- Hi, everyone.
Welcome to our homeroom live stream.
We have a very exciting
conversation coming up,
Sal here from Khan Academy,
in case y'all don't know me.
We're gonna have a conversation
with Chancellor Robert Jones
from the University of
Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
And it's gonna be really
interesting because
University of Illinois
is really putting their
best foot forward to do
testing, contact tracing,
and give as close to a normal
experience as possible.
So there's going to be some
really interesting questions.
The whole country is really looking at
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
to understand how this can be done well.
But before we get to that,
I will make my standard announcements.
First of all, a reminder that Khan Academy
is a not for profit organization.
We can only exist through
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from folks like yourself.
So if you're in a position to do so,
please think about going
to KhanAcademy.org/donate.
I also wanna give a special shout out
to several organizations
that have helped support
Khan Academy, we were running at a deficit
even before the COVID crisis,
but then when the crisis,
our deficit only grew because
of increased server costs,
and we're trying to
accelerate a bunch of content.
So special thanks to Bank
of America, Google.org,
AT&T, Fastly, Novartis,
and the many other
supporters at all levels
who've allowed Khan Academy
to get to where it is today.
But we need more help.
So if you're in a position to do so,
please think about doing that.
So with that, I'm excited to introduce
Chancellor Robert Jones,
from the University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Thanks so much for joining us, Chancellor.
- Sal, thank you very
much for the opportunity,
glad to be here.
- So maybe a good place to start,
we're back to school, the
big debate, both in K-12
and in higher education is,
to have physical classes,
not to have physical classes,
to have hybrid classes.
Tell us your thought process,
the University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign's
thought process as you went
into this back to school
and how are y'all approaching it?
- Well, it became very clear
to us as we transitioned
very quickly over the
course of about 12 days
back in March, from our
traditional face-to-face education,
to more remote education.
And as soon as we got to
graduation, our virtual graduation,
we start to immediately
pivot and started to focus
very sincerely and rigorously on
what the model should
look like for the fall.
We quickly resolved that,
based on our own analysis
about the value of both an in-classroom
and the learning that occurs
outside of the classroom,
that we should try to move towards
some form of face-to-face education.
And we started to hear from our students
who were anxious to come back to campus,
the majority of them were
pretty much insistent on
being back on campus in
maybe some blended form,
but back on campus to
have a chance to be among
their friends and colleagues,
and really be part of that
uniquely transformative,
exciting environment
that exists on university campuses.
So the fundamental question became,
how could we do that in an effective way?
My Provost and Chief Academic Officer,
Andreas Cangellaris,
former dean of mine of my
engineering school, began
to pose that question
to several of our most
outstanding, innovative scientists.
And the first person that he
talked to was Marty Burke,
who is the associate dean
of our medical school,
he's about chemist, as well as an MD.
And Marty put together in a
very short period of time,
a multidisciplinary team of
more than 100 individuals
across veterinary medicine
with Paul Hergenrother
and Tim Fan, who were veterinary medicine
cancer researchers.
They all came together with
that multidisciplinary teams
and pretty quickly came up
with this testing protocol
because Provost Cangellaris
was very insistent
that if we came back together
in a hybrid form of education
or completely face-to-face,
we needed a test
that was more rigorous than
what was generally available
because we had enough
evidence to think that testing
was gonna be absolutely
critical prerequisite
for us coming back.
And so I can fill in more
detail, but that was our thinking
was that some form of
face-to-face education
was the best model for this university,
but more importantly, the
best model for our students.
And so we had to innovate to create this
world class saliva-based testing
that no one else has exactly
been able to do this,
at the scale, and at the way
that we've gone about doing it.
- This is what's really
interesting about this.
I think everyone would agree that
the in-person experience in
college, it's hard to replace.
You can do something on distance learning,
maybe get some of your academic learning,
but the immersive
experience you can't have.
So I think everyone's there,
but what's really incredible
what y'all have done,
some people have just kind
of taken the leap of faith
and said, let's cross our fingers
and hope all that goes well.
