Harvard President Larry Bacow and wife recover from COVID-19


Tuesday, April 7, 2020

Harvard University President, Larry Bacow, and his wife, Adele Fleet Bacow, recover from COVID-19 after having been infected unkowingly by the noval coronavirus strain. Larry Bacow shares his experience in an interview with the Harvard Gazette that can be found in this article.



The following is Q&A Style Interview that was posted on the Harvard Gazette.

Harvard University is one of the country’s top private universities. It features some of the best programs for undergraduate and graduate students to earn their bachelor’s degrees, master’s degrees, or doctoral degrees/PhDs. Like many of the other top colleges and best universities across the country, Harvard University has transitioned from traditional contact class to online learning and online education. All undergraduate and graduate students are completing their semesters and contributing to their bachelor’s degree, master’s degree, or doctoral degree/PhD from home through online education and distance learning methods.
Q&A with Larry Bacow. 

How are you and Adele feeling?

BACOW: We are feeling much better. We were very fortunate. We never experienced any of the respiratory problems that sent so many people to the hospital. For us, this felt a lot like the flu. Not fun, but certainly not life-threatening, at least in our case.

What were your symptoms?

BACOW: We both started off with a cough and then that progressed to having a fever and chills. I also had whole-body muscle aches. Everything hurt. I felt like I was 120 years old almost overnight. And then lethargy — just how you feel when you have the flu.

What was going through your mind when you learned you had both tested positive?

BACOW: Well, we’d been very, very careful, and I was a little bit surprised, in truth, because Adele and I had not seen anyone except each other for close to 10 days before we started experiencing symptoms. We were completely isolated in the house. One reason we had taken such precautions is because I live with an autoimmune condition that makes me very susceptible to any kind of infection. In fact, some people questioned why I actually got tested. It’s because I’m immunosuppressed. So I was at risk. And when we tested positive I thought, “This is going to be interesting.”

I was also worried about being able to discharge my responsibilities. When I was at Tufts, I had gotten quite ill in 2004 when my autoimmune condition was first diagnosed, and I had had to take a month off of work. I realized that I needed to look after my own health. I wasn’t good to anybody if I wasn’t healthy. But beyond that, I realized I also had to give others permission to take the time they needed to recover if they got sick. So when I tested positive, I tried to model the behavior I would hope to see in others by being a good patient and doing what I was supposed to do. And I’m fortunately blessed with a great team. They didn’t miss a beat and filled in behind me and just kept everything moving forward in my absence. 

Were you able to do any work at all, or were you off the grid entirely?

BACOW: As president, you are never completely off the grid. I was looking at email, although not terribly responsive to it. I would have one call a day with Patti Bellinger, my chief of staff, and with Bill Lee, senior fellow of the Corporation. And I would receive daily reports from both Katie Lapp, [executive vice president and chief administrative officer] and [Provost] Alan Garber. And if I needed to, I would talk to them by phone as well.


What kind of response did you get when you let the Harvard community know in an email that you and Adele were sick? 

BACOW: We must have received a thousand responses, from students, faculty, staff, and alumni, in some cases from all over the world. We were both quite touched by the response.What was a little strange was lying in bed sick watching CNN, if I recall correctly, and having them report on me being sick. That was a bit of an out-of-body experience. Once it made the national news, we started hearing from old friends and family from around the country and around the world. 


What are you doing to keep yourself occupied during this social isolation? Have you been binge-watching anything or reading anything in particular?

BACOW: It’s a struggle just to keep up on email. I haven’t really had a chance to read anything for pleasure. In the irony department, our son and daughter-in-law and two granddaughters called us up a few weeks ago. They live in New York City. They were working remotely and wanted to know how we would feel if they came up and lived with us during this experience. We said, “Of course, we’d love to see you.” Well, they literally drove up here the day the two of us came down with our first symptoms. They have been in the house and we’ve been FaceTiming them and engaging in social distancing. The big distraction is having our 2½-year-old granddaughter and our now 8-week-old granddaughter with us. We hope as we emerge from the other side of this in a few days that we’ll actually be able to play with them. That will be our distraction. 

Now that you are feeling better, what is a typical day like for you working from home?

BACOW: Since I’m just recently recovered, I’m not sure I have a real routine yet. I have not started exercising again, but that is something I hope to do in the next week. I’m still trying to take it easy because I’m getting my strength back. So, for a typical day, the first thing I do is look at email that came in overnight. And then usually I have a series of phone calls and Zoom meetings, like everybody else. Sometimes those are calls with my direct reports. I’m checking in with the deans and the various vice presidents. I’m also talking to public officials. I’ve had phone calls with the governor, and officials in Cambridge, Boston, and in Washington, D.C.

I’ve also been talking to my presidential peers. The Ivy League presidents have been in close touch largely via email, and I have also spoken to a number of them by phone. I make a point of speaking to Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) President Rafael Reif regularly, and I have spoken to a number of other presidential colleagues in the area. I’ve also been in touch with [former Harvard presidents] Drew [Faust] and Larry Summers. So, I try to reach out to people who either have previously dealt with situations like what we’re dealing with now, or because they’re dealing with them in real time.

