Responding to the global pandemic - Otago's story - The University before and during COVID-19 lockdown. Photo: Dave Bull - The Aspen Institute New ...
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Responding to the global pandemic -
Otago’s story
The University before and during COVID-19 lockdown. Photo: Dave Bull
In mid-January, before the longest March anyone could remember, a call came into
the University of Otago’s International Office.
It was from a student in Wuhan, the centre of the coronavirus outbreak.
“He was really distressed, he was yelling down the phone ‘I’m trapped, I can’t come
to university, they’ve closed the borders, people are dying, most of us don’t even
know what’s going on, what can I do?’” remembered Danielle Yamamoto Kerr, Ota-
go’s Manager of International Student Services.
The team asked him to stay calm. They would get some more information and work
something out. Solving problems for Otago’s international students is a large part
of what this office does.
There seemed plenty of time. The Otago campus was just stirring back to life for
the 2020 academic year. Surely the situation would settle down and this student be
able to get to Dunedin for semester 1 in late February.
A couple of days later a student came to the International Office.
“She was a young student. She was visibly upset. She told us that her parents were
both doctors in Wuhan and she wanted to show us a video on her phone of a hos-
pital waiting room.” She said to us ‘I don’t know what to do, I want to go home to be
with my family, but they want me to stay here where it’s safe, what should I do? Tell
me what to do. What’s the best answer for me?”
COVID-19 was no longer far away. It was getting closer by the day.
The focus at this point was on more than 200 Chinese students who were unable to
travel to New Zealand to start or continue their studies at Otago.
The calls and emails from these students began to grow and the International team
worked with the Chinese Students’ Association to provide support and information.
The situation was changing so rapidly that in many cases there were simply no
answers.
“For my teams, whose daily work involves laying out known options for students
and helping them make decisions based on that, having no tools, no precedents, no
answers for all of these new questions that were being asked was pretty frustrating
and often a little disheartening.”
These were uncertain days. The virus was spreading through northern Europe and
every day the looming impact of COVID-19 was becoming clearer. But the full lock-
down which shut down New Zealand and virtually emptied the Dunedin campus
of its 20,000 students was still many weeks away. Nobody knew exactly what was
going to happen.
2
International Office Director Jason Cushen now looks back at January and February
as the calm before the real storm.
“I spent a lot of time saying to my team: It’s OK to not have the answers because
simply the answers are not there yet, these were unprecedented circumstances.
It might take three or four days to get an answer by which stage we would need
answers for a different set of questions. It was surreal.”
But solutions were on their way. The University’s Pandemic Committee met in
February and work began on ensuring this group of stranded students could con-
tinue their studies remotely where possible. This initial work to support this group
provided the basis for Otago’s move to full online learning which has secured the
continuation of the academic year for all students.
“In February it was almost unimaginable that first year Health Sciences would be
online, yet it was possible by March. It was amazing how this situation evolved,” Mr
Cushen says.
With circumstances changing by the day, the group of 200 students stranded in
China became a subset of a much larger group.
Around 1,800 international students were already in New Zealand, and many were
thinking about going home.
In addition, Otago had 220 students scattered around the world on exchange who
were also thinking of returning. International routes were closing. Some had to
make two or three airline bookings but happily all who wanted to come back to
New Zealand made it.
In early March came a tipping point. The United States called its students home,
which for the International Office involved face-to-face meetings with hundreds of
students.
“It was pretty tough. Some of them were really torn between what their home
universities and colleges were saying because they felt quite safe here. Remem-
ber by this stage we had the daily updates on TV and could see for ourselves the
profound impact of COVID-19 in countries like Italy. They were genuinely conflict-
ed about what to do. We were encouraging them to make this decision with their
families.”
In the end, over a fraught two-week period, about 400 students decided to return
home. All but a few of this group continued to study online.
The vast majority of the international cohort – about 1,500 students – have re-
mained and are continuing their degrees in New Zealand using Otago’s rapidly
constructed online learning environment.
3
“What’s been really interesting is having to maintain that distance to help manage
student anxieties while putting aside our own anxieties about all of this and be-
ing able to present a face to students like: ‘We got this’. When sometimes we don’t
really. We absolutely continue to support them and let them know they made a
good decision to stay here. And we’re really looking forward to seeing our students
again,” Danielle says.
