A Perfect Storm of Goodness

When looking back on a sprawling, monumental period like the COVID-19 pandemic—one chock-full of critical milestones, momentous decisions, and people caught up in the blur of rapidly shifting events and worries—it can be difficult to pinpoint the moment when everything changed. At WPI, that moment most likely arrived in the middle of January 2020.

Just a few weeks earlier, in late December, officials in China had concluded that a novel coronavirus was responsible for a cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan, the capital of Central China’s Hubei province. In mid-January Regina Roberto, then the director of health services at WPI, brought news of the viral outbreak to some of WPI’s senior leaders. At that time, their concerns centered on the potential impact of this new illness on WPI students who lived in the region and on the approaching Chinese Lunar New Year, which was expected to bring an increase in travel to and from the affected area.

But even at that time, only weeks out from its initial discovery in Wuhan, WPI’s emergency management leaders believed this new strain of coronavirus had the potential to pose a serious impact well beyond its point of origin. And they recognized the urgent need to begin preparing the university for this gathering storm.

And so—long before a small outbreak would become a pandemic, weeks before this new disease would come to the attention of most Americans, and months before many colleges and universities in the United States would take their first steps to address the threat to their communities—WPI started to lay the groundwork for a comprehensive, university-wide response to the greatest public health threat the world has seen in over a century. This is the story of that work.

The roots of WPI’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic stretch back several years, says Philip Clay, vice president for student affairs. “WPI’s first comprehensive emergency preparedness plan was developed more than two decades ago under the leadership of the late Bernie Brown, then vice president for student affairs,” he says. “Janet Richardson, who succeeded Bernie as vice president, and Jeff Solomon, then executive vice president and chief financial officer, working with Cheryl Martunas, our police chief, took that further by introducing what is known as the Incident Command System to the university. They put that overlay on our emergency response work and said this is how we are going to organize our efforts.”

The Incident Command System, or ICS, “is a federally recognized means of standardizing emergency response incident command for anything from a building fire to an armed attack,” says Lt. Col. Ron Bashista, WPI’s inaugural director of emergency management. “So, well before the coronavirus was around, when WPI was looking at how best to deal with any sort of incident—natural or manmade, the micro to the macro—the senior leadership embraced the ICS because it allows the institution to speak on the same terms as our municipal partners and it gives us credibility because it shows that we understand, within our own resources, how to organize and manage any sort of incident.”

“We had the bones of an ICS in place,” Solomon says, “but we hadn’t tested it. We didn’t have anybody who was dedicated to owning it on a regular basis. It was part of several people’s jobs, and none of us was an expert in this. We knew we needed it, we knew the power of it, but I don’t think we were in a position to really own it and embed it in the organization. That’s why we created the director of emergency management position, and we were lucky to find someone who was an expert in this. If we didn’t have someone with the gravitas and expertise of Col. Bashista, I think our response to the pandemic would have been a free-for-all.”

A retired United States Army officer with more than 20 years of active-duty service, including three combat tours, Bashista came to WPI in 2018 from Boston, where he spent nine years as the director of emergency planning. In that time, he was involved in numerous emergency response operations for the city, including running its Emergency Operations Center during the Boston Marathon bombing and Watertown manhunt; hurricanes Earl (2010), Irene (2011), and Sandy (2012); and the Back Bay power outage in 2012. At WPI, he facilitated some of the first applications of the ICS methodology during planned events.

Working out of the Emergency Operations Center (EOC) in the lower level of Founders Hall, the location of WPI’s Campus Police Station, he coordinated teams that watched over major events like Commencement, Homecoming Weekend, and TouchTomorrow, an annual one-day science and technology festival that drew upwards of 10,000 people to campus each year between 2012 and 2019. The EOC has the technology for monitoring media feeds, gathering the information needed to make decisions, and coordinating the response operations associated with those decisions. The composition of the group that sits at its rows of long tables depends on the nature of the incident. Key among them is the incident commander.

The incident commander is the primary source of expertise and guidance for the incident. The person who fills that role changes from event to event. For a chemical spill, it would be the director of environmental health and safety. For a tornado, it would be the chief of police. And for a public health emergency, like a small norovirus outbreak that occurred in 2019 and the pandemic of 2020 and 2021, it would be the director of health services.