And those are a lot of the
universities that are now
having to send kids back
home a couple of weeks in.
But y'all said we can
actually develop our own test,
a high quality, sensitive
test, and administer it.
And I believe y'all are
administering it to every member
of your community every three days.
- Every member of our community,
every three to four days.
So twice a week required
mandatory testing of our students,
our faculty, and our staff.
And we have testing capability
to do a least 10,000 tests
per day in order to cover those cohorts.
And several days this week and last week,
we did 18,000 tests last Monday,
and the Monday before that.
And so at this juncture,
we're approaching probably
at 140 to 150,000 tests
that we've done since July.
And the rigorous testing
protocol, and the fact that
the saliva-based test is
innovative in terms that
it really cuts out a lot
of the supply chain issues
that it would be, that
had become problematic
with the nasal pharyngeal test,
a lot of the reagent
steps had been cut out,
and you basically dribble
about a teaspoon full
or half a teaspoon full into a test tube.
And then that's heated
to deactivate the virus.
A buffer is added, and it goes
directly onto this machine,
we call an RTPCR.
And so it cuts out
enormous amount of time.
It is cost effective, it only
cost a fraction of the cost
of the nasal pharyngeal
test, it is scalable,
and it gives us the capacity
to test more than 100,
do run a more than
100,000 tests every week.
And if we deal with this
thing called pooling,
we could actually do 20,000
tests per day if we have to.
And so the major difference, as well as,
that is scalable, it's cost effective,
you don't need trained medical
personnel to administer it.
And I haven't had the
nasal pharyngeal test,
but I understand it's not
the most pleasant thing
to do in the world.
- I really wanna share
that there's other things
y'all are doing as well, but
this test that y'all developed,
how quickly do y'all get the results?
- In an ideal situation, the
results come back as quickly as
five, six hours or so, but
as shouldn't take any longer
than 24 hours to get the test results.
Which are absolutely critical
to be able to notify people,
to initiate both our
digital contact tracing,
which I'd like to talk
about a little bit later,
as well as the physical contact tracers.
Which allows us to be able
to notify people early,
get those individuals in isolation,
and those that they've been
associated with in quarantine.
And so quick turn around is absolutely key
because as you know what
the nasal pharyngeal test,
it's not just hours and
in far too many cases
it's been days to get the results back.
Which creates an environment
where you have no way
of mitigating the spread of the disease.
And we were originally
gonna test once per week,
but a lot of data coming
out from other researchers
and our own researchers, clearly showed
and our modeling work by our biophysicist,
Nigel Goldenfield and Sergei Maslov's,
clearly showed that if you wanna be able
to mitigate the spread, you
need to be able to test those
that are just showing or
just accumulating virus
in their saliva, as well as those who
have accumulated enough virus,
that they can spread it to others.
And so the three to four
day testing protocol
was the best way to do
that, and to mitigate it.
And it's shown to be effective.
It's allowed us to do
broad-based surveillance testing.
And let me just mention,
the past week or so
we have been doing 20% of all the tests
in the state of Illinois,
and 2% of all the testing
in the entire country.
And so this test is absolutely amazing
and it actually has kind of served as
a canary in the coal mine for us too,
because we do so much testing,
and do so and get the
results back so rapidly.
A few days ago, we started to
see signs of a potential rise
in the number of positive cases.
So it's critically important
that another aspect
of this test, is that it acts
as a canary in a coal mine
to let you know well beforehand,
before you get to that five or eight,
or seven or 10% positivity
across your population,
you have early warning
enough to mitigate that rise.
And those are some steps that
were announced yesterday.
So it's a game changer we
think for this university,
and potentially a game
changer for the state,
and for the nation.
So we're very, very excited about.
- And I definitely wanna
get into the contact tracing
'cause that's also another
very important piece
of y'alls, the way you're tackling this.
But we're getting a bunch of questions
off of Facebook and YouTube.
I'm just geeking out a little
bit more on the test itself,
on the accuracy.
Brian Sway, what is the accuracy?