Otago researchers call for lockdown
By April New Zealanders had become accustomed to the gritty practicalities of
lockdown and the daily 1pm update of COVID-19 deaths and new cases.
But in March it was a very different story. The Ministry of Health had yet to push the
button for a drastic pandemic response.
As New Zealand prevaricated on adopting stringent control measures, Otago Public
Health researchers were among the first to sound the alarm of the looming
emergency.
Their calls to action had a direct impact on Government decision-making and they
are now among the most prominent public faces of New Zealand’s widely praised
evidence-based response.
Dr Ayesha Verrall of the University of Otago, Wellington answers virus-related questions
during one of her regular Facebook Live sessions.
4
“My profile is a function of very strange and unusual circumstances like the fact
there was no other news because every other part of society was shut down. There
were no rugby players and no celebrities, so epidemiologists were the celebrities
for four weeks,” laughs Dr Ayesha Verrall, a Senior Lecturer in the Department of
Pathology and Molecular Medicine at the University of Otago, Wellington.
On 23 March, her colleague Professor Michael Baker warned of the dire conse-
quences of a delayed lockdown on the national news website Stuff.
With New Zealand at a fork in the road, this was by no means a universal view at
the time.
“All I can do is convey the epidemiological rationale for doing it very rapidly,” Pro-
fessor Baker told Stuff, “The alternatives are pretty dire.”
As the Professor of Public Health at the University’s Wellington campus, and one of
New Zealand’s leading epidemiologists, Professor Baker was well qualified to make
this call.
He and his colleague Professor Nick Wilson, of Wellington’s Department of Public
Health, had become convinced of the need for a lockdown after reading a World
Health Organisation report on China which showed the effectiveness of a contain-
ment strategy.
In a follow-up story just two weeks later, Professor Baker was described as “the
man for this moment” with modelling undertaken by himself and Professor Wilson
directly informing Government policy.
In mid-April he was awarded a $500,000 Government grant for a project to guide
an effective and equitable pandemic response and to learn as much as possible, so
New Zealand is better prepared for the next major public health emergency. In the
same funding announcement Senior Lecturer Lesley Gray, also from the University
of Otago, Wellington, received $179,904 for research into self-isolation.
By now Otago academics were in high demand by a media hungry for trusted infor-
mation. Professor David Murdoch, Dean of the University of Otago, Christchurch,
was being called on to explain COVID-19 test results and the steps required to de-
velop a vaccine.
Professor Baker was everywhere, appearing on the UK’s most watched breakfast
TV show and answering real-time reader questions on Stuff. His contributions were
becoming synonymous with New Zealand’s response to the virus. And he wasn’t
alone in the spotlight.
5
Professor Michael Baker, of the University of Otago Wellington, speaks on Good Morning Britain in April.
Dr Verrall was also plunged into a new world, at one point juggling 20-30 media
calls a day with her shifts as an Infectious Diseases doctor at Capital and Coast Dis-
trict Health Board.
Dr Verrall, who teaches microbiology to medical students at the Wellington campus,
is a tuberculosis specialist who had used New Zealand’s contact tracing system to
track TB infection.
She, too, was more than a little worried about New Zealand’s COVID-19 response
and went public in early March with a call for a rapid scaling up of testing and con-
tact tracing.
Her profile had already been growing through live Facebook videos organised by
the University and hosted on the Newsroom website where she answered ques-
tions about the virus.
“At that stage (February) there were a lot of questions about ‘Was this really a
thing?’” she remembers.
“Facebook is a very good direct way of learning what is worrying people so that’s
really nice engagement and there are very simple questions you’re able to help peo-
ple with. ‘Is it safe to touch their groceries’ or ‘how do they do their hand washing in
practice?’
“Doing it from well before the lockdown has felt like going through a journey with
people.”
6Dr Verrall’s own journey as a public academic has accelerated in tandem with the
developing emergency.
Just weeks after she first went public with her concerns, she was commissioned by
the Government to undertake a rapid review of New Zealand’s contact tracing re-
sponse to COVID-19.
Otago academic Emeritus Professor Sir David Skegg had already made national
headlines after telling Parliament’s Epidemic Response Committee that failure to
improve rapid contact tracing would be like playing “Russian roulette” with the
health of New Zealanders.
