Episode 171: COVID 101

3/3/21--Stephanie and Jenn regroup in the virtual pod bunker, starting the episode with a quick recap of a special election. Jeff Turco pulled off a victory in the 19th Suffolk district Democratic primary to replace Bob DeLeo. Stephanie breaks down the contributing factors to Turco's win, including the fallout from allegations of sexual misconduct aimed at then-candidate Tino Capobianco.

Later, the hosts are joined by a pair of student journalists who covered the COVID outbreak and breakdown at UMass Amherst at the beginning of the spring semester. Cassie McGrath and Will Katcher describe a scene in which thousands of students were welcomed back to campus without preparations in place prevent and/or treat a massive spike in COVID-19 cases. The fallout has left many students with a bad taste in their mouths and the university with an image to clean up.

Full transcript here:

Jennifer Smith: [00:00:03] Welcome back to The Horse Race, your weekly look at politics, policy and elections in Massachusetts. I am Jennifer Smith and I am here with my co-host, Stephanie Murray. And vaccines may be rolling into the state in the next few weeks. How will they get delivered to the distribution centers and zapped, shot, inserted into people's arms, is another question. Stephanie, Queen of our Vaccine Information Department Bureau, where are we at this week? [00:00:30][27.1]

Stephanie Murray: [00:00:32] So there's been a pretty big shift in the state's vaccine distribution plan this week, and that is because President Joe Biden has called for states across the country to prioritize vaccinating teachers so kids can get back into school more safely. So that is happening in Massachusetts, something that the governor is kind of pressed back on for a few weeks now. Teachers are moving up in the line as of I think it's March 11th. [00:00:55][23.3]

Jennifer Smith: [00:00:56] Yeah, that's right. And it is interesting as well, because you have the the disconnect at times, especially in Massachusetts, between who's technically allowed to get a vaccine and what the availability is for those actual appointments to take place where you have differing reports from different areas in the state that some vaccine centers have plenty of availability but are not convenient, for instance, to other people who live in a totally different area, who are near vaccine distribution centers that are extremely, extremely crowded. So how is the website looking this week? We saw a lot of delays on it last time. [00:01:30][34.1]

Stephanie Murray: [00:01:31] So the website a few weeks ago had crashed. And then a week ago or so, the new version that had this virtual waiting room where if you logged on, it would kind of put you in line and show you where you were before you could put in your info and book a vaccine. People still seem to be having trouble with that website. It shows really long wait times and they kind of bounce around from being short and long. So, you know, not down to a perfect science yet. And to your point, it's going to be interesting. You know, teachers are allowed to get vaccines now, are able to get vaccines. But whether they're going to be able to book their appointments and go get shots in their arms in a pretty timely way is the next step here. And judging by the last few weeks of the vaccine rollout, that might be difficult. [00:02:15][44.1]

Jennifer Smith: [00:02:17] That's right. Well, the other thing that's been on our radar this week and last week and a few weeks before is the 19th Suffolk Democratic primary, which concluded last night with Jeff Turco winning. And he is, of course, likely to win the general come March 30th. Not certain elections are always surprises because as you might know, you might be aware last week we had on Tori Bedford and Lisa Kashinski of the Boston Herald to talk about a breaking allegation of sexual misconduct, several allegations of sexual misconduct against candidate Capobianco and the endorsements that were being pulled because of that. And it looks like that very likely had an impact on at least his outcome in this race. Stephanie, where you looking at anything interesting about where his voters might have gone? [00:03:07][50.1]

Stephanie Murray: [00:03:08] It's an interesting question. These special elections, especially where the the turnout is so low, I think around 4700 people voted in total on Tuesday. It's hard to tell where the votes went. So Jeff Turco, you know, he's posted online about supporting former President Donald Trump, about being anti-abortion. So he doesn't have a whole lot in common with Capobianco. But at the same time, they both live in Winthrop. [00:03:35][26.7]