What's the false positive,
false negative rate?
Maria K. Stumpf asking essentially
the same question from Facebook.
So what do y'all know
about the false positive
and false negative rate of these tests?
We know that the false
positive rate is extremely low.
You know, there's no way to
have a 0% false positive.
But I can tell you it is extremely low.
We've done this by spiking
saliva samples with the virus,
and there were different viral loads.
And it clearly shows,
and then comparing them
against other RTPCR tests,
and it clearly shows that our test
has an extremely low false positive rates.
And that's one of the things that
we are very, very excited about.
In order to get our
emergency use authorization,
with our partnership with Yale University,
we had to do what is
called a bridging study,
to leverage off of their approval.
I think they got their
approval maybe on a Friday,
and by partnering with them,
we had our approval by the next Wednesday.
The governor called a big news conference,
et cetera, et cetera.
And one of the things
that bridging studies show
is that our test is able to detect a very,
very low viral load, a
fraction of what other tests,
most other tests would not be
able to detect the viral load
at the number of hours
per milliliter sample
that we're able to do.
So it's very, very accurate.
It's very sensitive.
In fact, the comparison with
the Yale test as a benchmark
for our bridging study,
shows that it's about
eight times more sensitive
than the Yale test.
And we know it's much more
accurate in terms of predicting
positive cases, because
one of the concerns
about the nasal pharyngeal
test, is generally known that
the percent accuracy is less
than what we're experiencing.
And there is the ongoing problem.
Say, for example, the
viral load apparently
is much higher in saliva because
that is the predominant way
that the disease is spread.
And our studies and
analysis would indicate that
one of the reasons that some
people are having a problem
that even after they are
no longer symptomatic,
apparently have recovered from COVID-19,
if they go back to get a
subsequent nasal pharyngeal test,
it will still come back positive
because we think the nasal cavity perhaps
has some remnant virus
that may longer be active,
whereas saliva has predominantly
an active viral load.
So there are a lot of
reasons that gives this test
a comparative advantage
that has allowed us
because of this predictive capabilities,
as well as scale and a
number of people we can test,
has allowed us to do what no
other university is doing.
And that is wide scale
surveillance testing of everybody
in the community.
And hopefully will allow us to mitigate
this rise in our positivity rate,
that was much higher than
what we had predicted,
but we think we're can
get our arms around it
in the next few days, and
if not, the next week.
- So first of all, I mean the sensitivity,
I think matters a lot,
that the false negatives
are the most dangerous
'cause obviously then someone can go out
and spread it without knowing it.
So that's really powerful.
Tell us a little bit
about the contact tracing,
'cause this is really,
there's two pillars to this,
maybe a third around behavior.
But the second one is contact tracing.
- Yeah Sal, you're absolutely right.
We didn't just develop
one of the most innovative
saliva-based tests in the world.
Concurrent with that, part of this,
our whole strategy is
an integrated system,
of saliva-based testing,
integrated with a app
that we now call Safer Illinois,
which grew out of a
conversation that I had
with one of our alums who
developed the whole integrated
fan experience for the
San Francisco 49ers,
a guy named John Paul.
And he talked to myself and
the provost about a year
and a half ago when we were out visiting,
about if we were interested
in a app based strategy
to improve the student
experience on campus,
improve advising, improving
the fan experience,
about ordering tickets,
what to do over the weekend,
what to do at any point in time.
And so we'd already built
out the Illinois app.
And as soon as COVID-19 hit,
John Paul collaborated with Bill Sullivan,
one of our professors over at engineering,
and they created ultimately
what is now called
the Safer Illinois app,
that is built on a platform
that we are calling Rock Wire.
But the key part of it is that it allows
a Bluetooth enabled capability.
That basically when you sign
up, you download this app,
it allows to use the Bluetooth capability
so that if ultimately you test positive
or someone that you've been in around
for a short period of
time, it can identify
off of those signals, and
allow us to do kind of
a digital Bluetooth enabled
contact tracing, as well.