Dr Verrall now found herself in front of the same committee.
“Part of it was my expertise but I think it’s fair to say that when you’re a young fe-
male academic you don’t necessarily get invited to do these sorts of things unless
you push. I think the work in the media certainly helped profile myself as some-
one with knowledge in this area. I was able to establish myself as an authority who
could be trusted to write the report.”
It’s a role she is comfortable with and hopes to capitalise on in the future to push
for improvements in New Zealand’s public health system.
“I think we’re on the right track with the public health response to COVID-19 now,
but the underlying issues have been about decades of under-investment in public
health and I’m determined to continue to keep our focus on not letting that slip.
“So, we have now got investment in a strong response to COVID-19 with an in-
creased capacity of public health units and better data systems but it’s important to
make sure these gains are leveraged for gains in all areas of preventive medicine.
“So that’s a project I see in the future. We want to maintain that focus.”
Isolating the virus
While New Zealand was grappling with the impact of the virus, Professor Miguel
Quiñones-Mateu was trying to get his hands on it.
Professor Miguel Quiñones-Mateu, a microbiologist who is the Webster Family
Chair in Viral Pathogenesis, had just returned from holiday in early January when
his colleague Associate Professor James Ussher came into his office.
7Associate Professor Ussher suggested
they use Prof Quiñones-Mateu’s
previous experience in developing
molecular diagnostic tests to work on a
test for COVID-19.
At that time New Zealand didn’t have a
case of the SARS-CoV-2 (the virus
responsible for COVID-19) but they knew
it was coming and that laboratories
would need diagnostic tests
“James and I just got together and said:
‘Let’s do this in case this thing hits New
Zealand’. Being a virologist, I really
wanted to work with the virus. We
couldn’t wait for everybody else out
there to do a job we should be doing
here.”
The test they implemented was used
to detect Dunedin’s first two confirmed
COVID-19 cases.
The next step was isolating the virus
Professor Miguel Quiñones-Mateu, who holds
the University’s Webster Family Chair in Viral Pathogenesis. from patient-derived samples.
High above an eerily empty Dunedin
campus, researchers in hazmat suits
have been using Otago’s state-of-the-art
PC3 laboratory to do just this.
“That will open the door, not only to
make positive controls for diagnostic
tests but to do a lot of different studies
here in New Zealand. You cannot
imagine how many people have been
contacting us because they have a
product they want to test against
SARS-CoV-2, need access to the virus to
evaluate sterilisation methods or have
plans to develop a COVID-19 vaccine.”
Dr Rhodri Harfoot, a postdoctoral fellow in the
Quiñones-Mateu lab, works in full protective clothing.
8Jackson Treece works in Jo-Ann Stanton’s Anatomy lab.
The strength of Otago’s diverse and interdisciplinary research programmes is
evidenced by the range of research streams which have successfully pivoted to
address the threat of COVID-19.
In the Anatomy Department, Associate Professor Jo-Ann Stanton was already
advanced in work to develop hand-held diagnostic technology which can be
used as point-of-care testing devices to test for diseases like COVID-19.
She says ruefully that the virus arrived a little too early.
“This has been a very inconvenient pandemic.”
Her research has been recognised by a Health Research Council grant which will
help fund a multidisciplinary team of both academic and commercial experts,
together with rural Māori communities and primary healthcare providers to
develop a test to screen patient samples for COVID-19 at the point-of-care,
whether that be at a doctor’s clinic or the airport.
“If you think about COVID-19 what do we need? We need something that can go
anywhere and test anybody for presence of the virus and that is the device that
we are in the process of inventing.
“We have a lot of those pieces so we’re going to pull them together into
something that’s usable quickly and that will inform future development of an all
in one black box testing platform.
“So, the next time this happens we won’t be stuck inside.”
9Her colleague Professor Neill Gemmell, who made global headlines with his Loch
Ness monster research, is part of a national team looking at testing sewage for
the virus.
The hope is that this will provide a downstream tool to detect infection spread
and possible alert system to reveal undetected outbreaks.
From monster hunter to virus hunter ... Professor Neil Gemmell is part of a
national group hoping to find a way to detect coronavirus in wastewater.