Stephanie Murray: [00:03:35] And, you know, as a source put it to me yesterday, politics there especially are kind of about who you know and whose families, you know. So it's likely that some of those votes could have moved to him. Some of them may have moved to Alicia Del Vento, you know, a candidate to Turco's left who also lives in Winthrop, or some of them could have gone to Juan Jaramillo, who had a pretty strong showing. He won Revere and he came in second place. He was separated from Turco by about 300 votes. But I should add that one was always going to have sort of an uphill battle because Winthrop makes up a larger part of the district and the voters there. Historically, it's a whiter a little bit more affluent, a little bit more conservative city than Revere. They tend to turn out in these special elections at higher rates than Revere. And that was the case on Tuesday in a pretty big way. [00:04:25][49.3]

Jennifer Smith: [00:04:25] That's right. I can hear the distant echoes of people chanting ranked choice, voting, rank choice voting, because once again, you know, did you have Massachusetts fourth alarm bells going off in your head as you were watching this one, Stephanie, in terms of winning not an incredibly crowded race, but a race with a decent number of candidates and with less than 50 percent of the vote? [00:04:46][20.9]

Stephanie Murray: [00:04:47] Yeah, I mean, it was crowded enough that this is sort of a familiar thing that we see in these primaries that a conservative Democrat or the most moderate Democrat of the bunch in the case of MA-04, not to say that Jake Auchincloss and Jeff Turko really share much at all. They don't. But what they have in common is that they were seen as kind of a candidate in their own lane while the rest of the candidates were to their left and kind of split that side of the vote. And, you know, that delivered Auchincloss his victory. It delivered Turco his victory this week. [00:05:21][34.1]

Stephanie Murray: [00:05:22] So like you said, ranked choice voting, that debate has been revived, especially on Twitter. [00:05:28][5.8]

Jennifer Smith: [00:05:28] That's right. Well, we'll see what happens at the end of this. But what else are we talking about this week? [00:05:34][5.6]

Stephanie Murray: [00:05:35] So this week we are going to talk to a pair of Massachusetts Daily Collegian reporters about the covered outbreak at UMass Amherst. Pretty crazy and interesting story. So I say let's get to it. [00:05:47][12.4]

Jennifer Smith: [00:05:47] All right. Let's go to. [00:05:50][2.5]

Stephanie Murray: [00:05:55] A coronavirus outbreak at the beginning of the semester turned life upside down at UMass Amherst, students were forced to stay in their dorms, prevented from going to work, and even advised not to walk outside covid outbreaks at colleges that have brought students back are almost inevitable. And it's a story playing out across the state and the country. So we invited Massachusetts Daily Collegian reporters Cassie McGrath and Will Katcher on to talk about the work they're doing at the student paper on rule breaking outbreaks and their school's response. They coauthored a wild series on what went wrong with UMass Amer's covid protocols, which we very much recommend you read So Cassie and Willl, thanks for being here virtually. [00:06:37][41.5]

Cassie McGrath: [00:06:38] Thank you so much for having us. We're so excited to be here. [00:06:40][2.4]

Will Katcher: [00:06:41] Likewise. Thanks for having us on. [00:06:42][1.0]

Stephanie Murray: [00:06:43] So first off, we should acknowledge that UMass is a big network. And what we're talking about here is what happened on the UMass Amherst campus. And full disclosure, that is why I went to school. So I'm obviously very interested anyway. Take us through a quick rundown of how this started at the beginning of the semester. How did the outbreak happen? [00:07:03][19.6]

Cassie McGrath: [00:07:04] So the semester started up on February 1st and 5,300 students moved on to campus, which was about 4,000 more than were on campus the previous semester. So we saw very minimal cases of students that it was the case was that students who lived on campus in the fall had a reason to be there. They're absolutely required. They needed the housing. They had an in-person class, things like that. But then they invited everyone who wanted to come back to come back to the dorm. So everyone, meaning freshmen or people who transferred to Mass in the spring of twenty twenty or the fall of twenty twenty. So essentially to give students a piece of the college experience, but bringing back five times over five thousand students, we saw just a vast increase in cases. There is a massive outbreak on our campus and I'm sure we'll get into detail a little bit about why. [00:08:03][58.7]

Will Katcher: [00:08:04] Pretty much you had the fall where it was everyone who needed to be here was here. And the school just wildly opened its doors in the spring and tried to formulate a policy that it thought could manage this huge increase in students. And the first few weeks proved that maybe that policy wasn't best suited to handle the student behavior. [00:08:24][19.6]