“The system’s flexibility is one of its greatest strengths,” Bashista says. “It is designed to involve every relevant aspect of a community in terms of managing an emergency. When you drop that down on our community, there is already a mechanism for involving Facilities, the Budget Office, Talent and Inclusion, and so on. Very little adaptation needed to be made [for the pandemic] and that adaptation came rather quickly because we had been using the system for other types of emergencies and events.”

In the early days of the developing pandemic, WPI’s emergency planners had two concerns: one immediate and one still to be assessed. The immediate concern was travel: by students and faculty advisors then working at WPI’s Hong Kong Project Center, located about 900 miles to the south of Wuhan; by Chinese students who would soon be heading to WPI for the start of C-Term; and by other community members with plans to travel to and from China. Risks associated with travel are the domain of the Global Travel Review and Response Team (GTRRT), which met for the first time in mid-January to receive a briefing from Health Services on the situation in Wuhan and to begin preparing recommendations on possible changes in WPI’s travel policies.

The other looming concern was the potential effect of the viral outbreak on the campus community and potential threats to WPI’s operations, including the threat posed by students and faculty and staff returning to the campus from Asia. That was the kind of crisis that the Emergency Response Team (ERT) was designed to address, using the ICS process. Recognizing the overlap in interests between the GTRRT and the ERT, university leadership pulled members of both groups together to create the Coronavirus Working Group (CWG). “This put more eyes on the emerging situation,” Clay says.

At the CWG’s first meeting on Jan. 24, Health Services shared news that an emergency committee convened just the day before by the director general of the World Health Organization had been unable to reach a consensus on whether the outbreak constituted a public health emergency of international concern. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control had already issued a Level One Travel Advisory for China, urging travelers to use caution; it had also reported the first case of COVID-19 in the United States (the patient had recently returned to Washington state from Wuhan).

On Jan. 27, the CDC upgraded its travel advisory to Level Three, urging travelers to avoid all nonessential travel to China. Then on Jan. 30, just a day after the CWG’s second meeting, the U.S. State Department issued a Level Four Travel Advisory urging Americans to avoid all travel to China. Level Four warnings apply only to areas with a “greater likelihood of life-threatening risks,” the State Department noted.

At the recommendation of the CWG, the university soon recalled students and faculty members from all active global project centers. Then, in early March, in response to guidance from the CDC, the State Department, and the Massachusetts Governor’s Office, it cancelled all international travel.

In short order, the coronavirus, SARS-CoV-2, had jumped across an ocean and landed in America. A once-isolated viral outbreak now seemed poised to become much larger, and it was beginning to appear that the university, like the rest of the world, could be in for a long siege. It was time for the temporary, ad hoc CWG to evolve into a new entity built for a long-term emergency.

Adhering to the ICS model, the Coronavirus Emergency Response Team (CERT) was born in March 2020. With the Health Services director as its incident commander, and Clay, Solomon, and Bashista as its leaders, the team would undergo six changes in composition and structure as the nature of the external threat and the needs of the campus community evolved. In each of those iterations, CERT reported to the Executive Policy Group (EPG), the university’s senior leadership team, and ultimately to President Laurie Leshin, who would serve as the primary decision maker. As members of both CERT and EPG, Clay and Solomon served as conduits to keep information flowing between the groups.

Sticking to WPI’s established emergency response structure offered two principal advantages, Bashista says. First, it enabled the university to begin addressing the pandemic early and without delay. “A lot of other institutions chose to reinvent the wheel internally,” he says. “Even when the ICS approach was already available and had been used on their campuses, they didn’t immediately recognize that this was, essentially, no different than any other emergency.”

Second, having senior leadership involved elevated the seriousness of CERT’s mission. “When senior leadership has buy-in on something, it is amazing how the rest of the organization follows,” Bashista says. “Attendance at our meetings became very easy to gather up.”

Along with Clay and Solomon, members of the senior leadership team often attended CERT meetings, particularly as the pandemic progressed and the threat to the campus increased, Bashista says. “As this grew bigger and bigger and the impact grew larger, you saw the active involvement, for example, of senior vice president and general counsel David Bunis and vice president and chief of staff Amy Morton. They were right there in the EOC, sitting in those chairs, working through the planning process with us, right up until we couldn’t meet in person anymore.”