And we've had a pretty
high level of people
that have signed up for that.
And of course you can turn
it on and off if you want,
you can set your sensitivity level.
But most people, a
significant number of folks
in our community, high
enough participation in this
to allow us to do both kind of
quote unquote digital contract tracing,
and to leverage that against
the collaboration we have
with the Illinois Public
Health Department,
that has allowed us to hire more than
100 physical contact tracers,
and we just made a
commitment to hire 35 more.
So it is an integrated
system that we've delivered.
The test results, once they
come back from the lab,
they go to our medical
McKinley Health Services.
And the positive cases, you are notified
by your cell phone,
because you're supposed to
enter your cell phone number.
And then this app basically has with it,
a critically important tool, as well.
That's leveraged off of this app.
And that is it gives your COVID status
in terms of, are you given permission
to enter a building or not?
It doesn't tell you or the
person that's looking at it,
whether you're positive or negative,
but it does enable our students.
And everybody is required to do this,
faculty, staff, and students.
Before you enter a building,
before you can enter a
classroom, particularly,
you have to display what
we call your entry card
and your boarding pass, either digitally
on your smart device, or
we actually have a system,
you can print it out hard copy,
and it says access
granted or access denied,
and Chancellors are not exempt.
If you bear with me just
a moment, I can give you,
if you are interested,
a visualization of that.
I just came back from
giving my saliva test
a few minutes ago.
And hopefully you can
see that Robert Jones
has been granted access
to buildings on campus.
And so everybody in our
community, if you go into a class,
you have to show this.
In order to make this
work, we had to invest
in hiring between three
and 400 individuals,
mostly students, some
folk from the community
that we call wellness associates.
And their job is to be
in front of classrooms
to check these apps.
We absolutely require wearing
masks inside of the classroom.
So to be perfectly candid with you,
being inside one of our
classrooms, two things,
we know that as far as humanly
possible, 99.9% of the folks
in there are COVID free, they're negative.
As well as we require people,
not withstanding that,
everybody has to wear a mask the full time
that you're in the classroom,
including the instructor,
the professors.
And when they're speaking,
in order to not disadvantage
people that may have hearing issues,
they can take their masks
off, and put mask off
or face covering off and put
on a plexiglass face shield.
But we're creating a safe
environment as we can
inside of the classroom.
And even between classes, as I walked over
to get my saliva test
about an hour or so ago,
you could see small group of people
sitting around on campus.
And I'm very, very moved
and touched by the fact
of the large compliance that people,
it's hard to see someone walking on campus
and not have on their face covering.
And if they're walking alone,
or walking with somebody
that lives in their roommate or someone,
they'll be chatting, but
you could check this,
look down at their hands,
and you'll see they have
those face coverings
in their hands.
And I can't tell you how
many times I've observed
as they are approaching
others they don't know,
they put the face covering
on and that's become
part of the culture of
keeping themselves safe,
but also protecting the
health and safety of others.
- There's so many questions.
This is really impressive.
A couple of question from
Facebook, Jessica Fox asking,
how are students quarantined
after positive tests?
I'd love your answer to
that one 'cause you know,
Fauci's talked about it.
Some colleges sending kids
home, that's not a good idea
'cause that just infects everyone else.
And let's just start there,
I have other questions.
- Yeah, we're not sending
young people home,
I agree that that's a bad idea.
And so a key part of what we
decided to do quite early,
that we knew that there
were going to be students
testing positive when the
first week that they came back,
and as well as that will be positive cases
as we began the first week of class.
And so what we have done
about isolation is that
as soon as that test result,
up until actually yesterday
when we made another announcement,
the results went to the local
Public Health Department.
They were the first line
of contact of calling up,
trying to contact those individuals,
and let them know what they
needed to do to isolate,
that went to the housing.
And we created an
environment where students
would quarantine or isolate in place,
with very strict instructions
about not violating
isolation, or quarantining.
And we set aside about 5% of
our rooms and our housing,
residential hall for this purpose.
We just decided to move
that to almost 10%.