Jennifer Smith: [00:08:26] And when we talk about massive outbreaks, of course, we're talking about hundreds and hundreds of cases. This is not, you know, that we saw a few dozen popping up in one form or another. So, of course, coming from the reporter side of it and also being students, what was it like to sort of see those numbers rising? And what was the initial approach to trying to figure out how this went so wrong so fast? [00:08:48][22.3]

Cassie McGrath: [00:08:49] Yeah, so we saw an increase of 750 cases in the first two weeks coming back to campus. So that's that number there. Yeah. So what it was like, you know, everyone has a different relationship with the campus. Some students have in-person classes. Some students had the majority of students living in the dorms as well, had no in-person classes. And so they were living in their dorms basically 24/7. And when they moved back to campus, the protocol was, you get tested before you move in and then you wait four days and you get tested again. So you were meant to quarantine for that period of time. But when they arrived, there was limited security at times. None, no RAs there. The resident assistants who-- basically their job is to support and ensure the students are following covid-19 guidelines, which, that position has completely changed from what we previously knew at as. And so we kind of saw that with this lack of supervision, students who hadn't seen anyone their age to this extent in a year or ever in their lives, you're at college for the very first time with really nothing else to do but sit in your dorm or, you know, leave and socialize with people when there's no one watching you. But then we saw that extend into more than just students masking in groups of four social distancing in common rooms, which was allowed when they moved in. We saw this transcend into parties in the dorms and off campus as well. [00:10:21][91.5]

Stephanie Murray: [00:10:22] So it seems like this pair of frat parties at the beginning of the semester were kind of the catalyst for cases exploding. Can you talk a little bit about that? And I'd also be interested in hearing how you guys have reported it out and got that story. [00:10:35][13.8]

Will Katcher: [00:10:37] Yeah, and just to circle back for a sec and just put those numbers in perspective, because they really did blow me away that in the fall. Twenty-seven cases, I believe, was our highest in one day. And the sentiment around Amherst was, oh, no, this is it. People are going to be sent home for twenty seven cases. And in the. First, on the first day of school that Monday, there were 36, in the next day, there were more than 100 in that continue for three days straight. And again the following Monday. So it really it was just a remarkable increase in cases. But to get back to your question, so the this was the Friday and Saturday before the start of the semester reporting not from either us, from two of our colleagues, showed that Theta Chi fraternity that is very much physically on campus, but not technically a part of campus. It's under the jurisdiction of the town, not the school had two massive back-T]to-back parties, no masks that were shown in videos provided to the collegian. You can see in big block letters on the back wall of the room that the party was and the big Theta Chi across the wall. It was very clear where the parties were. The reporters were able to verify which nights each specific video was taken and did just some phenomenal resource reporting that I have never really seen in my time here, the ability of reporters to to tell a story like that inside a Greek life. So that was kind of the that was kind of the first step. And that was the Friday, Saturday and the following Monday is when those cases really started, really started to spike. [00:12:08][91.6]

Jennifer Smith: [00:12:09] And what's that kind of been like? Obviously, I think all of us at this point have been student reporters reporting on campuses where we also go to school, are familiar with what the general outlines of it. And so I wonder if you can talk a little bit about the the dynamics of trying to report on on a campus where you're familiar with it. You might have prior relationships with some of these students, some of these fraternities, some of these organizations. Was there any amount of trepidation for kind of like infiltrating a student group that is nonetheless, you know, allegedly taking part in activities that are endangering other student groups? You know, what was that dynamic like? Because it can be a little bit fraught when you're just getting into reporting in this context. [00:12:54][44.5]

Will Katcher: [00:12:54] Yeah. So I wouldn't speak for the two reporters, Matt Burke and Sophia Gardner, who reported that story. But having edited this story and worked with them really closely on producing it and getting it out, I know that people were very irritated with this fraternity, especially within within the sororities. They had several sources from sorority leadership who were willing to speak about what what the fraternities were doing. And in the week, week or weeks following, you saw, I think, around campus how mad people were at this one specific fraternity. You had a petition going around, which I'm not sure, you know, if it will ever have, you know, an outcome. But 10,000 people almost sign that petition asking for this fraternity to be disbanded and for a school of 22,000 or so undergrads. I think that's a huge proportion to see. You know, 10,000 people put their name on wanting to get this fraternity kicked up. [00:13:52][57.4]