While the country was still under a restrictive Level 4, Otago Psychology lecturer
Damian Scarf moved quickly to investigate New Zealanders’ attitudes towards
government authority.
He and his team created a 15-minute questionnaire on lockdown life which gar-
nered 3,500 responses.
“We’re particularly interested in whether crises like COVID-19 change people’s po-
litical beliefs and whether these changes are maintained as we go down the lock-
down levels and the risk of COVID-19 decreases.”
Other COVID-19-related research activities are taking place in the schools of Food
Science, Economic, Management, Tourism, Geography and Psychology.
10In the School of Pharmacy, Dr Shyamal Das rolled his sleeves up and got on with
it, leading postgraduate students on an in-house project to produce 100 litres of
hand sanitiser, enough for essential services on the University’s Dunedin campus
over the following weeks.
Six of his students helped to produce an ethanol-based hand rub, volunteering
their time in the face of the escalating Coronavirus crisis.
Dr Shyamal Das (left) and his team (from left) Rishi Shah, Prakash Khadka, Tushar Saha,
Bishal Adhikari, Rakesh Bastola and Nicole Wood made hundreds of litres of hand sanitiser.
The move to online
The University of Otago has a vibrant student culture which attracts young people
from all over New Zealand and the wider world.
A key component of this is the quality of its face-to-face teaching. So, it was a ma-
jor philosophical and technical challenge to be suddenly forced to make the
transformation to distance learning.
In a report to the University Council on 15 April, Vice-Chancellor Professor Harlene
Hayne acknowledged the magnitude of this transition and the many moving parts
across academic divisions and Information Services which had to synchronise at
great speed.
11Dr Tyler McInnes of the Genetics Otago Teaching Programme leads a class via Zoom.
A pre-lockdown Zoom performance class
practice led by Heleen du Plessis.
Associate Professor James Scott shows
Communications Adviser Guy Frederick
the virtual landscape he created
following a whirlwind trip to Fiordland to
photograph and video important
geological spots for a lockdown COVID-19
field trip.
12“Staff across all divisions have responded quickly and professionally, prioritising
the needs of their students during this very challenging time. The huge amount of
preparation undertaken has proved invaluable and our staff have embraced the
challenges of online teaching in many creative ways.”
Moving an entire University’s teaching programme online is a serious undertaking
and preparations started weeks prior to the eventual move.
Professor Richard Barker, the Pro-Vice-Chancellor of Sciences, compared his role
to that of the captain on the bridge of a ship “whose every decision triggers an
awful lot of activity in the engine room”.
Preparations for online teaching had been under way since February to sup-
port the students stranded in China. So, by the time the decision was made to
move the whole University online there was a level of confidence that it could be
achieved.
“Between a Friday and a Monday, we realised we’re going online for everybody
and we’re going to be doing it by next week.
“So that’s how rapidly it evolved. But because we’d gone through the exercise with
the students stuck in China and we’d already had the conversations about a
significant number of our courses, we were well-placed to be able say ‘Yes we can
do this. It won’t be perfect but we’re confident we can do it’.”
On the technical side, academic staff from Distance Learning, HEDC and the
College of Education, in conjunction with IT Services, produced a website on
Blackboard called Shifting Online and ran workshops to assist staff with learning
about online delivery and assessment. The Director of Student Success and others
helped assisting students.
Meanwhile staff were scrambling to improvise solutions for coursework.
Associate Professor James Scott, of the Department of Geology shot down to
Fiordland with a camera to make location videos to replicate the experience of a
student field trip.
Virtual versions of other field trips were also quickly produced and transferred to
digital platforms.
Dr Christian Ohneiser and Dr Sophie Briggs spent a day on the Taieri Plain
capturing footage introducing the geology and hydrological systems of the area,
which was then edited into a 25-minute animated video with the help of
Geological Mapping Technician Stephen Read over four days.
13With his dog in tow, Professor Mark Stirling ventured out to create a virtual field
trip on natural hazards with a focus on the local Akatore Fault and Abbotsford
Landslide.
Professor Mark Stirling and his dog film clips for a virtual field trip on natural hazards.
In the laboratories, teaching staff filmed laboratory work to give students content
for their lab reports.
