Well, good afternoon, everyone, and happy Friday. Welcome to this week's Fireside Chat. I'm Lisa Sternstein, here, of course, with Dr. Tim Cross, our Senior Vice President.
We will be updating you today on the latest information regarding our COVID-19 cases, both within the university and institute, and we'll be talking about some changes that have been made to our guidelines. And then, of course, we will be taking your questions. But first, a few reminders, as always. Please keep your audio muted so that everyone can hear the conversation.
And, of course, there is the chat function for you to use to ask questions. You can post them publicly or you can send them privately to me, and we'll make sure to get to as many as we possibly can. A recording of this session is always made and posted to the UTIA Coronavirus website. You can find that link on our new homepage, which is utia.tennessee.edu.
So we'll jump right in. And, Tim, students are officially back on campus. So what does the situation look like as far as cases and how those are being handled? Thanks for kicking us off again, Lisa, and welcome, everyone.
As usual, it's great to see you and appreciate those of you that have taken the time to join us today. I do want to provide some updates on some facts and figures, if you will, with regard to coronavirus and update everyone on sort of the situation here on campus as well as across the state. But I also want to maybe make a few comments based on the fact that we've had another shooting this week, and we've certainly seen a lot of violence, a lot of bloodshed that none of us certainly want to see happening across our country. And it reminded me that I haven't done much of an update with the group lately with regard to the Institute's efforts related to diversity and social justice.
So I want to tell you to be on the lookout the next few days for an announcement of the new director position that we've established, the director for diversity, equity, and inclusion for the UT Institute of Agriculture. This will be the first time we've had such a position. And, you know, it's probably long overdue in some respects, but the good news is we've got that put together. We've got a search committee in place.
And I want to thank Dr. Dave White and Dr. Sharon John-Polique for co-chairing that search committee. So we have not forgotten about the fact that while the country's struggling with coronavirus, we're also struggling with social justice issues, and I want to make sure our Institute's doing its part as well.
So watch for that position announcement. And then my plan is that as soon as we get a director hired, the very next urgent thing we need to do is appoint a diversity council and really start to lay down some specific plans and actions within the Institute as well. So I know that doesn't directly answer Lisa's question, but I want to make sure and work that in this afternoon before I got myself off track. So coming back to Lisa's question, what is the situation both on campus here and across the state?
Well, let me just share a few facts, data points with you, and most of these you can find yourself if you really want to stay up on things. They largely are available at the UT Knoxville website that indicates the number of positive cases and the number of self-isolations among employees and among students. So let's start with the University of Tennessee as a whole in terms of the Knoxville area, including the Institute of Agriculture, across the whole campus, and that includes our off-campus locations. There are currently six positive cases among employees, and there are currently 143 positive cases among students.
So that's the current numbers in terms of positive cases. And then if you take that a little further and say, all right, that's how many positive cases there are, those individuals have likely had direct contacts with others in the organization, or there may be individuals who have had direct contacts with positive cases outside of our campus. What do those numbers look like? We currently have 70 employees in self-isolation and 774 students in self-isolation.
So those sound like some big numbers, and particularly the 774 students in self-isolation. Remember that those include not only students who may be experiencing symptoms, but the largest portion of them are actually students who believe they have had direct contact with someone that is a positive case, or they've been listed as a direct contact for someone that has a positive case of COVID-19. So there are a number of students certainly in self-isolation at this time, but at this point it's also being manageable where we have self-isolation places, residences for those who are residential students, and for those that are off-campus residents, they're self-isolating in their own facilities, or many of them may have chosen to go home. So that's the overall numbers, statistics, if you will, for the university.
And again, those figures include not only UT Knoxville, but also the Institute of Agriculture. So if you probe down just a little bit in those numbers, I said there were six positive cases among employees across both UTK and UTIA. Among those six, there is currently only one positive case that is a UTIA employee. So one out of six is an Institute of Ag employee.
And then we have out of the 70 employees in self-isolation, 12 of those are employees within the Institute. So our numbers remain very, very low and actually showing no sign of increasing at this point. That's good news. We don't want any cases, but managing to have only one positive case is certainly good.