Cassie McGrath: [00:13:53] And also kind of follow up just on the conduct piece, because the big question here was like, what's going to happen? So there's a few components of this. And I'll disclose this. I'm a member of a sorority on campus, but basically, so Theta Chi owns its chapter house. It's located essentially right on campus, like we said, like it's within 15 feet or maybe a little bit more. It feels like 15 feet from a campus building, Eisenberg's school of management, it's just right there. So and they own their house. [00:14:24][31.4]

Cassie McGrath: [00:14:25] And so what we're seeing here is that, there's been fraternities that have been removed from campus, the force over my understanding, in order for a fraternity to be removed from campus, they can they essentially have to be moved by their national headquarters, because if they own the property and they were moved as an RSO, a registered student organization from our Student Government Association, they can still live there and operate as like an unofficial kind of chapter, which we saw with I think it's Alpha Epsilon Pi, AEPi, a fraternity on campus. They're not technically a UMass fraternity, but they still operate and they still recruit. [00:15:00][35.1]

Cassie McGrath: [00:15:01] So that's also an interesting component. And then we're also hearing as well from members of the Student Government Association that the university needs students who were actually there that night at the party to report that the party happened because there is evidence, secondary evidence, there's Snapchat videos and there's, you know, like students who are like, "My friend, like or someone on my floor told me they were going. I saw them leave. I saw them come back. I know what happened." But people have to report themselves that were physically there. So now there's kind of this question of accountability and can it happen if students-- and students who do report themselves will not get in trouble with the dean of students office. But, you know, that's definitely a piece of this. And you, MMPD and APD both can't stop these parties, which we've also found out, too. So it's just a lot of moving pieces there. I just wanted to mention on the accountability front. [00:15:58][56.6]

Stephanie Murray: [00:15:58] So after these parties at the, you know, beginning of the semester, end of January, beginning of February, students went to those and then they went back to their dorms. And that's when cases really started to spread. And it seems like the school's efforts for contact tracing and moving students into isolation, housing sort of unraveled. What happened there? [00:16:21][23.1]

Will Katcher: [00:16:22] Yeah, you did have a lot of students from on campus going to these fraternities and coming back. And when those two same reporters were reporting later on other fraternities, they were walking around outside. And I heard people asking, you know, do you know how to get back to Pierpont? That's one of the dorms in the Southwest residential area, which is a freshman dorm. But, yes, the cases spiked quickly and it was evident that the school was not really prepared for that level of spike. So you had the first day of the semester, I think I mentioned earlier, I believe 36 cases on that day roughly, that you had a hundred within a few cases of 100 for the next three days after that and one hundred twenty five that Monday. The school had nowhere near the capacity to handle those cases quickly. So the result was with a huge increase in cases. The contact tracing system was completely overrun. You had students waiting three, four days in their dorms after they knew they already had the virus. [00:17:16][54.0]

Will Katcher: [00:17:17] So you had students starting to have symptoms on Thursday. They test positive on Friday and they're in the dorm Friday, they're in the dorm Saturday and they're in the dorm Sunday before they get moved. And for some students, they have, you know, these are mostly freshmen who, you know, in your first week on campus as a freshman, you don't really have many solid friends yet usually. So, you know, some people had people who had friends who could go to the dining halls and bring them back food. Others really didn't. And they were kind of forced to just go to the dining halls knowing they had covid or probably had covid and hope for the best. You know, maybe they were two masks, but they hope for the best. And all throughout this, students are using the bathrooms, the showers, the water fountains, because they really don't have another choice, like they're not going to go to the bathroom in their dorm. [00:18:03][46.0]

Cassie McGrath: [00:18:04] For like timeline wise, these parties happened before classes even started. So by the first day of classes, we already had a massive outbreak. And I think that's that's just like newsworthy in that like we weren't even doing what we were meant to be here for yet before the outbreak happened. [00:18:20][16.6]