At critical junctures, when the size and scope of the issues before CERT loomed large, President Leshin often sat in on CERT meetings to immerse herself more fully in understanding the challenges, providing real-time guidance and decision making, and seemingly memorizing every bit of data presented to her. Her presence increased during the spring and summer of 2020, as plans emerged for reopening the campus in the fall.

“Not only did she manage to stay on top of everything,” Clay says, “but she was often a step ahead. Jeff and I have worked with Laurie long enough that her depth of knowledge and commitment weren’t a surprise to us. But it was a new experience for some of the CERT team members to witness her leadership up close, and it was inspiring to see how her energy fed theirs, and vice versa.”

From the early days of the pandemic, Leshin established a baseline for CERT decision making and a guiding principle for its deliberations: the top priority would always be the health and safety of the community. Every decision the team made and every plan it developed must meet that minimal test. It came to be known as “our North Star.”

CERT was dedicated to making decisions based on data and facts, which put a premium on the flow of accurate, up-to-date information. Associate general counsel Amy Fabiano took on that responsibility. “Every week,” Clay says, “she tracked changes in federal, state, and CDC guidelines; kept an eye on decisions made by other universities in relationship to their responses to COVID; and monitored national and local news stories about the coronavirus, cases, hot spots, and so on.”

During critical phases of WPI’s response, Fabiano compiled an analysis of the most relevant news stories and sent a weekly digest to EPG and CERT. “Amy’s work allowed CERT to keep its fingers on the pulse of what was going on outside of WPI and how that might impact our operations,” Clay says. “When there was a change in state or federal regulations, or new guidance on a particular part of our campus operations, Amy analyzed it, mapped it against our current protocols, and worked with departments to adapt or modify their protocols to ensure that we were in compliance.”

From the start, CERT has used a deceptively simple three-word test for assessing possible actions and plans. “The planning process is always hallmarked by three dynamics,” Bashista says. “It has to be feasible, meaning it is something within the realm of the possible given what we have on campus, what we can procure, and what we can staff. And, of course, it actually has to solve the problem. It has to be supportable, meaning this is something we need to maintain going forward. And then it has to be executable, meaning it has to be able to make the transition from a plan on paper into actual mechanics on campus to effect the correct impact on the tactical problem.”

Clay cites the large-scale COVID-19 testing program developed over the summer of 2020 as an example of how a solution passed through this gauntlet. The program was a must if students and faculty were to return in the fall, because without regular testing there would be no way to track and contain the spread of the virus on campus. “When we first came up with this idea,” he says, “and as the state’s Higher Education Working Group was looking into it, we weren’t sure that this was going to meet the litmus test for any of those three words.”

In time, the pieces started falling into place. In particular, the Broad Institute in Boston agreed to assemble a high-throughput operation for analyzing thousands of tests a day and reporting results back to campuses within a window that eventually shrank to less than 24 hours. Using a platform created at Tufts University, WPI built dashboards that could take the daily tests data and turn it into trends that could be monitored daily by CERT and displayed for the campus community. Also important, the university looked at its budget and determined that it could pay for the testing program.

As often happened in the course of CERT’s work, answering one question would bring others to the fore, Clay notes. “Once we start testing, what do we do when students test positive? What about their close contacts? How do we follow up with them? Where are the affected students going to live? Will they stay in place, or will they need to move? If it’s the latter, where will we create isolation and quarantine spaces? How are we going to feed students in those spaces? Once we made the decision to test, it opened up a host of other decisions that needed to be made.

“And this,” he adds, “is another way we benefited from starting to think things through much earlier than many other institutions. We had the systems in place, we had the right people around the table, and we continued to evolve, in terms of the structure, and the membership. Many of our peer schools went remote in March 2020, as we did, but they really didn’t start to unpack these other kinds of decisions until July. That’s why some schools said, “We don’t have testing or appropriate infrastructure in place so we’re not able to bring people back.”

Like a chameleon that can change its appearance to blend in with its environment, CERT changed its structure and composition to suit the evolving needs of the university. Its first post-CWG phase, known as CERT 2, was concerned with such pressing issues as how WPI’s academic operation would have to change should the campus shut down, how a prolonged shutdown might affect the university’s operations, and how WPI could recruit a new class if campus visits and information sessions could not take place. The CERT organizational chart for that phase was dominated by campus units responsible for those areas.