“Good scientists tend to be creative people,” says Professor Barker. “I’m very
proud of how the Division responded.
“From students, the response has been overwhelmingly positive. I don’t believe
the online experience is as good as they would have got if they were in class but I
think they’re very understanding of the situation that they’re in and appreciative
of the fact that the material they’ve been provided allows them to get on with
their studies.”
Supporting students
Hand-in-hand with the academic and teaching response has been the work to
support students.
In a University flat close to the heart of a deserted Dunedin campus, Otago
University Students’ Association (OUSA) President Jack Manning jumps from Zoom
meeting to Zoom meeting.
14He and his team have found themselves at the nexus of the University response,
translating student needs and expectations as each day brings new and
unexpected challenges.
“We knew COVID had the potential to have a very significant impact early on and
the Uni brought us into their daily incident management meetings. But we
certainly had no idea to just what extent it would actually impact our daily lives.”
He clearly remembers the day he got an invitation to meet Professor Hayne at
noon in the Clocktower.
“I realised if I’m being called in this must be big. And going into the Clocktower
and suddenly hearing with everyone else that New Zealand was moving the Alert
Level 4; it was a paradigm shift.
“We’d done as much as we could and worked with the University and given
guidance but that was the day I realised: ‘Wow, everything about being a student
at Otago is about to change quite significantly’.”
Jon Adams, an AskOtago Service Representative, makes welfare checks from his home
At ground-level the University’s on-campus helpdesk AskOtago has been
providing personal welfare checks for almost 2,000 students and staff.
The team is staying in contact via email and phone calls which cover general
health and wellbeing with a brief to direct students to any services they might
need.
“We know for our students living alone we are a connection to the outside world
and take this responsibility seriously,” says AskOtago Senior Manager Philippa
Hoult.
15Third-year anthropology student Timothy McRobbie, living alone in private
accommodation, told the Otago Bulletin Board he had found the wellbeing checks
“invaluable”.
“Having someone communicate with me on a regular basis is really helpful and
supportive for me. Some days AskOtago is the only contact I receive from the
outside world,” Mr McRobbie explains.
Uncertainty was in the air as the University’s Dunedin campus began to empty as
students in residential colleges and flats made the decision to return home. The
questions began to mount. Students wanted answers quickly. Could they continue
their courses remotely?
Regular meetings with the Vice-Chancellor have been welcomed and Jack is
hopeful of keeping OUSA positioned in this space.
“The urgency of the situation has been met with a high level of student
representation in decision-making and OUSA has welcomed that very happily and
we hope that has set a new standard for the amount of student consultation that
takes place.
“Initiatives like the student hardship fund and digital exams have all been heavily
consulted on.”
It hasn’t all been work, with the OUSA executive taking time to make daily videos
on Instagram to connect with the student community.
One very funny clip shows residential representative Jack Saunders
demonstrating how to use salad spoons as hands to get around the need to wear
gloves. It’s well worth checking out.
“That’s one of the great things about OUSA. It’s just students connecting to other
students,” Jack says.
“We’ve seen a tremendous amount of resilience from students. The immense
amount of support has been incredible. It is very telling of the character of Otago
students.
“They’re very supportive of each other and of the wider community and those
who are most vulnerable. Everyone feels uncertainty but I’m also seeing students
handling this tremendously well.”
16Alumni answer the call
Pastoral care for students is at the heart of Otago, and senior leaders recognised
early on that student hardship would be an issue as time passed and students
lost part-time and family income as well as dealing with their studies.
In late April, the University announced a $1.5 million welfare fund for students
facing financial hardship.
Named Pūtea Tautoko, which translates as “financial support”, the fund is a way
for the University community to support its students facing the greatest need in
extraordinary times.
Professor Hayne announced she was donating 20 per cent of her salary over six
months to the fund, a move matched by University Council members.
A call to Otago alumni for contributions met with an immediate response and the
money started flowing in.
The University’s Development and Alumni Relations Office shared the announce-
ment of the fund via a letter from the Vice-Chancellor, emailed to all alumni and
friends.
The response was immediate and unprecedented – in the first hour $12,000 was
raised, and by the end of the first week, more than $95,000 had been donated.
Working on the appeal for Pūtea Tautoko has been Development Manager Annual
Giving Stephanie Miller’s priority during the lockdown.