Jennifer Smith: [00:18:21] That's a great point. And one thing that occurs to me as well as is the difficulty of enforcement, for instance, kind of in those early days you mentioned, you know, there wasn't dorm security. A lot of the hours weren't there yet. And it does seem like a lot of this pressure kind of was being put on the aura's to sort of figure out how to safely break up gatherings that shouldn't be happening. You know, one of the notes that really stuck out to me in your reporting was an R.A. knocking on the door of a crowded room and hearing someone yell, OK, everyone put your masks on. So it's it does seem like this was a difficult situation for the Arias to manage. And then there was the question of what happens if you write someone up? So can you talk about what the pressures were for the students and for the Arias who are kind of being tasked with managing this in an ad hoc way? [00:19:13][51.5]

Will Katcher: [00:19:14] Yeah. So RAs on campus, have had a pretty crazy year coming into the fall. When we thought everyone was going to be brought back to campus. The majority of them were laid off and then they came back. And they basically have been advocating to be able to work and be paid to do remote services and then some people volunteer to be on campus, so a lot of people are apprehensive coming into the environment, which I think is some important background to have on the relationship with that coming into this semester. [00:19:41][26.9]

Cassie McGrath: [00:19:42] But as far as enforcement, I mean, we had the quote one story that said, you know, an RA went to write someone up and they said, "You're ruining my college experience." And so that's that's--and I will also say that there are many students in many dorms with ours that are following every rule, taking it very seriously. And that has caused an enormous amount of frustration on campus. I feel like we've kind of said is that there's two sides there's students saying "don't ruin my college experience." And there are students saying, "well, you getting covid is ruining my college experience" and things like that. [00:20:14][32.5]

Cassie McGrath: [00:20:15] So it's been tough. But for RAs, they also have to put themselves into potentially dangerous situations by writing these students up. I had one RA interviewed say that he was alongside someone else, wrote someone up 30 times like 30 write ups within the first week. A majority are all for covid-19 guidelines. And, you know, like what is--RAs are, they're trained. They have a lot of skills. They're like, their process to become an RA is very competitive. But at the same time, you could be, you know, enforcing rules for someone you're six months older than. And these people are in college for the first time. I mean, we've seen so many cases of RAs having to go into dangerous environments and breaking up parties of 20 people and dorm rooms. And there's no one else there. You know, there's it's just it all falls on them to assure that people aren't breaking covid guidelines that are, again, like very new to college. Feeling that pressure. "I'm not going to make any friends. Like, I don't know. I don't want to get sent home. I want to make the most of this experience," whatever they're thinking. And that training, I think, is something that if it's happening a period of months, I mean, I don't know. It's it's a really tough job. [00:21:34][78.8]

Stephanie Murray: [00:21:35] So as this was happening, UMass started to take some pretty strict steps to try to control the outbreak. They asked students not to leave their dorms at all, even to go for a walk outside. Northampton and other surrounding cities and towns were advised that if they employed UMass students, they couldn't come to work in person. But I'm looking on the Daily Collegian website right now, and there's a headline from a few days ago that says, quote, It's crazy in there. Alpha Sigma Phi and Phi Sigma Kappa host gatherings during masses of sequester period. So are these measures working or should you must be doing some sort of different enforcement if people are still, you know, not obeying these rules? [00:22:19][44.3]

Will Katcher: [00:22:20] That's a great question. And I think it's it's important to like to differentiate between the people you're talking to here, because there's, you know, a set of fraternities who have clearly shown that they're not going to follow any of the guidelines that UMass sets out. And I'm not sure what, you know, if any of those policies about walking, you're going to have anything to do with the fraternities. And you have, you know, these students who, when the case is really started spiking, you must put in this this high risk period. They entered a self sequestered period where students were essentially told, you don't really need to leave your residence unless it's to get tested, to get a meal. And that's where you got some of those more extreme measures. The walking policy was really something to see because UMass was telling students to stay healthy, get exercise. They needed to, you know, eat three meals a day and get tested, which is, you know, for people not leaving one room, it's not a healthy environment. You need to be going outside, you know, keeping your legs moving, just getting some fresh air. And it kind of made no sense to a lot of people on campus. [00:23:22][61.3]

