A Message about the Risks Associated with Asymptomatic Positives
To help our community appreciate the serious risks associated with asymptomatic positives, which make up approximately half of all COVID cases, we ask each of you to take a few moments to engage in an important thought exercise.
The exercise is this: imagine that *you* are an asymptomatic positive. You feel fine. You think you are healthy. But you have just received a phone call from the Bard Health Service (if you are a student) or from Human Resources (if you are an employee) and the message is that you tested positive for COVID through Bard's on-campus testing program. The next thing that will happen is a member of Bard’s contact tracing team will call you.
The contact tracer is about to ask you to identify all of your contacts from the past four days. This includes anyone with whom you have been unmasked for at least 15 minutes. Think very carefully: every meal you have eaten, every time you hung out, every time you rode in a vehicle. Make an exhaustive list of everywhere you have been in the past four days and who your contacts were in each place. Be honest and thorough.
How many people are on your list? If it is only your roommate or members of your household, congratulations and thank you: you have been extremely careful and helped contain the spread of COVID. Is it five people from outside your household? That is very risky, since each of them could now be sick too and unwittingly spreading COVID to others. Is it more than 10? That is extremely risky, and you should immediately change your behavior. Is it so many that you cannot remember the names of them all? That is downright dangerous and disrespectful to every other member of the community. The risk of community spread increases exponentially with each additional person on your list.
Whatever your answer, that is the number of people who are potentially exposed to COVID and, in accordance with New York State regulations, must immediately go into a 10-day quarantine and be tested. If you are a student on campus, that is the number of people the College now must move into quarantine housing and manage.
What do you need to change about your behavior to help keep our community safe? Will it help you to establish a small pod of people and only eat meals with that same small pod? Do you only take your mask off to eat, or do you take your mask off as soon as you sit down in a restaurant or dining hall and leave it off even after you are done eating? What can you do to lower the number of people on the list you must give to the contact tracer? Your answers determine the role you play in this pandemic: as someone who helps contain the virus by minimizing contacts, or as someone who spreads the virus.
Each decision you make about your behavior to lower your number of contacts is a gift that is your duty to make to the rest of us. We thank you in advance.
This situation is not hypothetical. Several members of our community have discovered they are asymptomatic positives over the past month, which is entirely in keeping with local and national virus statistics.
We all must recognize our individual responsibility to stay informed and support the collective health of our community. We are even more tired of writing it than you are of reading it, but please diligently wear a mask and practice physical distancing so that you don’t make others sick if it turns out that *you* are an asymptomatic positive. There are serious and real consequences from interacting without caution. We rely on each other’s good will and voluntary compliance. Each of us working or living on campus has signed at least one health pledge that we will do what is necessary to keep all of us safe, on campus and off.
Sincerely,
Bard College COVID-19 Response Team
[email protected]
Coleen Murphy Alexander, Vice President for Administration
Kimberly Alexander, Director, Human Resources
Jonathan Becker, Executive Vice President and Vice President for Academic Affairs
Barbara Jean Briskey, Director, Health Services
Erin Cannan, Vice President for Civic Engagement
Deirdre d'Albertis, Dean of the College
Malia Du Mont, Chief of Staff, President's Office/Vice President for Strategy and Policy
Brooke Jude, Associate Professor of Biology
John Gomez, Director, Safety and Security
David Lindholm, Interim Athletic Director
Emily McLaughlin, Associate Dean of the College
Jennifer Murray, Dean of International Studies
Bethany Nohlgren, Dean of Students
Kahan Sablo, Dean for Inclusive Excellence
Michael Sadowski, Interim Dean of Graduate Studies
David Shein, Associate VP for Academic Affairs/Dean of Studies
Éric Trudel, Chair, Faculty Senate
Dumaine Williams, Vice President for Student Affairs/Early Colleges
For more information, call 845-758-6822.