My Role in Pandemic Theatre

A large part of my administrator job in the past year has revolved around what I'll call pandemic theatre.  Let me say at the outset that the idea of pandemic theatre isn't original to me; a series of articles in The Atlantic uses the term "hygiene theater" and focuses more on the scrubbing that we've all been doing.  This article ties the term back to the increase in "security theater" that we instituted in the past 20 years after September 11, 2001, and this article tells us that we can quit doing all this scrubbing we've been doing for the past year.

As an administrator, I haven't been doing all that scrubbing myself, although I've spent a lot of time thinking about and ordering scrubbing supplies.  I'm using pandemic theatre because it's a more expansive term, and because I'm not sure it's done a lot of disease prevention.

Eleven months ago, we spent a lot of time writing pandemic protocols that we would put into place as students returned to campus to do lab work.  I would write a set of protocols, my campus team would offer suggestions, I'd rewrite them, and then the Corporate team would demand revisions.  I would take the parts of the protocols from other campuses that had been praised and try to shape ours to that, while at the same time wondering why the Corporate team didn't just hand us the protocols that they wanted us to adopt.

I've spent a lot of the past 11 months screening people arriving to our campus.  At first, I asked health questions, and then we decided we wanted a written record.  We continue to have people fill out a sheet of paper.  If we ever have to do contact tracing, it will come in handy.  So far, we haven't had to do contact tracing, so maybe our protocols have been a success.  Or maybe there's been exposure, but no one has told us that they were a possible disease vector.

As I look back over the last 11 months, I'm amazed that we haven't had outbreaks on our campus.  We've done our best to minimize large groups, and we still make sure that we don't have more than 10-12 people in a classroom.  We still wear masks.  I still ask students to space themselves out if they're congregating in clumps inside.  Those parts of pandemic theatre are the parts that have helped in disease prevention, at least according to what we know now.

Having people fill in the health question sheet?  Taking their temperatures?  Those things haven't helped, at least not past the first few weeks.  We now know how to answer the questions.  So far, no one has come to campus with a fever.

My school has gotten that the message that one should stay home when one is sick.  I hope that we can hang onto that when the pandemic ends, if the pandemic ends.  We have had the conversations about whether or not students are really sick or are they just trying to avoid a quiz or test.  I would love to see us go to an assessment model that moves away from whether or not students are cheating in any number of ways, but I accept that I'm not likely to change that discussion during the limited time I have left in my administrator life.

Our students have also been wonderfully forthcoming about when they've been exposed to COVID-19.  Yesterday was a new milestone for me.  A student came to campus when I was staffing the intake table.  She told me about her friend who tested positive yesterday.  I went through the questions:  when did she test positive, when did you last see her, were you inside or out, masked or not?  And then, when I was about to send the student away to get tested, she said, "I've been vaccinated."

I moved to a new set of questions, beginning with the most important one:  when was your last shot?  Lo and behold, she said she had had two shots of the Moderna vaccine, and the last one was two to three weeks ago.  I said, "Well, you should be protected.  You can't contract the disease or spread it.  You can be on campus."

Now that my state is vaccinating everyone, I need to remember to ask the vaccination question earlier.  And I know that the disease is ever evolving, so at some point, having been vaccinated may not be enough.  The thought that we might still be doing pandemic theatre years from now as the disease mutates makes me very tired.

I understand that we're performing pandemic theatre for a variety of reasons:  to make ourselves feel safe, to make others feel safe, to protect our institutions against litigation, and because parts of it actually work.  As we move through this second year of the pandemic, I hope we can start to understand what parts work and what don't--and maybe we can stop doing the parts that aren't important, like disinfecting the pens at the intake table.