Coronavirus email

March 25, 2020

Dear Members of the HMS Community:
 
By now you have heard the news about Governor Baker’s emergency order and have received Executive Vice President Katie Lapp’s email to the University community about essential personnel. I wanted to reach out with guidance about how this order will impact our HMS community.
 
Last week we worked with HMS departments, offices and units to compile a list of essential personnel. We also reviewed petitions from lab PIs and research core directors and approved lab access for a small number of projects. Thankfully, these existing lists of approved personnel do not need to change.
 
To ensure unimpeded access to campus, these essential HMS personnel will receive an official exemption letter that can be shown to local, state and government officials upon request. Our human resources team will be sending these exemption letters to department administrative leaders to distribute this week.  
 
If you have been identified as essential personnel and need to work on campus, please continue to follow the enhanced Harvard workplace policies, updated March 22, regarding sick time and dependent care.
 
If you have any questions about this protocol, please contact your manager or HR representative. I also encourage you to continue to visit the University coronavirus webpage and the HMS coronavirus preparedness webpage, which include helpful FAQs and the latest information and links to resources. These pages are being updated regularly.
 
Thank you for your commitment to keeping our school safe and productive. Whether you’re carrying out your work remotely or on campus as one of our essential personnel, your support for one another and for our community is inspiring.  


Sincerely,

Lisa M. Muto
Executive Dean for Administration
Harvard Medical School

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March 14, 2020 

Dear Members of the HMS Research Community:
 
Yesterday, you received a communication from Harvard Longwood leadership directing you to ramp down your laboratory research activities, which parallels recommendations from our hospital affiliates. Recommendations from epidemiologists and inferences based on observations of the outbreaks in Italy and Seattle indicate that we need to institute drastic measures of social isolation to impede the spread of the coronavirus.
 
SARS-CoV-2 is already in our community. Cases of COVID-19 will rise swiftly and overwhelm our hospitals unless we take emergency measures that don’t just distance people, but dramatically restrict people from coming into and going out of our immediate community.
 
We are rapidly approaching, if we haven’t already surpassed, the time to limit in-person access to our laboratories only to essential individuals. I understand that everyone is concerned about the very real loss of research productivity. What you may not understand are the devastating consequences, loss of life and disruption to our hospitals that will ensue if our caseload approaches those in Italy and Wuhan.
 
Some labs endeavor to practice social distancing by working as small groups in shifts. A single infected person will leave a trail of virus. Given that surface contamination is a major mode of transmission, shift workers will be unwittingly exposed.
 
Furthermore, please appreciate that infected individuals shed virus before they become symptomatic, and apparently for some days post-recovery. We currently have inadequate means to diagnose those among us who are or have been infected. To reduce epidemic spread, we have to reduce gatherings of individuals, which we all endorse and are already practicing, and minimize the migration of individuals into and out of our community, which limits the migration of the virus. This is why we have called for the emptying of our laboratories and encourage all to pursue alternative scholarly activities in isolation.
 
We are seeking to cease research operations on the Quad and expect to completely shut down each lab and core facility, with virtually no one entering a lab or research core after 5 p.m. on Wednesday, March 18. Access will be allowed for only the most critical needs—to maintain animal colonies, to replenish liquid N2 and to ensure the stability of experimental material. This blanket laboratory ramp-down will also exclude the small number of individuals working on research directly related to immediate priorities of the COVID-19 pandemic. We anticipate this will be the situation for 6-8 weeks. 
 
I realize that many individuals may take exception with or doubt the wisdom of this directive. As a scientist, I found it difficult to deliver this message to my own lab. But as a physician and steward for this community weighing the grim reports I’m reading from colleagues in Seattle and Italy, I believe the recommendation to shutter our labs is in our collective best interest. Each one of the six high-level colleagues I have contacted in China has had their labs entirely mothballed for over two months. There are vanishingly few experiments that take precedence over life and death in our community.
 
The outbreak of COVID-19 is the single most threatening pandemic to arise in the last century, and has historians recalling the devastation of the influenza pandemic of 1918, which infected about a third of the world’s population, resulting in at least 50 million deaths. The world’s population today is almost four times larger, and our communities are correspondingly denser and more vulnerable. Reducing not only community density but containing the migration of those infected with the virus will be essential for dampening the impact of this pandemic.
 
I ask you to act responsibly on behalf of our entire community, especially those who are most vulnerable. Please work remotely and maintain distance and isolation until we have a better understanding of the course of this outbreak. We will get through this, together.
 
Sincerely,
 
George Q. Daley
Dean of the Faculty of Medicine
Harvard University