 You are tuned in to the COVID-19 community report here on KDRT 95.7 FM in Davis, California. It's the first day of autumn, my favorite season, so I'm a happy camper today. It's Tuesday, September 22nd. We're sharing local news and resources focusing on what's impacting Davis and nearby cities in Yolo County during the COVID-19 pandemic. Before we get to the updates in today's interview with UC Davis Chancellor Gary May, let me pause to wish KDRT a very happy birthday. September 24th marks 16 years since we started KDRT, which early on I dubbed as the little radio station that could. Though classified as a low-power FM station, KDRT's impact locally has been anything but small. It's been my privilege to steer the Davis Media Access ship, including KDRT, for many years and also to hop in the host seat six months ago to bring you this program. So if this show has been useful to you on any level, please consider making a donation this week to support the work we do here. Because the truth is, community radio doesn't happen without community support. Learn more at KDRT.org and thank you. And here are some COVID updates for our area. The adjusted case rate in Yolo County dropped from over 9 per 100,000 residents last week and to 7.5 this week, continuing a downward trend in cases over the last two weeks. However, public health officials urged caution saying Yolo County remains at least two weeks away from moving out of the state's purple tier for counties with widespread risk of COVID-19 transmission. In order to move to the red tier, which would allow a number of Yolo County businesses, including gyms, libraries, nail salons, movie theaters, and places of worship to reopen, albeit with restrictions on the number of people allowed in at a time, the county's daily case rate must go below 7 and remain there for at least two weeks. In addition to having a daily case rate below 7 per 100,000 residents, a county must also have a test positivity rate below 8% in order to move from tier 1 to tier 2. The return of thousands of UC Davis students in the next week, many of whom will be screened by the University for COVID-19 upon arrival, could make that difficult if the increased testing results in a higher daily case rate for the county as a whole. And we'll have more on that later with our guest. Meanwhile, Yolo Public Health is offering free COVID-19 testing at various locations in Yolo County during the latter half of September. That's us now through the end of September 30th. That will provide greater accessibility to testing. The specific testing site dates and locations are spread across Yolo County with locations in Clarksburg, Dunnegan, Asparto, West Sacramento, and Woodland. Proof of residency is required. I'm going to give you the website for registration. You must pre-register. I'm then going to direct you to the yolocounty.org webpage to capture it. It's avalancoronatest.com slash patient, A-V-E-L-L-I-N coronatest.com slash patient. In addition to those sites provided by the county, the state of California's free OptumServe test site remains open at the Davis Senior Center through September 30th, and that's at 646 A Street in Davis. An important note on this site is that it's open to all California residents, regardless of documentation status, and it's by appointment only, and all ages are welcome. To schedule, call 888-634-1123 or go online at lhi.care. We're going to take a moment for music, and we will be back with our interview shortly. Okay, my guest today is Gary S. May, who became UC Davis's seventh chancellor in 2017. He leads the most comprehensive campus in the University of California system with four colleges and six professional schools. The numbers are kind of staggering. UC Davis enrolls more than 39,000 students, brings in nearly 850 million annually in sponsored research, and contributes $8 billion annually to California's economy. It's an institution that brought many alums, like yours truly, to Davis and helped us find a home and make a difference locally. This week, UC Davis was once again rated among the top colleges in the country in the latest best colleges rankings by US News and World Report, which ranked UC Davis the 11th best public school in the United States and the 39th best school overall. Quite an accomplishment. Welcome to you, Chancellor May, and thank you for joining us. Thank you, Adam. Thanks for having me. You bet. Well, to start, my impression of you is that you're a very outgoing and community-oriented leader. So I'm guessing that's brought its own challenges in this pandemic. How are you and your family doing? Other families don't call families. This has been a bit of a trying time. A lot has actually lost her aunt to the virus back in March. But, you know, and we all feel kind of isolated in this the daily interaction of people around the campus and the community. We're missing football, these days, and all those sort of things. Yeah. Well, over the summer, you hired a new provost and executive vice chancellor, which is a big deal. And she happens to be an epidemiologist. Is her background a happy coincidence or was that by design? Please tell us about her role on campus. Yeah, that was just on my amazing foresight. Her