Employees: COVID-19 Updates & Significant Changes

Jan. 13, 2022

Dear colleagues,

We are just finishing our first week of this new semester, and we are again settling into our regular routines. We want to directly thank the many of you who attended our Town Hall meeting just over a week ago on Jan. 7 where we together looked at our COVID-19 protocols and plans for the semester, especially as our world and our campus face the new challenges brought by the Omicron variant.

We are now experiencing the immediate influx of cases that we anticipated and talked about in that Town Hall. We know that each one of us is being directly impacted by that. So we want to also thank you for your patience and cooperation with us as we, together, continue to create the best possible learning and working environment we can in this current context.

However, since we met, there are additional changes that are impacting us.

This afternoon, we received some significant updates on the impact of COVID-19 on healthcare in our community from Spectrum Health Lakeland:

Spectrum Health Lakeland continues to hit record numbers in the ongoing COVID-19 surge. We are encountering more hospitalized patients, more ICU patients, more ventilator usage than ever in our history, and our emergency department wait times have never been longer.

"86% of admissions are friends and neighbors that have not been vaccinated. Right now, 100% of our ICU admissions at Lakeland are for individuals that are not vaccinated," said Loren B. Hamel, MD, president, Spectrum Health Lakeland. "It absolutely decreases your risk of hospitalization and dramatically decreases your risk for ICU admission, for ventilation, and for death if you've been vaccinated."

You can watch the entire video report regarding Spectrum Health Lakeland’s current and challenging COVID-19 circumstances, including these comments from Dr. Hamel, here.

Earlier this week, you received our most recent email about the current changes to isolation and quarantine expectations and times.

Earlier this afternoon, we received confirmation that the Supreme Court has blocked the OSHA-ETS (Occupational Safety and Health Administration Emergency Temporary Standard) requiring vaccination or testing for employers with more than 100 employees, which would have included Andrews University. As a result, for our campus community, that means our expectations on vaccination or testing will stay as they were in the first semester of this school year (you can continue to review these and other University protocols on our dedicated COVID-19 website).

As a reminder, our current protocols require that all those employees and students who are not fully vaccinated at a minimum, or who do not have natural immunity from a previous infection, should test once a month. To monitor compliance with this expectation, the University will randomly select employees and students each month to help assure that this is happening.

However, most importantly, we continue in our shared commitment to keep our community as safe as possible in line with our Community Covenant of Care, irrespective of changes to external COVID-19 regulations and protocols.

With that in mind, and as we move into a few very critical weeks in this global pandemic impacted by the Omicron variant, here are some recommendations and reminders—including some new ones—to maximize our capacity to serve each other well:

1. With the Omicron variant still strongly impacting our nation, state and campus, we recommend that irrespective of our existing monthly testing expectations for those not vaccinated, we’d like to also invite all employees, regardless of vaccination status, to make a personal commitment to test weekly, where self-test kits are available. That new commitment represents only ten minutes of your time each week.

Also, please note that you can now charge eight home tests per person per month that you purchase personally to your Andrews University medical insurance (additional details will be shared with employees by the Office of Human Resources), as well as other insurance carriers. Please remember that you should always report positive test results and symptoms using #CampusClear.

2. In addition to continuing to wear masks consistently indoors, regardless of vaccination status, please ensure they are at least two-ply in thickness (the fabric COVID-19 masks provided by Andrews University are two-ply and meet this expectation).

3. If you have not done so already, consider moving any in-person meetings and committees you have planned to remote meetings for the next few weeks.

4. Consider eliminating food (sadly) from gatherings for a few weeks to minimize the times face masks will be removed.

5. Continue to watch the physical distancing and help establish and ensure natural distancing in spaces across our campus wherever that is possible.

6. Keep up-to-date on vaccinations and record them here.

7. And the perfect seven—remember to do all you can to maintain a strong immune system through the eight natural remedies, which focus on nutrition, exercise, water, sunlight (be sure to check out the infrared options at the Andreasen Center for Wellness if it’s cloudy out), temperance, air, rest and trust. Those things make a difference.

Finally, let us remember we need each other’s kindness and care. We especially need each other at this time—our students need us and the wider community needs us. By the way, if you haven’t seen it yet, we invite you to watch a special COVID-19 edition of The Feed, which our Campus & Student Life team shared at University Forum earlier today.

Thank you for representing Andrews University so well in these challenging times and as we welcome a new semester of study here on our Berrien Springs campus.

Andrea Luxton
President

Christon Arthur
Provost