Part 5: Achievements_ A Look Back on Carle Illinois' Response to COVID-19

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The SHIELD team’s metrics for success were simple: avoid hospitalizations and deaths. It accomplished that goal. The fast, frequent testing, data modeling, communications, and science the team had access to lead to no hospitalizations and deaths among students. The team also accomplished the university’s land grant mission to and educate the students, engage in research, engage the community.

A safe space was created, and the university thrived during the COVID-19 global pandemic. “Not only were we able to achieve that here, but we were able to model to the rest of the country and the world that can happen,” Martin Burke, Carle Illinois associate dean for research said. “That has been another key part of our success- that the University of Illinois and Carle Illinois College of Medicine are now rightly viewed as an example of how you can reopen and stay open safely during this very challenging time.”

The innovations and learnings from UIUC and Carle Illinois College of Medicine faculty have inspired many others to aim to do the same in spring 2021. “We feel really proud that we can help show the world that it is possible to continue to do really important things like continue to be educating the leaders of tomorrow in a way that is safe,” Burke emphasized.

The road to get there was thanks to the remarkable desire and ability to innovate, brilliant minds, and willingness to collaborate across many disciplines in the UIUC campus. Burke calls it the Shield Team’s “special sauce.” Burke called Paul Hergenrother early in the pandemic and they agreed “failure is not an option.”

The two decided to make sure that was true. They reached out to their colleague Tim Fan, who brought the idea to turn the UIUC Veterinary Medicine laboratory into a COVID-19 human testing facility. Burke reached out further across campus to Rebecca Smith and Nigel Goldenfeld.

They listed all the reasons bringing the students back to campus would be very challenging. These early team members dispersed to get to work and reconvened a short time later. When they came back together, they all agreed: if there is a way to test everybody twice a week, we can do this.

The ping-pong ball came back to the Shield testing team to figure out how to do it. Burke reached out to Bill Sullivan and asked how to turn the testing into disease mitigation. Sullivan’s team came back the next day with a plan to create a new app with a lot of new code, that would help communicate testing results, exposure notifications, offer information, and serve as a screening access tool to campus buildings. “That’s what makes us special- and the pandemic shined a bright spotlight on the power of innovation and collaboration that makes Illinois such a remarkable place,” Burke said.

This is Part 5 of the series “A Look Back on Carle Illinois' Response to COVID-19.”

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Part 5: Achievements_ A Look Back on Carle Illinois' Response to COVID-19

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