I’ve been on calls with the Association of Independent Colleges and Universities in Massachusetts, and the American Council on Education. Last weekend we had the governing boards meeting on Zoom. We had a full meeting of the Board of Overseers and a meeting of the Corporation. 

Looking backward, when did the University start monitoring the coronavirus?

BACOW: In early January, Harvard University Health Services started paying attention to what was going on in China. We have students from China, and we have a fair number of faculty and staff who travel to China for their own scholarship, so we started monitoring what was going on there. We also started issuing advisories to members of our community who were returning to campus from China on the steps they should take to ensure that they remained healthy. Then we started issuing advisories discouraging travel, first to China and then broadening that to other hotspots throughout the world as they became apparent.

We were very, very attentive to what was going on. We were also in close contact with the members of our own faculty and staff, some of whom are among the world’s foremost experts in infectious disease, virology, epidemiology, public health. And they themselves were in contact with their colleagues in China and in other parts of the world, and started advising us on the risks we were facing going forward. We very quickly started convening a crisis-management team to follow these events and to start doing some preliminary planning. Katie Lapp convened that team, which engaged the administrative deans, the vice presidents, and others from environmental health and safety throughout the University to start planning and thinking about what we might do if we saw this virus, both in the Boston area and especially if we saw it on our campus. Giang Nguyen, the director of Harvard University Health Services, also quickly put together a scientific advisory group. We have also been blessed to have Alan Garber, a physician as well as an economist, as our provost. Alan has published scholarly papers on the management of pandemics. So we drew upon a tremendous amount of expertise in trying to prepare for this virus and to make some intelligent decisions along the way.

Harvard was one of the first institutions to de-densify its campus and transition to online learning, and there was some pushback at first. Can you talk about that decision-making process?

BACOW: Our thinking was driven almost entirely by a handful of considerations. One was just looking at the spread of the coronavirus, both in China and then in Italy and Spain, and trying to learn from the experiences of those countries. Second, it was driven by modeling, which we and others did, which suggested that, if this virus was as infectious as we thought it was and as dangerous as it appeared to be, we could face a very real crisis going forward. At that time, we believed that young people were less at risk than the elderly or those with pre-existing conditions. More recent data suggests, at least in the United States, that you’ve got a higher incidence of severe illness in young people than in some other countries. So we were looking at that. We were observing what was going on with a few cruise ships near Japan which function effectively as petri dishes and imagining what would happen if we got an infection in our dormitories where students live in close proximity to each other.

With spring break coming up, we were concerned that if we did not act quickly our students would disperse and likely come into close proximity with other young people in various parts of the world, and that when they returned to campus we could face a full-blown outbreak here. So we thought it was important to act before students went on spring break and we mobilized resources very quickly. Our Harvard University IT department under Anne Margulies [vice president and University chief information officer] quickly geared up to be able to get everybody on Zoom, to start educating faculty on Zoom, and to make sure that we had the IT infrastructure to sustain teaching in large numbers and having meetings on Zoom. Similarly, our vice provost for advances in learning, Bharat Anand, and his colleagues started to assemble resources to quickly educate faculty in online teaching. Each of the deans worked tirelessly with their faculty and staff to prepare. They are the real heroes of this process. And then we issued a notice to students that we were going to ask those who could move out to do so and not to return to campus after break, and that we were going to move all teaching online.

I knew that we would be criticized by some for possibly acting prematurely. But there was a point in this process where we watched the incidence of cases in Massachusetts over a four-day period go from, I believe, 13 to 28 to 42 to 91, which is clearly an exponential growth rate, albeit from a small base. It was a growth rate that had been repeated in almost precisely the same pattern in every other country that was a week or two ahead of us. So there were flashing red lights. And I quickly realized that the cost of being wrong was asymmetrical. What I mean by that is that if we acted prematurely, as some thought we were, then we would inconvenience many, and we would probably squander a lot of resources. But if we waited too long to respond, that cost was likely going to be measured in human life. And so the decision actually wasn’t that difficult. Implementing it was. But the decision to tell students to leave and to not return and to transition to online learning seemed pretty clear. We also recognized that by acting quickly we might make it easier for other institutions that were faced with similar decisions, but without access to the same expertise that we were blessed with, to act quickly as well.


How do you feel the University went about supporting students and others in the transition?

BACOW: Obviously, we were asking a lot of students and others in our community to move so quickly, and people across the entire University pitched in to help. It was a mark of the strength of our community that individuals volunteered to assist students as they moved out. We also tried to provide financial support to help students with travel, storage, and other expenses. Staff in the College worked day and night, literally, to implement this decision and to address issues as they arose. They had thousands of questions to answer and problems to solve. Around 6,000 of our undergraduates moved out in five days or so.

We have had to quickly make a transition to online teaching and learning, and it’s also a transition for everybody working remotely from home, with very few exceptions. We’re so grateful for those members of our community who are looking after the students still in residence. We are really grateful to our employees who are continuing to make sure that our buildings are safe and secure. Everybody has been touched by this crisis. I’ve been really encouraged by the willingness of both our faculty as well as our students and all the people who are supporting them to, almost on a dime, master the technology necessary to teach online. There’s been so much goodwill on the part of people willing to learn new ways of teaching and learning.




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