name is Mary Crowbin. Mary is our provost and executive vice chancellor. She does happen to be an epidemiologist, which really was just a happy accident. So she's actually served 30 years in the University of California. She was UCSF faculty member. She was system-wide academic senate chair. She worked with the office of the president. But most recently, she came to us from the University of Nevada, Las Vegas, where she was vice president for research. And she is an Aggie herself. She got her BS from UC Davis in community health. And she's an Aggie parent. Several of her children have been Aggies. The one I think is still currently an Aggie. Great. Keeping it in the family. Yeah, she's been terrific. She's been a great addition to our leadership team. Her insight is valuable, and she works very well with all of us. Well, congratulations on that. So when you run an institution as big as UC Davis, you obviously deal with challenges on a large scale as well. So who advises you on the pandemic? There's no shortage of advice for the chancellor. All sorts of ways. But in terms of who I regularly work with and listen to, public health officials, our elected leaders, experts from across our campus, all helped me to make the decisions we need to make. We used that input to decide when we were going to suspend operations as well as our gradual return to operations. And we put all that into a website, our campus-ready website. The campus-ready.ucdavits.edu, if people are interested. We also share a weekly email update that goes out to the campus community, checking in with Chancellor May, and I'm very active on social media. So I'm putting information out and receiving a lot of feedback on social media as well. Great. And you're right on the cusp of a very big week with what, some 24,000 students expected to be living here, fall quarter, which starts next week. And I know the vast majority of students here in Davis live in apartments and single-family homes. So I'm wondering, can you tell us about the plans for testing students when they arrive and then on an ongoing basis? Yeah, sure. Of those 24,000, actually 11,000 of them were already here. Living in the community and the rest are arriving this week. I'm actually really proud of the teamwork that we've been able to establish between the city and the county and the university to manage the pandemic. We have this initiative, we're calling Healthy Davis Together, which you may have heard about or read about. And that's really a cooperative initiative between the university and the city to reduce the spread of COVID-19 in the community. And a big part of it is the testing that we're going to be doing on campus. We actually started the testing last week. I did the testing myself. High throughput, saliva-based PCR tests. So not the nasal swab, but you just spit into a tube and the results are available in 24 hours. And right now, we're just validating that with the nasal swab test to make sure that we're getting accurate results. And once we've finished the validation pilot, we'll be ready to do the mass throughput, which we'll be able to test thousands of students per day, or thousands of people per day. We've already tested more than a thousand of the students who are moving into the campus housing with very limited positive, I think only one positive I'm aware of. Right. In talking with public health officials at the county, the unknown is obviously when you bring in an influx of people who haven't been in community for a while, we'll have to watch for a couple of weeks and see how things develop if cases go up or not. I think the harder question, and I think this is a hard question because I don't know what authority the university has to, I'm going to use the word enforce. For students who are living off-campus in congregate settings, I'm trying very hard not to pick on the Greek system, but I'm going to use them as an example. When people tend to gather, if they gather, will there be any consequences for that? That is to say, if they gather in a way that is not compliant with current public health guidelines. Yeah, so I'll get to the enforcement issue in just a second. I want to start by saying we're looking at this as an educational and developmental opportunity rather than a way to punish people. And so we've hired 250 students to be what we're calling public health ambassadors. And those will be peer ambassadors for those other students who will remind people to wear their masks, that's forgotten them or keep six feet apart and wash their hands and all those sort of things that we're used to hearing now. And the idea is that they'll be better messaged from them than from the administration saying what to do, what not to do. And yes, there will be a series of progressive consequences for people who don't behave properly, up to and including suspension and expulsion, but we hope we don't get that far. But there are new policies in place and we've already codified the policies, so the students are aware of them. The students are taking a pledge to behave properly. It's part of their return to campus and their orientation for the new students. So we're trying to do the best we can with just messaging and communication