A short-lived CERT 3 explored options for Commencement (in-person or not?), summer programs (in-person or remote?), and the logistics of moving students and their belongings out of residence halls once the decision was made to offer all classes remotely. “At the same time,” Bashista says. “We had one group focused on recovery and reopening, because even at that stage we wanted to dedicate folks to looking at how do we return once this is over. If you wait until it’s over to start planning, it’s too late. If you are constantly working on these things, informed by the incident commander, it gives the senior leadership viable options to select from to guide the organization.”

Recovery and reopening dominated the work of CERT 4, which began in the spring of 2020. The organizational chart for that phase is filled with task forces working on the challenges of delivering academics with multiple modalities (in-person, remote, and hybrid), restarting the on-campus research enterprise, supporting global project work when travel was still not permitted, managing a de-densified residential life, reconfiguring events and food service, and many other details of repopulating a campus in the midst of a pandemic.

“Once a plan is in place, it’s not a self-licking ice cream cone,” Bashista says. “A group has to be there managing it and making sure that what was planned continues to be feasible, supportable, and executable.” That was the mission of CERT 5, the organization dedicated to executing the return and recovery plans and adapting and adjusting to the changing conditions on the ground. With units dedicated to business operations, academics, student life, employees, and communications, and with the constant flow of intel from Fabiano, CERT navigated one of the most intense and taxing phases of the pandemic at WPI.

Throughout the crisis, CERT has served as the university’s central coordination agent—evaluating the latest information, formulating plans for the senior leadership to consider, and coordinating and evaluating the work of the rest of the community as those plans were executed. “CERT is the primary coordinating agency because it involves representatives from the entire campus and every aspect of campus operations,” Bashista says. “The section chiefs and branch leaders are empowered to work issues, because we cannot allow ourselves to get bogged down in the day-to-day, dot the ‘i’ and cross the ‘t.’ So once things are approved, they are pushed down.

“But at any level,” he says, “if someone identifies a war stopper—something that will take us off our game—they highlight it and they bring it to the collective group, along with what they have identified up to that point as potential solutions. Above all,” he adds, “and this is always there in red on our slides—everything, every decision, has to be a collective, synchronized action. No independent action is allowed. It’s like the cylinders on a car. They work in a synchronized manner. When they don’t, the car doesn’t run.”

At universities like WPI, community members normally have a fair amount of leeway in how they carry out their responsibilities, says Clay. “We have parameters and guidelines for everyone,” he says, “but there is a lot of latitude in terms of how people navigate their day. When people are used to acting on their own, they have to learn to adapt. We occasionally have had to push back against independent actions, but not too often.”

Learning to route all pandemic-related communications through CERT is an example of one area where unlearning old ways was sometimes difficult, he says. “People weren’t going rogue, but there was bristling at times. We were just trying to get people to recognize that this is a synchronized effort, so we need to work collaboratively. If we don’t, that’s when things can go off the rails.”

Another way CERT worked to keep the university’s pandemic response from leaving the tracks was to look ahead, plot out the range of scenarios that could befall the campus, and work out contingency plans for many of them. Key to this kind of planning is the identification of triggers that signal the need to change course and put a new plan into action. Triggers include pre-identified numbers of new COVID cases, low levels of cleaning supplies, and nearly full quarantine and isolation spaces. “These are the kinds of things that could have led to our having to shut the university down and operate remotely again,” Clay says.

“We developed road maps,” Solomon says, “sets of plans that were not fully developed, but that allowed us to say, should we fall into this category, that these are the kinds of things we would have to start doing pretty quickly.”

“If we were to reach a trigger point,” Bashista says, “we had already identified two or three feasible, supportable, executable contingency plans that could be further developed and executed. The triggers alert everyone to a problem and give you the time and space to maneuver before it becomes catastrophic.”

“Colonel Bashista likes to say, ‘The virus gets a vote,’” Clay says. “We make our plans, but the coronavirus doesn’t give a lick about them. You are always planning against the unknown.”

The triggers that were in place during the fall and winter of the 2020–21 academic year had been developed the previous May, as CERT made plans for the campus reopening. “That’s when Health services said, ‘This is where we would break,’” Bashista says. “If we had this many cases, or if we saturated our isolation and quarantine capability, or if we had this much of an outbreak in a residence hall, the system would break.”