“This is the most collaborative appeal I’ve ever been involved with, with the
Vice-Chancellor, Human Resources, Communications, OUSA and DARO all working
together – and swiftly too.”
Also during this time, significant donations have come in to support the work of
Otago academics who have played key roles in the public health and governmen-
tal response to COVID-19.
“High profile academics such as Professor Michael Baker have generated a lot of
philanthropy at this time, including a $215,000 grant from a donor’s trust,” says
Director of DARO Shelagh Murray.
17Finding a new normal
As New Zealand eases its pandemic alert levels, the University’s Dunedin campus
is slowly beginning to come back to life.
Professor Hayne is back in her office in the historic Clocktower and familiar
campus sounds are drifting through the bluestone walls.
“I can hear lots of giggling outside my office right now,” she says. “The students
are coming back.”
With New Zealand still at Alert Level 2 it will be some time before the full body of
students returns.
But the sights and sounds of young people, the lifeblood of the University, are a
welcome sign the transition past the worst impacts of the pandemic has begun.
Returning students are learning to negotiate an adjusted campus with round
yellow social distancing markers on the walkways and contact tracing registers in
the building lobbies.
A pre-lockdown Strategic Emergency Management Group Meeting.
Offices are filling up again as University staff come back to work. Hand sanitiser
is everywhere. Yellow COVID-19 signs dot the walls and doors. Some colleagues’
desks are a little further away.
18The unpredictability of the strict lockdown period has been replaced by a
measured move back to normality.
But nobody, least of all Professor Hayne, is pretending a comprehensive picture
exists of what the rest of 2020 will look like.
“My crystal ball doesn’t have batteries that last that long,” she says.
What she does know is that the University was severely tested and proved its
resilience in a way that gives her confidence it can handle future challenges.
In the thick of the lockdown the planning horizon shrank to the next 48 hours
which became known as “COVID-time”.
“It was like being on a fast-moving river. You had to go with it but try and exert
some level of control. We moved quickly, we made decisions, we got resources
where they needed to be.”
Professor Hayne paid tribute to the University’s senior leadership team – “I didn’t
know I was selecting them to go to war with, so to speak, but I’m really glad that
these are the people I had with me” - and the vital contribution of student presi-
dent Jack Manning and his executive team.
“That’s been a real key to our success because it keeps us on course and it keeps
our moral compass very firmly positioned towards the students.”
Across the institution, academic and
professional staff worked overtime to
replicate the collegiate experience online and
support students, displaying ingenuity,
patience and compassion.
“I have two young adult daughters and the
irony was not lost on them that it was the
Boomers trying to teach the Zoomers in the
online medium that they’re much more
comfortable in. But our people have gone
above and beyond to deliver this rapid shift in
the learning environment.
“The Prime Minister talks about
New Zealand’s team of five million but the
University of Otago is our team of 20,000,
and everybody is really ready to play on the
team.”
The University’s Chief Operating Officer Steve
Willis multi-tasks while working from home.
19Professor Hayne is hopeful the University will be able to resume a large propor-
tion of its face-to-face teaching in semester 2.
And she’s optimistic that Otago will be able to host its international students and
teach them on campus in 2021.
“It really depends on how the virus behaves. The big lesson that we learned in the
pandemic is we need to be fleet of foot, and we need to be mindful of everything
that is happening around us at all times. So, if worse came to worse, and the
restrictions were tightened again we would be prepared.”
It is not lost on the senior leadership team that immediately after celebrating its
150th anniversary in 2019, the University faced as stern a test as any in its history.
“It’s a really good testament to 150-year tradition that there are so many funda-
mental values that the University holds that did allow us to continue to exist and
in some ways flourish during an international pandemic.
“Think of the amazing contributions that University of Otago staff made to the
Government’s decision-making – and this is a government that’s being held up
worldwide as Best in Show.
“I personally feel very fortunate that the same people who were advising the
Prime Minister were also advising me.
“We all have this underlying sense of calm, because we had within our own organ-
isation this massive amount of expertise. So, we will take that forward with us into
whatever COVID-19 throws at us next.”
A message of solidarity chalked by the children of a Christchuch-based staff member
during lockdown.
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