Retrospective

Remembering the COVID-19 flow of events.

“I remember trying to figure out what we already knew about what external shocks and crises do to an institutional system like U.S. higher education . . . And I remember thinking, it was precisely because we didn’t know that we were going to mismanage the whole thing.”  --Dr. Tressie McMillan Cottom in Dissent Magazine.

A chapter in my dissertation describes what happened from January to March of 2020 to support the argument that the event was as an episode of cosmology.

In philosophy, “Cosmology is the ultimate macro perspective, directed at issues of time, space, change, and contingency as they relate to the origin and structure of the universe” (Weick, 1993, p. 633). Weick (1993) argues that many of the matters related to time, space, change, and contingency are taken for granted until they are not, that is, when people “suddenly and deeply feel that the universe is no longer a rational, orderly system” (p. 633).

I was thinking today that some of these details might be unknown or forgotten by my fellow higher education professionals and that it might be interesting to remember what was happening at around this time two whole years ago.

(In my mind, the pandemic feels like a never-ending six-month block, so it’s difficult to comprehend how much time has passed.)

Below is a condensed version of what happened, along with some of my personal notes about my experiences from my own records. Around this time two years ago, for example, I have a note that the Chinese restaurant study made a dramatic impact on me, and I watched the science unfold as we learned more. My sensemaking at this time meant that I started focusing less on surfaces for my own family and much more on air-borne transmission. I told my 70 year-old father who lives in Florida to stay away from the mall.

But in the months leading up to that time, here’s what happened.

COVID-19: Detailed Timeline

By the end of 2020, COVID-19 infections in the United States reached 20 million and more than 346,000 people died. Across the globe, over 83 million people were infected, and more than 1.8 million people died (JHU, 2020). In the last month of 2020, vaccines were distributed amid several logistical challenges, with the United States falling considerably short of its goal to vaccinate 20 million people by the end of the year (Diaz, 2020). Vaccine availability was, however, a bright spot in an otherwise challenging year of events that began with the confirmation of a novel Coronavirus in Wuhan, China, on January 9, 2020 (WHO, January 1, 2020). From that point, events in early 2020 unfolded very quickly.

January: Travel Screens and Restrictions in Wuhan

By January 20, 2020, the CDC announced it would begin screening passengers from international flights landing at airports through which the most passengers from Wuhan travel: JFK International airport in New York and both San Francisco and Los Angeles International Airports in California (CDC, 2020). A passenger living in Washington state was the first confirmed case of COVID-19, prompting the CDC to deploy a team to trace the movement of the initial patient. The next day, January 21, 2020, a team in Wuhan confirmed that COVID-19 is transmitted human to human, as deaths reached four and infections reached 200 in Wuhan (WHO, January 22, 2020). 

(In my personal records, I have a note that I posted to my own network on January 18, 2020, that Coronavirus was coming and that it was not going to be as fun as it sounded [weak attempt at a Corona beer joke!]. My sensemaking was informed at that time by my recollection of this event: Ziemer’s resignation. Why that article stood out to me way back in 2018, I will never know; I just tucked it away in the recesses of my brain. Maybe it wasn’t even all that meaningful in the unfolding of COVID events, but later, it framed decisions in my own life, and by the end of January, my house was prepping for what I felt in my gut was going to be a disaster. I knew we were not equipped, nationally or locally.)

Just three days later, more than 300 people were ill with COVID-19 in Wuhan and deaths reached double digits, resulting in the quarantining of both Wuhan and Hunggang, a city 30 miles from Wuhan with a population of 7 million (Levenson, 2020). The movement of nearly 18 million people was restricted: Residents were not permitted to leave either city without permission. As COVID-19 continued to spread and was detected in Japan, Germany, Vietnam, and Taiwan along with the United States, the WHO issued a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC). This January 31, 2020, declaration meant that COVID-19 was designated as "an extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response" (WHO, 2019). The global death toll was over 200 and cases continued to increase exponentially with 9800 cases reported by the end of January (JHU, 2020). 