Will Katcher: [00:23:22] And over the course of the days after that, when that policy appeared in every news outlet from The Daily Collegian to The Daily Mail and The New York Times. And then UMass walked it back a few days later. That was, I think, kind of an interesting thing to see and especially to see the messaging from the school in the days after that, of trying to in some ways repair the image of this kind of draconian measure was something kind of interesting to see for a school that I think we know is is very concerned with its image. [00:23:52][29.8]

Jennifer Smith: [00:23:54] And there were a few measures and a few incidents that, again, were just really striking, you know, in the process of, for instance, moving students over to a quarantine dorm or a facility where they were supposed to be self isolating. I mean, there were instances of transportation systems getting screwed up. So students had to walk through the freezing cold all on their own to to a dorm that might be 15, 20 minutes away. Some students being confused about what the food process was and not eating for. I think one one young man didn't eat for twenty four hours in the middle of this in the process of going over to a place where he. We could isolate were there any particular incidences like those that stood out to you and how is kind of the student response been to those instances? I don't imagine it engender is a lot of faith in the in the management process, right? [00:24:44][50.6]

Will Katcher: [00:24:45] Yeah. These these are all symptoms, I think, of the same problem, which is the spike in cases in M.S. not being prepared for it with the with regards to the transportation in the meals you had students you know, one girl told me her roommate tested positive while she was out. So she said, OK, you know, I'm going to get this contact tracing call soon. I you know, I live with her, it's going to happen, and she sat in her car for two hours and two hours, turned into a few more hours, and eventually, you know, she starts the middle of the afternoon at 8pm, rolls around, and she hasn't gotten a call yet. Her roommate hasn't gotten a call yet. So what are her options? She can go back to her dorm where her roommate is positive. She might have been exposed or she might not have. But but that's the situation that resulted from not having enough contact tracing capacity and, you know, with the meals, something that was really interesting to see. [00:25:38][52.6]

Will Katcher: [00:25:38] And I think maybe Cassie can speak more to this, too, is the students who we talked to who were in quarantine and isolation housing those first few days before the spike in cases like we're talking about the very first students to test positive on campus. So that really it was pretty seamless and it was pretty well-run. And it was only once those cases really got going and the newcomers started coming into the quarantine housing that things got out of hand. You had a huge blizzard. Those first two days of school. They were telling us, you know, when people started moving in on those days, they weren't really respecting the walls of the quarantine. They would go outside. They would, you know, in the snow that would go outside and smoke. They would, you know, just in no way respect the fact that they were, you know, potentially positive or positive for covid and needed to stay in one location. [00:26:23][45.3]

Cassie McGrath: [00:26:25] Yeah, the one that stuck out to me the most was that there is one student who was positive in the dorms for two days, went to the dining halls, as we said, then was moved. So UMass is a very big campus, which I also kind of want to stress, like it's about two miles each. And if you're in Southwest, it's a mile to quarantine at the campus center. So a mile walk. So this one student was in one residential area and moved. He tested positive, but didn't get his call for two days. And then he moved into quarantine and one of the towers at UMass. So he said he was very lucky. [00:26:57][32.3]

Cassie McGrath: [00:26:57] It was a short walk because his roommate had to walk to the campus center and it was like a horrible experience for him. But this student, when he was quarantining, needed a piece of medical equipment that just never came to him. And so, I mean, I think that kind of speaks for itself, honestly, that he was making phone calls and not getting something that he needed. And he said, "I was fine, but what if I wasn't?" And that's because they did not have enough resources. And there are athletes like all all athletics who were canceled for the self sequester for two weeks. And one of the athletes in my class said, like, I'm going to get out of shape. It's the middle of the season. And I've been training for this. Like she's a senior. It's her last season and she's stuck in your dorm. She can't go for a walk. And she's a long distance runner up, the track team. And then we also saw students with off campus jobs. We're not allowed to work. And that is UMass has since implemented a program to give students, I think, up to six hundred up to six hundred dollars now for missing. It was originally three hundred. And then student advocacy really pushed to increase that number because three hundred dollars is not a minimum wage job for two weeks, never mind something more. [00:28:05][67.2]