And while I certainly can't share the specifics about that case, it's an off-campus case at this point. So on campus we actually have no positive cases currently among Utah employees. If you look nationally, the U.S., things seem to be improving. We're not getting better overnight, certainly, but the trend is that the seven-day average number of new cases is decreasing.
We've been seeing on average 50,000 or more cases a day, and now we're down closer to 40,000 cases per day. So that, again, is a very large number of cases. However, the trend is decreasing rather than increasing, and that's certainly good news. And if you look even further or look a little more closely at our state situation, in Tennessee we're seeing basically the same trend, that the overall average number of new cases is decreasing.
At our peak, we were averaging around 2,300 new cases per day, and currently we're closer to 1,200 cases per day, again, on average, and that's a rolling average. So I've thrown a lot of numbers, a lot of statistics at you, but, you know, so let me just summarize it by saying this. We've got a few positive cases among employees. We've got several positive cases among students.
We have a lot of students in self-isolation, but that's a manageable sort of caseload at this time. Very low numbers of positive cases in self-isolations within the Institute, and nationally and here in Tennessee the trend is starting to look much more positive. So wrap that question up with those remarks. Well, and that is good news, and I have actually heard from the medical community that some of that is really attributable to the fact that people are taking wearing masks and using precautions seriously.
Are you seeing that within our organization? Yeah, definitely. I think, you know, we've been, as I've shared the last couple weeks, we've been starting to do a few more meetings, events, or activities. We've certainly, you know, welcomed a lot of students back to campus.
There's more interactions taking place both on campus and across the state, and yet our numbers have not changed. I do attribute that to the fact that we're doing those things that really seem to make a difference, washing our hands, staying socially distant, certainly wearing a mask anytime we're around other people, and not coming to work if we are sick or feel like we may be getting sick and filing the self-isolation reports just to be on the safe side. So I do think all those practices are demonstrating that we can manage, we can stay safe, even in the midst of this pandemic. Yeah, that's great advice.
So, Will, we've also made some updates to the UTIA guidelines, and would you like to share the details of those? Yeah, I do, and they're posted already, so you can go look at them, and honestly, the changes are pretty small, all in all. There's one sort of specific change, and that is we had established that international travel would be restricted through September 30th of this year. It's now clear that international travel is not going to be possible anytime soon.
So in conjunction with UT Knoxville, we've extended the international travel restriction through December 31st of 2020. Now, in saying that, there's always been in place an opportunity to submit a request for an exception to that restriction, and that exception process is still there. So if there's really, really high-priority travel that needs to be done to an international destination, that can still be submitted as a request for an exception. But in general, I think we're going to see that international travel really isn't largely feasible anyway, given the current status of coronavirus here in the U.S., and so we're going to extend that travel restriction through the end of this calendar year at this point in time.
Domestic travel remains available, but it does require pre-approval, so don't make any reservations, any registration fees, or anything else until your domestic travel outside of the state of Tennessee is approved in advance. Otherwise, the changes we made in the guidelines are really removing some guidance that was no longer relevant or needed, some of it made it back clear to March, and simply making sure we were in line with university guidance, with state guidance, and with CDC guidance. And I think we've got things very, very well aligned in all cases. Let me just also use this opportunity to remind everyone that if you either feel that you're starting to exhibit symptoms or if you feel you've been in direct contact with someone that is a positive case, you should report that to your supervisor, and you should complete the self-isolation form, which is online, and it's linked both in the guidelines, and it's linked on the UTI website as well as the UTK website.
So it's really important that you do that. If you're on campus, that triggers the facility's response that either closes the space that you might have been in or provides deep cleaning in that space. It also, of course, keeps our leadership team informed as to what our status is and who may be impacted. It enables your supervisor to make plans for any responsibilities that need to be covered.
So just a reminder there, no change, but just a reminder, continue to report using that self-isolation form if you need to. And something that we haven't really stressed, but which I'm now realizing is almost equally important, if you are required to self-isolate or if you choose to self-isolate because of the direct contact, you need to also let us know when that isolation period is complete, and that may be the result of advice or recommendation from your health care provider, or it may simply be that the period of time has passed, but it's getting very difficult to track who's still actively in self-isolation, because we can't rely upon just the number of days that have passed. If it's someone exhibiting symptoms, we need to be assured that they're no longer exhibiting symptoms, no longer symptomatic. So both reporting on that form and then reporting to your supervisor or communicating with your supervisor that the self-isolation period is complete.
