would have still had to go to class,” she said.

When her friend received her positive test on Sunday, Holland officially was able to quarantine and receive meals from CNU. But she said her roommate was never placed under quarantine.

“After going through this whole process, and knowing how specific their criteria is for being quarantined or being put in isolation, I don’t trust (CNU’s data reporting) as much anymore,” she said.

“I kind of take the numbers with a grain of salt.”

The student employee who worked with Fendley had a similar experience. When he emailed CNU to say he believed he had been exposed to the virus, the office of student affairs sent him an email telling him to “lay low for now.” Like Holland, he had to “scrounge whatever food” he had to avoid exposing others until his test came back.

“The criteria to place a student in isolation/quarantine is based on CDC/VDH guidelines,” Hanchett wrote in an email. “Those guidelines are applied based on what the (presumed or confirmed) positive person shares and what the potential or confirmed exposed person also shares.”

Many comparable stories have unfolded publicly on Twitter.

“Everyone who’s had a bad experience ... puts it out there,” said Jackson Livingstone, a CNU student. “And everyone is kind of gathering this informal database of people who had their cases mishandled.”

Fendley said that, unanswered, the CNU Twitter-sphere can prove toxic.

“It’s just like an echo chamber of people spreading what can be ranging from, you know, total misinformation to speculation,” he said. “There hasn’t been any good sort of response to quash it. So it’s a little bit frustrating.”

According to experts, this lack of communication is harmful to the university’s efforts to contain the virus.

“It’s (crucial) to have student buy-in,” Ridenhour said. “And that’s a lot easier to get when the institution is being transparent.”

There are signs of improvement; CNU recently held a town hall to hear student concerns and, according to Hanchett, announced it would be offering “testing in some form to some members of our community” next semester.

“We listen very closely to (students) in their communications to us on what they’re looking for,” Hanchett said.

While some students are hopeful that CNU will listen to their complaints, Fendley plans to keep updating his website just in case.

“I’m not out for blood or anything,” Fendley said. “I just want to see the situation improve.”