Cassie McGrath: [00:28:06] Some students are really worried they were going to pay their rent or aren't going to be able to buy food during these two weeks. So I think the result of this is a lot of tension on campus where people who feel like they're following all the rules but just work off campus are getting adversely affected by this huge outbreak. On the other hand, there are people who are now in quarantine, still partying. So I think that just has caused so much frustration. And like we're seeing it almost every time UMass makes a decision, they're like people are saying, but I'm doing everything right. Why am I being hurt? So that's just happened. [00:28:42][36.3]

Cassie McGrath: [00:28:42] And my last quick point is that I worked on a story about graduate students and their families who lived in housing in Southwest that were restaurants, residential area, who were displaced because of the outbreak. So they were not told before that their housing would be used for quarantine space. But all signs point to UMass always had that plan. Student Government Association members didn't know it was going to be used for quarantine space. And then they had twenty four hours to leave their building with their families, with young children, people who have health conditions, that poor age that put them in a high risk for covid-19. And they called it traumatizing. And they don't know when they will be able to get home. And they've had to spend so much money to buy things that they couldn't they forgot to bring because they were they were they had to leave in twenty four hours. And although it's I had one quote that someone said, although it's only five people like that matters. And I think that these graduate students feel like it's a pattern of being mistreated by the university as well. [00:29:42][59.9]

Stephanie Murray: [00:29:43] So before we let you guys go, I just have one last question. And like looking around, there are covid spikes happening at a lot of different colleges, not as large in the case as I'm about to mention as what happened at UMass. But, you know, Williams College is cracking down after some dorm parties, Dartmouth College up in New Hampshire, a spike there has caused some of the businesses to limit their hours or in person, you know, shopping outside of the outside of the campus. The mayor of Newton has asked Boston College to be more accountable when it comes to covid cases. So was it a good idea for colleges to bring students back this semester in the first place, even as covid was still spiking? I mean, is it possible to have a semester safely? [00:30:31][48.5]

Cassie McGrath: [00:30:33] I think, 5,300 people is a lot of people, and then when you when you welcome some people back, you have to welcome them all back. And UMass is just a really big school. And we found that there was I think UMass was caught flat footed. And all the examples that we have given so far in this call, I think are evidence of that, like not telling the graduate students at their house their housing could be used as quarantine space kind of shows me that they weren't expecting to need it, not having the infrastructure to make contact tracing calls, having to bring in the state to help them with contact tracing, having to have not having the medical equipment for that student, not having the food come to people on time and having it be cold or gross and words that we heard regarding the food there. So I think that if they were going to, they had to just have a little bit more preparation because like we're seeing now, like UMass recently said, that everyone that's living off campus in the area needs to be tested twice a week or they'll be kicked out of their classes. And so now students are saying, like, you know, it's just a lot of results of things that maybe could have been solved. More preparation. It's hard for me to say whether or not it was possible, but I think I think it's not possible in the preparations that they made to have a successful semester. [00:31:56][82.8]

Will Katcher: [00:31:57] Yeah, I think that's the debate, you asked about who's to blame, because that's what a lot of people are asking is essentially the school trusted students, trusted a lot of 18, 19, 20 year olds who have lived at home for a year to come back and follow these guidelines. And I think that's the debate that a lot of people are having, is whether they should have trusted them or not. I don't know if any of us know the answer to the question. You know, we're a year into the pandemic. You'd think that people should generally know what they're supposed to do at this time. But a lot of a lot of people don't in the school place their trust in a lot of these kids. And, you know, to touch on one other thing is that the result is that, you know, regardless of whether or not they prepared enough, the evidence shows that they weren't prepared for what students were about to do. They did they did not have the capacity to to handle these cases. And the result was a lot of people, both at UMass and in the surrounding community who got the short end of the stick, students who, you know, followed the rules to what we'd call like a reasonable extent that, you know, maybe they went in other people's rooms and formed like a little bubble, but they weren't going to parties and those students still got sick. [00:33:07][70.6]

Will Katcher: [00:33:09] And then in the surrounding community, you know, when UMass went into a self sequester period, a lot of parents who who work didn't have their child care available because no students could come to their house. And, you know, we've touched on this, but a lot of students who fully depend on jobs weren't able to go to them. So even though you had so many students obeying the rules and so many students doing their best, you had enough students that it really didn't matter, that there is a significant spike in cases and a lot of people got caught up in it. [00:33:40][31.1]