Those are two really critical things to help us manage better and to support you better as well. And then finally, remember, we've got some guidance in our UPIA guidelines about conducting meetings and about attending meetings. I know as we start to get more active across campus and across state, there seem to be more questions about that. The guidance that's out there hopefully will help you in, if necessary, in conversation with your supervisor, determine when it's appropriate to conduct a meeting or when it may be appropriate to attend a meeting that perhaps you've been invited to attend.
And we don't have a blanket prohibition on either conducting or attending meetings. What we say is you should attend them if it's necessary, if it's helpful or valuable, and if it can be done safely. And then there's a number of questions or conversation points around those meetings to help make that decision and determine whether it is an opportunity that should be pursued or not. And that's pretty much all the updates that we have.
The rest of the guidance really hasn't changed. And, you know, I think everyone actually should feel good about that. Changing guidelines on a frequent basis means we're in a very shifting, dynamic, fluid situation. And really our guidelines haven't hardly changed since about June at this point.
So that's good. That means our situation is more stable and we are able to really respond and adapt to the situation that we're facing. And we're doing so productively and positively without increasing our number of cases. So, again, that's a very positive outcome as far as I'm concerned.
And Tim, that self-isolation form is on the coronavirus website? It is, yes. And we could actually screen share if we wanted. But I believe it's also actually linked in our guidelines.
There's a link there as well. So you can get to it from a number of different places. Great. So just a reminder to everyone, we are ready to take questions.
I am going to ask one, and that is just a clarification for everyone on in-state travel because we do get a lot of questions about that. But in-state travel, there are no restrictions. Is that correct? There are no restrictions against travel.
What there are requirements is to how you travel. So we're not going to file 10 people in a six-passenger van and, you know, troop across the state. We've got to be smart. So we're not going to restrict travel, but we are going to require that you do it safely.
And if you're using a university vehicle, again, there's guidance about what that entails. Basically, for an automobile, the maximum is two people in an automobile, one in the front seat, one in the back. For a van, I think the limit is four, a minivan, if you will, and so forth. So all that information is spelled out, and you'll want to follow that if you're going to be using a university vehicle.
In your personal vehicle, obviously, you know, you've got to make those decisions yourself. But let's remember that you're supposed to be six feet apart from anyone that you're interacting with. You're supposed to be wearing a mask. If you're near someone else and exposed, all those guidance requirements still apply, even if you're traveling.
And then there's a lot of information available about how to travel safely. CDC has an extensive amount of information about that. Think about, you know, when you're traveling across the state and you're stopping to fuel up. Think about the surfaces you're touching when you have an opportunity to wash your hands or use some type of hand sanitizer.
You know, there's ways to do it and, again, stay safe in the process. So lodging, there's considerations as well, restaurants and so forth. So all of that still is really required to be adhered to, but we're not respecting travel. So that may sound like I'm speaking on both sides of my mouth, but do it, but do it safely.
I think that's the real answer. Great. Well, actually, that's a great segue into a question we received, and that is the CDC recently eliminated the 14-day self-isolation guideline for out-of-state domestic travel. Has our policy changed with the CDC change?
It hasn't. Actually, the CDC has caught up to us, I think, because we had not required a 14-day self-isolation period. We had suggested, and still in our guidelines, the suggestion is visit with your supervisor, talk about where you've been, how you travel, what your accommodations were as you traveled, who you came into contact with, and whether it was an area that had a lot of positive cases or not, and then make a determination of what makes sense. If it's all right to return directly to the workplace or if you should work remotely for 14 days.
So, and I think that's precisely what CDC is suggesting as well. But you'll absolutely have to self-isolate, but if you've been to a hotspot, if you will, if you've been in direct contact with others, certainly then self-isolation is really important in those cases. Well, Tim, either you have just answered every possible question that could ever be asked, or we have a group that is really anxious for the weekend. Aren't we all anxious for the weekend?
