Texas Tech students are heading home for the Thanksgiving holiday as COVID cases continue to rise throughout Lubbock. Despite the fact that COVID cases soared in the 18 to 25 age bracket at the start of the school year, city officials don’t believe the students leaving will impact current trends.
Texas Tech Public Media talked with the University President, Lawrence Schovanec, about the future of in-person events on campus, lessons learned and how he’s handled leading a university in the midst of a pandemic. Here are highlights from the interview.
My understanding is that the faculty senate sent a letter to the university regarding in-person events.
SCHOVANEC: It started at the health science center, they wrote a letter to the Chancellor asking that all extracurricular activities be cancelled, and large gatherings—meaning athletics. Our senate was asked to support that resolution, which is perfectly reasonable and appropriate that they did because they’re concerned about the frontline healthcare workers.
Staff senate then supported that resolution as well. I had a meeting yesterday with the faculty senate president, the staff senate president and the SGA president and we discussed a whole range of issues. I just sent them a memo that I wrote.
I mentioned that consistent with the recommendations of the Lubbock County Medical Society, any event over 10 will have to be moved to an online modality or postponed. We will continue to have face-to-face instruction, or hybrid, until Thanksgiving, and then we will be moving solely online for the three days that remain.
We will move forward with the events that are scheduled for athletics and the December commencement, but we’ve had a number of meetings in the last few days about enhanced protocols and enforcement of those protocols, especially indoor events.
For commencement, everyone will have to wear a mask and that will be strictly enforced…
Some universities have reported having issues with students not getting tested for COVID. Has Texas Tech had those same issues?
SCHOVANEC: I think we’ve done more testing than most schools. There are three locations you can go to get free walk-up testing. Typically we test about 200 a day.
We’re offering free flu shots and we’re recommending that everyone get tested before they go home. I don’t think there’s a school in Texas that’s done more than that…
Where are contact tracers finding COVID-19 is spreading throughout the student body?
SCHOVANEC: I would go back to information I shared earlier that Sunday (Nov. 15) we had 33 students in isolation of the more than seven thousand that were in the dorms. Then we had about 180 students that were positive on Friday. So that tells you most of the students that are positive are off campus. I think one of the safest places you can be is on campus.
How comfortable are you with the in-person events that are going to happen?
SCHOVANEC: Well, I was at the football game on Saturday. My wife was sitting next to me and she has asthma. She takes no chances. When I have to go to events and she’s not sure who will be there, she won’t go.
She looked at the sparse crowd and she said, “This is probably the safest place to be in Lubbock right now.”
Given the sparse crowds we’ve had at football, and we have no evidence through contact tracing that that’s been a problem.
I was on a call last week with someone from the NCAA, a physician who’s in charge of some of the medical protocols. They believe that there hasn’t been one case of transmission of COVID among the players on the field. But understand this, anybody that goes out onto the field must be tested within 24 hours.
There’s a lot of evidence to support the idea that nobody out there has COVID, but you never know. It could have happened between the time they got tested to when they were out there.
Basketball is something that we’re planning very carefully. You will have to have a mask on. We have people in football games who go around and say will you put your mask on? But we have not taken an aggressive attitude towards removing anybody. We will in basketball.
How has it been being the president of a university in the middle of a pandemic?
SCHOVANEC: There have been times I have a hard time sleeping. I’ll lay in bed and think about things. I wish I would have done certain things differently…