of what's good behavior rather than being heavy-handed with it. Right, right, sounds like a good plan. I know a lot of us are, you know, having students here in town is, I'm gonna say it's a mixed bag. All of a sudden, town is more crowded and people are learning how to ride bikes in traffic and you know, all of that. But students support the local economy and the business in a profound way. And so I think there's a lot of hope about them coming back and about, you know, helping keep our businesses alive. Yeah, that's why the Healthy Davis together is so important. We have to be partners in this. We want the students to behave properly. We want the businesses to be open and available and have the right sort of safe environment for people to be patrons. And I think, you know, it's a win-win if we can do it together. Sure. And of course, I'm sure you've been watching the news elsewhere in the country where colleges have and universities have opened without these kinds of precautions in place and it's not been a good outcome. Yeah, one advantage to being on quarters, starting so late as we get to kind of observe what everyone else has done, try not to make the same mistake. So, you know, our curriculum is of in-person instruction. Only about 35 courses out of our 6,000 course bulk curriculum will be in-person and these will just be sort of laboratory, performance, studio kind of courses. We have 10 so the students can do those courses outside, which is a little bit safer. And I think some of our peer institutions early on were a little bit more aggressive in their in-person instruction than we're going to be, which led to some of the problems. Right, and this is not a short-term solution. The latest news suggests that, you know, we'll be doing this all through the academic year. Do you think that's the case? I think we won't get back to a normal quote-unquote until probably next year, but I hope that we can gradually in a phase of manner get closer and closer throughout the year. So, as the state goes from, you know, the county goes from purple to red to whatever the next color is. And we will at the same time be, you know, easing our restrictions as well and having a very personal class and all sorts of things. Yeah, if we've been stuck on red so long, I'm not sure there's anything past purple. I'm kidding, of course. So, well, obviously, you see, Davis, as I mentioned this earlier, it's just a giant in our region in terms of its revenues and its employment. So I'm curious what impact the disruption of the pandemic has had on things like the university's fundraising, its staffing, its support services, just kind of in general terms. Well, so there's good news and bad news there. You know, the bad news was obviously there was a tremendous financial hit to the university when the pandemic started, mainly in the areas of housing and dining because students went home and we got them out of their housing contracts. And then the medical center lost lots of revenue because of not doing elective surgeries and that sorts of things, only focusing on making room for fire stations in the ICU. And so we lost probably a total of $180 million or so from March to June. Now, some of that was alleviated by the CARES Act. We got $34 million in CARES Act funds, but still pretty significant losses. And it's going to take us a while to come back, but I think we will bounce back because the fundamental business model is sound. So as things return to normal, we'll recover. On the positive side, the university has record year in two categories. Fundraising, philanthropy was a record of $253 million last fiscal year from more than 30,000 donors. So I can't say enough about how proud I am of our community stepping up and being generous to the university under these circumstances. And we also generated a record $941 million in research awards. Wow. And that was nearly $100 million more than the previous record. So our faculty and our researchers are just doing exceptionally well and doing the kind of important research that the country needs at this time. Great. Those are some phenomenal numbers. I've actually interviewed some of your faculty, virologist and epidemiologist. And so I know a little bit about this, but let's discuss about the role UCD is playing, particularly in the research and development of vaccines and other COVID-related research. Well, we're trying to be part of the solution here. In the beginning of the pandemic, our school of medicine, veterinary medicine, our Center for Immunology and infection diseases all started collaborating on vaccines and diagnosed the testing. We're actually participating in clinical trials, I think, for two different vaccines. You may remember the first community spread patient for COVID-19 at UC Davis Medical Center. And so we were instrumental in getting the CDC to change testing protocols based on that experience. And we treated that patient, I believe, with remdesivir, if I'm not mistaken, which has become an important therapeutic for the disease. And the patient is fully recovered at home. So that's a really good news story. Our College of Engineering is working with the School of Medicine on 3D printing test swabs and working on producing