We don't have a problem with
expanding beyond that capacity.
So it's not a capacity
issue at the moment.
As well as the local
Public Health Department,
has rented hotels rooms
within the community
to also accommodate those,
particularly the ones
that may have difficulty isolating
because they have a roommate
or because of other
kinds of circumstances.
So we've been very, very
aggressive about the isolation
and quarantining piece.
And one of the things
we have done to increase
the rate at which we can contact those
that have tested positive,
I think we were putting
a bit of burden on the public
health folks to do this alone.
So again, the same team that created
what we call a Shield T3,
that's the formal name or shield
for our saliva based test,
yesterday came up with the brilliant idea
of something they're calling Shield 30,
where we have 30
additional people to assist
the public health
department within 30 minutes
of one of our undergraduate
students in particularly
receiving a positive test result,
someone is trying to
reach them either by phone
or by text message within 30 minutes,
because we need to make sure we identify
and contact those folks
as quickly as possible
because otherwise they will
be walking around the campus
in some cases, unknowingly,
potentially spreading COVID-19.
So we've been very rigorous about this,
and keep innovating around it to make sure
we have the most rigorous
system of isolation,
and identifying those that are positive,
and using digital and
physical contact tracing
to quarantine those that
they come in contact with.
- I mean, this is incredible.
I've really two questions,
I have many, many more,
but the first one is I
know you all have had,
it's good that you're
identifying these cases
and you've had several hundred.
At what point do you know
that this is working or not?
It's sustainable?
Is there or do y'all have
thresholds that you'd like
if X percentage of the population
starts testing positive,
we might have to go to distance learning?
How are you all thinking about that?
- Well, the way that we're
thinking about it is,
and I try to remind people,
there's been a data driven strategy
that has gotten us to this point
to make us feel comfortable
with opening up in the fall.
And it will be a data driven
strategy that causes us
to make a different decision.
Case in point, one of the things
that we announced yesterday
was that we were asking our
students, all of our students,
everybody in the community, to
kind of limit their activity
to essential activities
only for the next 14 days.
Why?
Because, we were very
surprised and disappointed
that a very, very small number
of folks in our community
were breaking isolation.
They were leaving their
isolation site to go get a burger
or go do whatever they
thought they could do.
And we had to send a very strong message
that that's not acceptable,
and those that continue to do that
are being suspended from the university.
There was another small group of students
who somehow had misinterpreted
the CDC guidelines,
that in some states, in some communities,
allows you to go back and get tested,
and test out of an isolation
or quarantine environment.
And we had to send a very
strict and stern message
that no, remind you that the CDC
also gave local governments,
local jurisdiction
to put in more rigorous criteria.
And so we had to remind
people that you can't test out
of a positive case or you
can't test out of isolation
or quarantine here at the
University of Illinois
Urbana-Champaign.
You have to stay in
isolation and quarantine
for the designated period.
When that is up, you will be notified
about how to get an additional test
to make sure that you're negative.
And so we have to really crack
down on those two issues,
as well as those repeat
offenders of large parties,
that went beyond the
guidelines that the cities,
Urbana and Champagne.
They've been wonderful
people to work with,
and we have a deep and
seamless relationship.
They worked very hard with the bars
to raise the legal drinking age too,
for two weeks to have outdoor dining only,
and to institute a significant
fine for hosting parties
that were more than
the number of residents
of a particular housing
unit plus 10 individuals.
And there were a quite a number of folks
that were violating that
and we have expelled or not expelled,
we can't do that in the
University of Illinois,
we have suspended about
four or five people so far,
suspended one Greek letter organization,
and have on notice a number of others.
We have about roughly 100 cases
that are currently being investigated
for possible violations
of our conduct code.
So we're being as thorough
and rigorous about this
as we possibly can be, and trying to send
a very strong message that
we can't have a small number
of people that are
essentially breaking the law,
in many cases, and being noncompliant,
to put in jeopardy the health and safety
of the rest of the community,
as well as to undermine
all of the hard work
that a dedicated number of
our scientists and scholars
and administrators have put
into place with the core primary
goal of keeping our students
and our faculty safe.