Although it looks like it could be a little soggy this weekend. Hopefully we won't see any damage. Thank you. weather like uh like the experience down in lake charles so absolutely you'll see how that plays out um we do actually another question just came through um parking lots are quite accessible now and any estimates on the percentage of faculty back on campus and the percentage of time per week on campus and do you have just a general expectation for for them that's a great question so you know um my perception is we probably got about 20 to 25 percent of our employees back on campus somewhere in that range and that's partly by looking at our parking lots that seems like about the amount of vehicles i'm seeing uh and what i'm also seeing though it's not the same vehicles every day and so when the question about well what percentage of our workforce is back i think it's much higher than that but it's on a rotational basis or a staggered basis and that's what we want we don't want you know all hands on deck and then we have some outbreak actually occur that does spread in spite of our best intentions and then we're all forced to be offline or at least working remotely so uh i think we're at a good place uh my sense is uh our offices are open and accessible as we said they needed to be i have yet to have anyone contact me to say gosh i needed some help and no one was available or no office would respond i think you all have been doing a great job of providing education research and extension clinical services uh to the people that need it uh if there's complaints out there they're not not making their way to my office so i believe that's an indication that uh that we're at a good level that we're providing the accessibility and the support that's needed and i'd say let's keep on what we're doing because thus far i think uh it's been very positive uh this is not related to covid but somebody asked if you could uh just share the changes in extension as far as um rob holland joining and dr bush moll's service i'm really not sure how to respond to anything that's not uh covid uh well certainly uh those of you in extension i know i've seen the announcement that dr bush moll has uh opted to return to the faculty uh into a faculty role in the department of house systems engineering and soil science he's done a great job for the past three plus years uh really provided excellent leadership there i know mike will be missing that role but we're glad to have his continued contributions to the institute through the department uh coming in behind mike we have rob holland from the center for profitable agriculture uh rob's got a great background uh with extension i first got to know rob when i came in 1994 he was working here in jefferson county as an area specialist uh and from there he's gone on to lead the center for profitable agriculture over in spring hill uh rob i think is as familiar with our all of our counties and all of our specialists he's got a great connection there with with the whole whole state so i know he can use that knowledge and that that experience very effectively in the role of interim assistant dean there so i expect dr senseman is glad to have the help i expect dr bush moll is glad to have the relief and i expect mr holland is uh looking forward to a challenge so i'm not sure if any or all of them might be on today but i know those changes have occurred and just want to thank dr senseman for his continuing good leadership of extension working as a member of the dean's office and our executive committee great well um honestly that looks like it um as far as questions are concerned so tim do you have some final remarks you'd like to make oh just a few you know i always try to wrap up on a positive note but really by large i feel like our discussion today has been pretty positive so i'm not sure i need to give my usual pep talk but let me just say uh how fortunate i have felt to work with a group that really just rolls up their sleeves comes to work does what's needed and when i say comes to work that may be remotely but uh really you know shows up does what's needed responds to students responds uh to clients and customers uh responds to our research partners and and just really has all of you have done a great job keeping things moving so uh thank you for that as far as our discussion today you know i told lisa i suspect our chats might start getting a little shorter and that's a good thing because that means we're not developing all new things we're not rolling out all new approaches we're really simply moving ahead with what's in place we're staying up to date and i want to have these opportunities to keep you informed but i honestly hope we don't have hours and hours worth of discussion that we have to share with you to uh to update you on new uh new or upcoming items i'd like for us to really have the ability to focus even more on our day jobs if you will and uh really move ahead in the coming years uh i'll wrap up by saying uh we got uh an interesting uh chat plan next week we're gonna hear from some students i thought you know we got students back on campus we're doing more forage events with students maybe about hear what their experiences have been like and we might learn a few things from them as well so we'll we'll have a group join us next week invite them to make some remarks and give you a chance to ask them questions as well so that's a plug for next week's program and uh with that i'm just going to say thanks for all you do uh as usual have a great weekend stay dry stay safe and stay healthy sounds great thanks so much thanks everyone for joining us have a great weekend you