February: A Grim Benchmark and a Name

February was the month of travel restriction. The United States declared that travelers from Wuhan must be en route by 5pm on February 2 or face possible entry denial or a 2-week quarantine (Lin, Fuller, & Fausset, 2020). Worldwide, travel restrictions were also implemented in New Zealand, Germany, Italy, and Australia (Lin et al., 2020). By February 3, worldwide cases reached 9800 with over 200 deaths (JHU, 2020), and the United States declared a public health emergency (CDC, 2020). 

Within a week, the world reached a grim benchmark when COVID-19 deaths surpassed the SARS 2003 outbreak (Myers & Zraick, 2020). On February 10, 2020, deaths reached 908 in China, exceeding the 774 of the SARS outbreak. Despite travel restrictions, COVID-19 seemed to spread easily, and daily case counts continued to increase across the globe and the nation (JHU, 2020). The United States reported its 13th case on February 10, 2020, in San Diego, California (Edwards, 2020). The next day, the WHO announced that the Coronavirus was named COVID-19 (BBC, 2020) at a press conference in Geneva, Austria. WHO chief officer Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus explained that the name “matters to prevent the use of other names that can be inaccurate or stigmatizing. It also gives us a standard format to use for any future coronavirus outbreaks” (BBC, 2020). According to the BBC (2020), “19” represents the year the virus emerged. 

(In my personal notes, I have 2/14 as a day I struggled so hard with my next steps. There wasn’t much conversation organizationally about COVID yet, and I vacillated about notifying my own department to start prepping because in my gut I already knew how this would shake out. Ultimately — and interestingly, in light of my own subsequent research on critical sensemaking — I did not act. I can now so clearly understand, name, and explain the [power] dynamics that factored into my sensemaking at that time. Pracademic life is great!)

March: Ringing the Alarm Bell “Loud and Clear” 

By far, the biggest period of disruption in 2020 was in March. Public schools, businesses, government agencies, colleges and universities began a mass mobilization effort to transform service delivery as a result of increasing global infections and deaths. The United States reported its second death on March 1 and its first case in New York (Andone, Croft, Gumbrecht, & Vera, 2020). Just two days later, the New York Times reported 11 deaths in the United States and the first outside of Washington state. California’s first death coincided with the identification of 51 cases there and over 150 cases across the country. On March 6, a cruise ship remained stranded at sea as nearly half of those tested for COVID-19 were positive (DeFiliciantonio, 2020). Within a week, Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus from the WHO spoke in Geneva and expressed concern about “alarming levels of spread and severity” and “the alarming levels of inaction” in the face of increasing infections and deaths across the globe (Keaten, Cheng, & Leicester, 2020). The March 12 briefing included a change in language, calling COVID-19 a “pandemic” and the assertion from Ghebreyesus that the WHO has “rung the alarm bell loud and clear” (Keaten et al., 2020). Nations are implored to “change the course of the pandemic” (Keaten et al., 2020). 

(Around this time, I subbed for another faculty member’s class. I mentioned spreading out because of the virus, and someone in the class said, “I don’t understand the big deal; it’s just a cold.” We already knew we were taking an extended spring break at that time, and I remember distinctly thinking that if I had been in my own class with my own students, I would have said this: “Let’s do an experiment about information literacy and see if there’s support for my hypothesis that the information literacy skills I’ve been teaching you this term can literally save your life. If we go away on spring break and come back in two weeks — as planned — I will come back to class with a $20 bill for every single one of you. But if we don’t come back after spring break, you promise to work throughout your entire life to continue building skills in information literacy.” Even though it wasn’t my class, I still shoulda done it!)