Stephanie Murray: [00:33:41] We are going to leave it there, but we will keep reading our Daily Collegian. So reporters Cassie McGrath and Will Katcher from UMass Amherst, thank you so much for joining us today. [00:33:51][10.5]

Cassie McGrath: [00:33:52] Thank you so much for having us. Stay healthy, everyone. [00:33:55][2.4]

Will Katcher: [00:33:56] Yes. Thanks for having us. [00:33:57][0.9]

Jennifer Smith: [00:34:00] And that brings us to trivia this week. Last week we asked you what you were doing a year ago today, a.k.a. in the final days before the world turned upside down, a.k.a. in the march. That is still happening. I assume it's just been a year of March. Anyway, you really knocked it out of the park with your responses, Stephanie, any of your faves? [00:34:20][19.4]

Stephanie Murray: [00:34:21] These were just all so fantastic. But I have to say, there was definitely some covid creeping into these memories. I got an email from Matt Epperly, who was at Red Sox spring training in Florida. And when they were there, they noticed that the players weren't giving anyone autographs. And so they, you know, on the flight there and back, they were wiping off their seats and everything. And people were looking at their family like they were crazy. And he says he hasn't been on a plane since Jeremy Stull was planning his 30th birthday trip, which was supposed to kick off with a St. Patrick's Day celebration. And once that got canceled, the rest of the year started unraveling. [00:34:59][37.8]

Jennifer Smith: [00:35:00] I was really struck actually by how many of these mentioned travel, because I'm sure that the earliest thing that everyone had to suddenly realize and grapple with was, oh, man, I might not want to be getting on a plane right now. I might not want to be going anywhere. So people were talking about missing trips to the Foxwoods folks who normally were going to go snowboarding in Utah, going to Vegas, that sort of thing was was really interesting to me because people were either returning from travel or canceling future travel and some of them were a bit closer to home. [00:35:38][38.1]

Stephanie Murray: [00:35:38] Brian Jencunas said he was working out of his second office at the 21st Amendment, which is, of course, the bar right beside the state house for one out. I'm sure a lot of our horse racing listeners miss that place. That's right. Yeah. [00:35:51][12.6]

Jennifer Smith: [00:35:51] And on the travel front, you know, Brian Dunn was apparently in the Dominican Republic at a pool bar a year ago today. So, Brian, I would have stayed this week. Stephanie, the conversation that came to our attention was not what happened a year ago today, but the return of a different kind of discourse. [00:36:11][19.3]

Stephanie Murray: [00:36:12] I can't believe we're talking about this again because I am embarrassed every time this topic comes up. We are I don't even know how to read into this because I'm not sure how we should be saying it. But people are debating how to pronounce the hash tag m a p o l i. [00:36:32][19.8]

Jennifer Smith: [00:36:33] That's right. Nate Roberts decided to kick this chaos show off again. And I would say it seems like not enough of hashtag Massachusetts politics is made up of longtime listeners of the horse race because we already solved this last year, more than a year ago, a very different time, but not all that different because we still thought about this particular issue overwhelmingly based on the dramatic polling that our co-host, Steve Koczela, conducted at the time. Most people do not spell out the M and the A in this. So Stephanie is alone. And even though some people separate on whether or not it's MA Pawley or MA, Pohli that you know, is again, you know, it's in the low 20s, that sort of thing, a plurality thinks we are going with mapoli rhymes with Napoli. Hundreds of people weighed in on this last year. So I think we are obligated to say it that way. I think that's where we're going to leave it this week. What do you think? [00:37:33][59.8]

Stephanie Murray: [00:37:34] I think that is the perfect place. So that is all the time we have for this week. I am Stephanie Murray here with Jennifer Smith. Our fantastic producer is Libby Gormley. Make sure to leave us a review wherever you get your podcasts. My request, if you're listening, take a screenshot, put it on your Instagram story, tweet it, help people find us. Sign up for the Politico Massachusetts playbook if you haven't already. And if you need a poll done, you can always call The MassINC Polling Group. See you next week. [00:37:34][0.0]

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