Throughout that fall and winter, CERT carefully tracked COVID-19 cases in students and the number of students in quarantine and isolation, along with the number of cases and the positivity rate in Worcester. The trends in all of those statistics began turning upward in early November, perhaps precipitated by Halloween parties. As the numbers edged toward the pre-set triggers, and as uncertainty grew over how the pandemic might progress during the upcoming holiday season, when the virus would likely spread during family gatherings, CERT pulled out its contingency plans.

To keep possibly infected students away from campus, WPI told students who headed home for Thanksgiving not to return for the balance of B-Term. And to give the university some breathing room between the holidays and the start of classes, it delayed the start of C-Term. In addition, the academic calendar was adjusted to reduce the lengths of breaks to encourage students to stick around and not head off campus.

“Honestly,” Clay says, “our students were phenomenal in their response. If they had not taken it as seriously as they did, we would not have been successful, because we would have had good plans that no one followed. Good plans on our part; good thinking went into developing them. But our students were the key to our success.”

During those tense days of November and December, the pre-set triggers led the university to move into more restrictive levels of its campus response plan, which meant that students were confined to their residence hall rooms except when they were attending classes or labs, getting meals, or seeking medical care. For Clay, this time epitomized the delicate balance CERT sought to maintain between the greater good (keeping the campus open, keeping people safe, minimizing the spread of the virus) and the impact the rules and restrictions had on people’s lives.

“We were making decisions based on the triggers,” he says, “and they told us we needed to ramp things up and put more restrictions in place to keep the campus open and keep people safe. But we knew that in some cases those decisions were going to make it harder for students and for our employees.”

Students isolated in their rooms (some of whom may not even have had a roommate to talk with because the roommate didn’t return to campus after Thanksgiving) felt isolated and disconnected. “There was such a psychological weight,” Clay says. “Plus, people’s lives were being affected in other ways. Many of our community members had family members or friends who were affected, who got sick, and, in some cases, who died. So you add to the psychological weight the anxieties about, ‘Am I safe? Am I putting my family members at risk?’ That’s where I struggled the most. These weren’t arbitrary decisions we were making just to be restrictive, but we were always struggling to balance physical health against the impact on mental health.”

Solomon says he saw this struggle play out in his team. “In addition to dealing with all the challenges of COVID,” he says, “we all had our own personal challenges, and none of us could be there in person to be there for each other. That added another layer of difficulty, because we were together but we weren’t together. And we were all doing our regular jobs along with the additional work associated with keeping the campus safe and open.”

For Clay, the importance of the work he and others did for CERT helped balance out the hardships and the constant stress. “This is the hardest, most challenging, and most important work I have done in my career,” he says. “The opportunity for the university to stay open and for students to take classes—that was the real motivator. The work was worth it because it was for the greater good of this amazing institution.”

In a classic action movie, the heroes endure seemingly insurmountable challenges and face peril after peril, but they triumph in the end, the movie reaches a satisfying denouement, and the audience goes home relieved and happy. As the eventful 2020–21 academic year neared its end, CERT switched to its sixth iteration, with a focus on the fall of 2021 and the transition to something approaching the pre-pandemic normal. Will this be the final version of CERT? Has the time come for the team to walk collectively into the sunset?

Bashista says the end of CERT will be a gradual one. “You won’t see the end come abruptly,” he says. “CERT adapted through the depth of the pandemic to whatever the university needed. It will continue to adapt to those needs until such time as it is no longer needed.”

While CERT may fade away, its lessons should not, Bashista says. “We had an exceptionally sound process,” he says. “We stayed ahead of the curve because of that process. We had absolutely the right people. And by right people, I don’t just mean on CERT, but across the campus. Above all, we had a very engaged senior leadership team that was monitoring this closely. And we certainly had the community—which is all inclusive of students, staff, and faculty—to make this work. Because the greatest plans and the most informed decisions come to no end unless there is a willingness to see that through. This all came together in a perfect storm of goodness.

“This has been 18 sustained months of working together on a daily basis, getting to know others on campus, understanding what they are responsible for, what they are capable of, and what they’re concerns are—and understanding that we can adapt a process as a means of doing business to manage pretty much anything, collectively, as a community. This understanding is what can’t go away after this is over … and I don’t foresee it going away.”