The United States declared a national emergency the next day (March 13), a move that provided federal funding for states as they worked to test, trace, and isolate cases (FEMA, 2020). Within three days, the first state-issued closures began. On March 16, 2020, 24 states, Washington, D.C., Guam, and Puerto Rico engaged in state-required or state-recommended closures (Florida, Kentucky, Maine, and South Dakota issued recommended closures) (Coronavirus and School Closures, 2020). By March 24, 2020, the entire United States was under either state-recommended or state-required closure. During this period, colleges, universities, and public schools experienced mass disruption and displacement as students attempted to make the transition to online learning, college students made arrangements under travel restrictions, and faculty attempted to convert instruction to online delivery while also managing COVID-19 disruptions in their own families and lives. 

The first interview in this data set took place on March 27, 2020. At that time, global cases were at 528,019 with 23,672 deaths. The United States experienced 85,991 cases with 1,296 deaths (JHU, 2020). Nearly all colleges and universities had transitioned to online instruction, with many colleges and universities leveraging a planned spring break week to make the shift.

Never before in the history of the United States had colleges and universities experienced this type of mass disruption at scale. 

COVID-19: A Cosmology Episode

The COVID-19 adaptation immediately disrupted time and space as homes became classrooms, offices, and medical appointment waiting rooms. This shift undoubtedly created an opportunity for mass sensemaking, as members of every affected nation and organization attempted to determine what the changes meant and what to do next. In addition to disruptions in the immediate environment, systems, and processes on a mass scale, another piece of evidence that supports COVID-19 as a cosmology event that disrupted individual sensemaking is leadership decision-making. The declaration of a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) by the World Health Organization is evidence that COVID-19 was a serious and disrupting event. A PHEIC is "an extraordinary event which is determined to constitute a public health risk to other States through the international spread of disease and to potentially require a coordinated international response" (WHO, 2019). Since its establishment in 1948, the WHO has declared a Public Health Emergency of International Concern (PHEIC) six times: The 2009 H1N1 (swine flu) outbreak, the 2014 polio declaration, the 2014 West African Ebola outbreak, the Zika virus epidemic in 2015-16, the Kivu Ebola epidemic in 2018-19, and the COVID-19 pandemic (Wilder-Smith & Osman, 2020). 

During the study, cases and deaths continued rise both worldwide and in the United States. The following table illustrates the cases and deaths on each interview date. These data indicate that the contours of the COVID-19 pandemic continued to escalate as faculty adapted their classes and attempted to navigate an increasingly dangerous and complicated COVID-19 environment. 

The graph below demonstrates the changes in cases and deaths in both the world and the United States as the study progressed; dates listed are actual interview dates. 

By May 6, 2020, nearly all public schools were under state-recommended or state-ordered closure for the school year (Coronavirus and School Closures, 2020). Colleges and universities remained in remote circumstances for the remainder of the term as well. Initially many colleges and universities planned to return to business as usual after a short closure, typically around two weeks (Smalley, 2021). However, as cases continued to increase exponentially and the death toll rise, colleges and universities completed the term at a distance.

---

It’s fascinating to review my data in the context of current circumstances. The seeds of our current troubles showed themselves in those interviews, and I’m constantly reminded of how the pandemic really did lay bare the faults and fissures of our social and economic arrangements and the manner in which those current arrangements are the products of past events and decisions.

In nearly every interview, faculty responded to my “what happened?” question with “Wait, let me go back,” and back they went: Back to prior departmental and institutional dynamics that informed their experiences during the COVID-19 adaptation.

Back to the material conditions that frame their work.

Back to the precarious balances they struggled to maintain in even the best of times.

Back to previous decisions that resulted in the state of higher education today.

And now, here in 2022, I still see those dynamics at play, and it’s just all the more evidence that I made the right decision to quickly pivot my research to COVID-19 in March 2020 because unraveling all of it is fascinating.

45 interviews in 90 days

But I wasn’t sleeping anyway, so gathering up this time capsule was a worthy endeavor because I doubt a data set like this exists anywhere else. What a privilege to have these stories.

I’ll write about the main findings soon, but they won’t shock anyone in the thick center of the org. However, maybe we’ll learn a few things.

Will we, though.

What I do know — almost for certain — is that organizations’ responses to COVID-19 (for better or for worse) will loom large in future sensemaking: “Wait, let me go back….”