We Can Be Heroes

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OUR TOWN 2020

Boone Hospital Center Registered Nurse Phyliss Golden performs a nasopharyngeal swab on a person at the Boone Hospital Center Mobile Health Unit located in the parking lot near Anthony and Ann Streets. [DON SHRUBSHELL/TRIBUNE]

Many stepped up for Our Town during pandemic

BY RUDI KELLER |Columbia Daily Tribune

Every year, throngs cheer athletic heroics on the gridiron in Memorial Stadium at the University of Missouri.

Thousands more give throat to their appreciation of a hot guitar lick laid down during the Roots N Blues festival.

But not this year. This is a year to cheer those who do their jobs quietly, out of the view of most and without a thought to who notices or not.

"The popular saying 'not all heroes wear capes' applies to these people who wear scrubs and white coats, as well as the people who provide food and housekeeping services to our patients," Stephen Keithahn, specialist in internal medicine pediatrics and chief wellness officer for MU Health Care wrote in April about health care workers.

And in May, Patricia Hall, medical director of Truman Memorial Veterans Hospital, echoed that sentiment.

“Police officers, firefighters and health care workers wrestle with an enemy — COVID-19 — that they cannot see,” Hall wrote. “They are on the front lines of this battle.

“These men and women are our mothers, fathers, sisters, brothers, husbands, wives, and friends. They are what we refer to as ‘essential,’ but really, they should be called heroes. They put themselves at risk daily for the health of their community, spending countless, sleepless hours caring for the ill and keeping our public safe.”

Some of the people who have worked daily to keep Our Town safe and functioning during the coronavirus pandemic by necessity did so in public.

Stephanie Browning, after 21 years of leading the Columbia-Boone County Health and Human Services Department, has been one of the most visible. For years, her department provided services in a routine and professional way, and among her biggest concerns was whether there would be a shortage of flu vaccine each year.

On her orders and recommendations, businesses and government offices in the county shut down in late March. The health orders she signs set rules for how many people can be in a bar or restaurant,

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movie theater or other gathering.

“The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us how everyone’s health depends on cooperation,” Browning said in June. “We must keep working together to save lives and protect our health care system by slowing the spread of the virus.”

So far, Boone County has been relatively fortunate. Missouri’s infection rate has been below the national average and Boone County’s rate is below Missouri’s.

There have been five deaths through the second week of August, including the first one in the state in March, but the rate of deaths here is one of the lowest in the state among counties that have experienced deaths and less than 10 percent of the statewide rate.

A big part of preventing spread of COVID-19 is tracing contacts for each infected person and investigating how they may have caught it and where they may have spread it.

That job has fallen on the health department. It is not new, and before COVID-19, contact tracing for various diseases was part of the health department’s job. When someone in food service had hepatitis A, for example, the department would work to identify when they were at work and where they might have contracted the disease.

But before COVID-19, no one at the health department was a full-time contact tracer and case investigator. That’s changed, with as many as 20 employees, full and part-time assigned to the duties and, as those employees return to regular functions, a dozen dedicated case investigators and tracers.

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OUR TOWN 2020

Their cheers go to a retired physician who has volunteered to help train and mentor them.

Jeffrey Belden, who Assistant Director Scott Clardy previously met for the first and only time on the day his daughter was born in 1994, has worked almost daily to support the teams, Clardy said.

“He sits in on their conference calls, he has provided guidance to them on symptoms and ways to ask questions,” Clardy said.

A professor emeritus in the School of Medicine, Belden researched electronic health record keeping and has been advising the department as it uses the REDCap Cloud clinical software, advising on the data that is most important.

Most mornings, he is on the investigative team meetings, Rebecca Roesslet, leader of the department’s disease investigation team, wrote to explain his role.

“During this time, he can be counted on for his clinical guidance as well as his willingness to research complex issues for the team,” Roesslet wrote. “He has even served as our AV support on occasion. He balances this with his daily bike ride, often pulling over during his ride to chime in when we have questions.

“We are grateful to have him in our team.”

Belden also takes on the job of boosting team morale, important when the number of new cases has been ranging between 10 and 60 a day.

“More than anything he has been a cheerleader and he has provide them some positive feedback from a provider standpoint,” Clardy said.

Brenda Selman, registrar of the University of Missouri, said she likes to think of her office as the hook behind the picture — preparing the course catalog, sending out diplomas, processing applications for students who want to become Missouri residents and, of course registering students.

“We don't brag a lot, we're not flashy but we are there and everybody expects us to be there,” Selman said.

The work she would like to raise a cheer for has been performed by the team that, over the summer, prepare for returning students under new social distancing rules that dramatically reduced the capacity of each classroom and laboratory.

Decisions had to be made about how approximately 17,000 course sections would be delivered. She credits a fourperson team led by Assistant Registrar Carla Whitney with doing that while making an absolute minimum of changes in when the courses would offered.

Students sign up for particular sections for a variety of reasons, sometimes to avoid conflicts with other required courses or so they have days open for a job, Whitney said. Those plans had to be taken into account.

Whitney, with student support specialist Jessica Bowen and administrative aides Patty Luckenotte and Tammy Limbach, had to rearrange the entire fall schedule. That was after all the returning students had made their selections and while new students were enrolling, she noted.

“It was very much rebuilding the airplane while it is flying,” she said.

First, a decision had to be made for each section — would it be entirely online, mainly online, blended or traditional. The goal was to put as much online as possible, Selman said.

A small class, generally under 10, can meet as normal, as long as the proper space can be found at the time needed. Large lecture classes that in the past would put hundreds of students together in an auditorium are out, Selman said.

Classes have been categorized based on how much is done online. Some are entirely online, with no need to even visit campus. Another category is for courses where more than 80 percent of the work can be done online, with visits to campus for one-on-one meetings or taking exams.

Most of the remaining classes will be blended. In some cases, students will be in classrooms each day the section is held but in half sessions, leaving so the other half can come in.

A class offered on Monday, Wednesday and Friday, for example, could have onethird of students in class each of those

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days and the remainder joining online. Each third would be assigned one day for in-class attendance and two days for online learning.

“There's all kinds of combinations based on what is needed, the capacities of the rooms and other factors,” Selman said. “They are working inside of a lot of parameters and were under a lot of pressure to get it done.”

All of the work was done in consultation with deans and departments and operations staff to understand the new capacity limits and the need for space for each class. They created a spreadsheet to track where each class was originally slated to be held, the previous and current capacity of the space and whether it could accommodate the full or blended class, Selman said.

Throughout all that work, the other functions of the office had to be maintained and moved online. All the while, like every other department at the university, managers took salary cuts and lowerlevel employees were put on furlough.

Between them, the team has almost 100 years of experience at the university.

“They were really the team that did the class thing and that has been truly amazing,” Selman said. “They were calm, and we talked and worked together about how to approach it and to move those things through.”

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