International Programs in the Time of COVID-19
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by Bill Frederick
As international education programs strategize for the resumption of operations into this new world there are a couple of paradigm shifts occurring for health, safety and security. First, how we regard safety may be different than prior to COVID-19. Secondly, since the suspension and cancellation of international education programs in March 2020, we need to re-examine the assumptions underlying the role that the CDC and U.S. State Department have played in determining travel policies and operations.
In recent phone conversations, zoom calls and webinars with program managers from a range of educational fields including international education, adventure education, sail training, summer camps, etc., the conversations are similar. There is a surveying of the new COVID-19 landscape, a review of what is known and not known, and the identification of operating protocols from various authorities. Then what follows is a discussion of how to implement these practices and how compliance may be very challenging. At some point the realization sinks in that even with robust compliance with the current best practice protocols, a program cannot objectively quantify or even subjectively qualify that a participant is relatively safe from COVID-19.
However, there are people who want to participate in programs and there are programs that want to run. If everyone understands the risks, is it ok to run? We’ll find out. While many programs have cancelled their schedules variably into the future, there will be programs operating. In the program conversations, many of the educators reported that in the majority of calls they’ve received, the callers expressed hope that operations would resume very soon. Most inquiries did not raise concerns for safety.
International education programs generally manage significant risks first by working to understand them and then by fielding strategies to reduce the likelihood of occurrence and to mitigate potential consequences. If understanding the hazard and risk requires specialized professional knowledge, we access it and follow professional guidelines. If we cannot confidently reduce the risk of a particular aspect of a program to an acceptable level, then we eliminate that aspect from the program. Under current conditions, meaning with no readily available testing to screen for who is currently contagious, and no vaccine, there is no current body of practical protocols that reliably reduces the significant risk of an asymptomatic-person transmitting virus to another program participant. Every program that operates in the current environment is conducting an experiment in a manner that is fundamentally different than any program before COVID-19. It is not “safe”. It is however, usual under our current circumstances.
Different countries, states, towns and individuals are experimenting with a range of strategies or lack thereof, in an effort to return to an optimal level of function in a COVID-19 pandemic world. “We’re in the middle of a global trial-and-error period to try to find the best solution in a very difficult situation,” according to Tom Inglesbury, who directs the Center for Health Security at Johns Hopkins University.
It has become a common experience to wait in lines at grocery stores six feet apart, wearing masks and gloves. How risky is that? We don’t know for sure but for most of us the risk vs. benefit adds up to going to the grocery store. We need food. Most shoppers are likely aware that frontline grocery store workers have contracted COVID-19 despite following best practices. Some have died. Most of us are aware that frontline professional medical workers with training and N95 masks have become sick in the presence of the virus and died.
Now, despite new cases in the U.S. projected by FEMA to be 200,000/day with 3000 deaths/day by June 1st, some states, including many with rising rates of infection, are opening restaurants, barber shops, nail salons, gyms, etc. The risk remains unclear, but there is an increasing willingness to accept a significant but not fully understood risk for things that are definitely not a necessity but which impact our quality of life. Why should educational programs be different? Consenting adults (can make decisions for themselves and for their kids), i.e., programs and participants, can make their own decisions. It becomes an ethical or philosophical (and probably political) issue. And…perhaps a liability issue.
So, who is responsible for safety? There has been a trend of relinquishing responsibility and pushing it downwards. The president has said the federal government is not responsible and that the states need to make their own choices. Some states have implemented strategies to reduce COVID-19 morbidity and mortality based on medical expertise and data. And, they are feeling pressure from increasing quarters to lift any restrictions. When states have lifted restrictions, they have not said it is safe now. They have said that businesses and individuals need to make responsible choices. Businesses may have touted the protocols they are implementing when they open, but they are not saying that they are safe. Most protocols such as the CDC guidelines are presented as suggestions with no binding authority. So, unlike with most health, safety and security best practices international education practitioners cannot point to their compliance with an authoritative standard as evidence of their due diligence. This is different than before COVID-19.
Additionally, most international education programs have historically based their go/no go decisions for travel on the U.S. State Department Travel Advisories and the CDC Travel Notices. On March 1st, 2020 the CDC issued a notice to international education stating: “IHEs (Institutions of Higher Education) should consider asking students participating in international education programs to return to the United States.” They did not change the risk assessments for any country. Nor did the U.S. State Department, except for those countries have the initial significant outbreaks, Italy, Iran and South Korea. Both NAFSA and the Forum on Education Abroad questioned the unprecedented communication from the CDC. Rachel B. Eidex, the Acting Chief, Travelers’ Health Branch, Division of Global Migration and Quarantine, CDC responded in a letter addressed to NAFSA. She clarified that the travel health notices represent the destination assessment at a particular point in time and were not intended to be predictive. She explained the initial communication was not a mandate but intended “to provide institutions with flexibility in their decision making.” The CDC is certainly not assuming any responsibility for decisions made by international education based on CDC assessments. It is clear that the CDC and the U.S. State Department have many stakeholders, some of whom have very different priorities than international education. For many of those stakeholders with business or political concerns riding on the numbers assigned to destinations for which they have an interest, the risk/benefit equation is perhaps different than for most international education programs. By the time both agencies issued worldwide advice against non-essential travel, a significant number of students had already contracted COVID-19 and many were stranded overseas (some students who claimed they had been stranded had ignored their university’s initial suggestion or directive to return home). In future the travel advisories and travel notices will likely remain important data points, but international education can no longer rely on them as handrails for decision making.
International education has been successfully adapting to a changing world since its beginning. The evolution of information and communication technologies has allowed us to do things that were once unimaginable and to adapt to the increasing pace of change in the hazard landscape over the past 25 years.
While COVID-19 was by far the most disruptive, it was not the only event that resulted in program suspensions and cancellations in 2019 - 2020. Emerging diseases, tropical cyclones, wildfires and protests are not unfamiliar hazards. However, the magnitude of the events we saw in 2019 was new. And COVID-19 is likely to be with us for some time.
To fulfill our missions, we’ll need the flexibility, acceleration and resilience to stand up programs rapidly and to stand them down in a timely manner. We’ll need faster and better information acquisition and analysis strategies. We’ll need to upgrade our systems and protocols. We’ll need to renegotiate relationships between students and their programs, universities and their providers, and between programs and vendors, insurers, travel assistance providers, etc.
Navigating international education into this new world will require a recalibration of our compasses. We’ll need to revisit our values, purpose and risk tolerance. It will require new thinking on risk management decision-making, and the standards, authorities and other stars by which we steer.