And I have zero tolerance for that.
And you expect not everybody
to be in compliant,
we were not naive that
there would be people
that were noncompliant.
In fact, our modelers had factored that
into our expectations about
what the number of cases
were going to be.
But I have to admit, we
all acknowledged yesterday
on a press conference,
that we were disappointed
and very surprised that those
folks who will knowingly
come out of isolation to either test out
or to do social gathering,
some of them were hosting parties,
and actually going to parties.
And that is what we are
trying to put an end to.
- And that makes all
the sense in the world.
I mean, my last question,
when you hear about the
programs y'all created,
it's really incredible.
It's actually the most impressive testing
and contact tracing I've heard
of, not just at a university,
but anywhere I've heard
of in this country.
It sounds comparable to what's
been going on in places like
Taiwan, which is really
best in class in the world.
Have other people been contacting y'all?
Not just universities,
it seems not just K-12,
cities, states, the
federal government to say
can we scale this?
- All of the above.
Absolutely because as way
some people will put it,
this is a game changer,
not only for the University
of Illinois Urbana-Champaign,
it's a game changer for
our other two institutions
that we immediately made this
testing capability available
for University of Illinois Chicago,
and our campus in Springfield.
And then the next iteration of this,
working with Tim Killeen,
who's the system president,
and his staff, we are
working on two paths.
One is how do we expand
this to the rest of
public higher education across the state?
Illinois has 12, 13 public
higher education system.
And so we've been working
to make this available
very quickly, particularly
in time for the next semester
for the campuses in Bloomington and not
University of Illinois
campuses, but the other
public freestanding
systems across the state.
And that was our second priority,
as well as setting this up for cities,
and for other public
entities like nursing homes,
K through 12 education, city governments,
we're in conversation
with the city of Chicago
about standing something up
there to particularly serve
the underserved Latinx and
African American populations,
populations that we know
have a much higher rate
of mortality related to COVID-19.
So we're trying to do
the public good as well
because we are University of
Illinois Urbana-Champaign,
at its core and its founding,
is a public land grant university.
I have an obligation
to do the public good.
And so in addition to trying
to stand it up across the state
with other universities,
we have another strategy
where I'm trying to create
this alliance of universities,
leveraging my relationship,
and the fact that I'm
chairman of the board of
the Association of Public
and Land Grant Universities,
242 of the finest public
institutions across the country,
and my colleagues in the AAU,
the 64 really world class
research universities
mainly across North America,
but two institutions in Canada.
So you might have met,
you might not be surprised
to know that the list of institutions
outside of establishing alliance,
we've already gotten calls
from almost every major
university you can think of,
from my colleague over
at Indiana, to Michigan,
to Michigan State, Wisconsin,
places in New York,
across the globe.
So this is a strategy
that we're working on
to serve the public good.
But then that is another piece of it
that we've started up as a formal
university related organization,
who is vetting this for use
with government agencies,
other states, federal government agencies,
as well as corporate entities.
You can imagine large companies
that have large workforce,
whether they are working remotely or not.
It's kind of hard to do all of your
manufacturing completely remotely.
They're interested in getting
it in their management,
their office, head office facility,
but as well as manufacturing as well.
So across the board, I can't name a sector
that has not indicated interest in this
in the last 12 to 45
days, and particularly,
the interest really peak
once we got our EUA approved.
And let me just add one
other thing to this,
I failed to mention.
But another innovation
that we're working on,
because we can't serve
all of these clients,
some of them have different set of uses,
some of them have the
ability to set up their own
CLIA approved laboratories,
many of our institutions do.
But to serve an underserved
community, for example,
or to serve a small university,
to serve K through 12 education,
that won't have a CLIA approved lab.
We are in the process of a prototype
that should be done in
the next week or so,
of a mobile COVID-19 laboratory.
And we hadn't done envision at
least a half dozen to a dozen
to maybe two dozen of
these being deployed.
