Dear Students and Colleagues:
For more than two years, we have sought to prevent COVID infections with intensive public health interventions. This has been challenging, and would not have been possible without the cooperation of every member of the Holy Cross community, for which I am grateful. We have also continually adjusted our policies to reflect new research developments and our experience as a campus. We are again at the point where we can adjust our COVID response.
Effective this summer, we will be moving away from a pandemic mindset towards a model that more closely resembles normal operations. We’re shifting our approach to an endemic mindset, in which we recognize that COVID-19 will continue to be with us but no longer requires an institutional-level emergency response.
Under this endemic mindset approach, each member of our community will be empowered to make mitigation and risk decisions based on their personal circumstances. As we make this shift, we will also ensure that we retain or create the appropriate structures to respond in the event of another outbreak - of COVID or any other pathogen.
We base this decision on the following:
Our community is highly vaccinated. COVID vaccines prevent severe illness, hospitalization and death in high-risk individuals, and are expected to be available to all people (including those under 5) soon.
- Our residential population is generally low-risk. To our knowledge, no Holy Cross students have been hospitalized for a severe COVID infection, and there has been limited spread to employees.
- Testing and therapies like antiviral medications and antibody treatments are effective COVID treatments and are now widely accessible in Worcester and beyond.
- Personal mitigation measures, including one-way masking, have been shown to be effective and will still be encouraged for individuals who are at risk of severe COVID infection.
- Amidst our largest surge this spring, we saw no severe infections - and we saw employees begin to access their own healthcare providers for testing and treatment.
We have worked closely with our medical consultant, Dr. Robin Ingalls, who is in full support of this shift in approach. We’ve spoken with leaders at institutions that began de-escalating mitigation measures in the spring, and they’ve seen no impact on severe infection outcomes.
Over the course of the pandemic, the College has maintained a robust COVID response team, overseen by the COVID Core Team. As we move towards an endemic mindset, the responsibility for monitoring and responding to COVID will shift to the newly created position of Public Health R.N. This individual will report to the Director of Health Services and in consultation with Dr. Ingalls will have primary responsibility for monitoring all public health concerns, including COVID, and implementing appropriate mitigation strategies.
We are actively recruiting for this role. Until such time as we can fill that role, Denielle Burl, Chief Risk Management/Compliance Officer, will oversee this transition. Denielle will be following up with an email outlining the details of our approach soon. Our Health Services and Human Resources staff also remain ready to support community members with their health and wellness needs in the context of this transition.
I want to thank you all again for your flexibility and commitment over the past two years as our understanding and experience with COVID has continually evolved. We successfully completed two academic years in a pandemic in large part due to your positivity, creativity and incredibly hard work. You have clearly demonstrated what it means to be a community who lives our Holy Cross mission.
Sincerely,
Vincent D. Rougeau
President