ventilators. And we have communication experts that are analyzing social media as a way to track outbreaks. Some pretty innovative work there. So all sorts of things going on to, again, be part of the COVID-19 solution. Wonderful. So one of the other disruptions early in the pandemic was, as construction came to a halt, there were a lot of things going on. I know UCD has committed to building a lot of student housing. And much of that is quite visibly underway. I'm curious if the pandemic has interrupted any of the long-range development plan or if things are on track to proceed. Unfortunately, nothing was interrupted. We are on track. Maybe we'll open up 1,000 new beds in our West Village development. And that's actually where I was helping students, transfer students and others move in last week. Nice. We'll have another 2,300 beds by next academic year. So we are well on our way to solving some of the housing issues that we've had in the community for many years. So I'm really happy about that. Great. So I'd like to end on a note where we think about if you could sit down one-on-one with an incoming UC Davis student or if you could address the whole class that's coming in right now, what would your message be about hope and about keeping on in this very weird year we're having? Yeah, that's a great question. I guess the first thing I would tell them is you've made a great choice in coming to UC Davis. You're going to be at a top 10 or top five public university in the country and you're going to get a great education that's going to prepare you for your career. You're also going to be at a place that cares about social mobility. And even though you make from humble beginnings, many of our students are first generation or low income or other issues, you're going to have a transformative experience here that's going to propel you and your family to high quality of life. And we're going to try to instill in you some sense of responsibility for your fellow students, your fellow citizens in your community because we want our students to be leaders in their communities and in their jobs and be a force for positive change, social change as they go out and leave us. So I think you'll also be able to still have a little fun. We're going to try to do some programming, socially distant and safe programming for the students that are here. And over time over the next several months and a couple years, we'll get back to something close to normal. Yes, the phrase new normal has become, well, the new normal. We all say it. We all find ourselves saying it. So I really want to thank you for taking time to talk with us today. I want to let you know that you've been my most requested interview as I reached out to the community and said, who would you like to hear from? People really, yeah, people really wanted to hear from you because obviously UC Davis has, you know, big footprint in the community. And I also want you to know in your honor, my mask today is Star Trek themed. And we're on the radio, so I can't show you, but I felt moved to wear it because I'm with you. I have a couple of Star Trek masks for myself. All right. Again, thank you so much for participating in local community radio and wishing you all the best as the quarter kicks off. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. You bet. Take care. Bye-bye. That was Chancellor Gary May of UC Davis. And we're going to take a little break for music and come back and chat a little bit more. All right. I always feel like I rush through the information I share about testing every week. So I am just going to share that one more time because it felt a little hurried earlier. So let's note that Yolo County Public Health is now offering free coronavirus screening, COVID-19 testing at various locations in Yolo County through September 30th. And to be clear, these are, this is to see if you have COVID-19, it does not test for antibodies or anything else. And it's going to be all over Yolo County throughout the rest of the month with locations in Clarksburg, Dunnegan, Asparto, West Sacramento and Woodland. And in some of those locations, you may notice are pretty rural. They're in pretty small areas of the county. And I think this is really an attempt to make sure that everyone who needs testing is getting tested. So proof of residency is required. You have to live in Yolo County to access these. It's free. Registration is recommended in order to speed up the process. But they say it's not required and it doesn't guarantee a test. And also when you register, you won't get any feedback. You won't get an email saying that you're registered and confirming your date. So I'm not sure what that's about. But again, the link for that is avalenocoronatest.com slash patient. All lowercase and avaleno is spelled A-V-E-L-L-I-N-O avalenocoronatest. And then of course, again, through the state of California, they maintain the free OptumServe test site. Open at the Davis Senior Center at 646 A Street in Davis. And that's Tuesday through Saturday, 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. through the end of the month. This one is open to all California residents, regardless of documentation status. And it is also by appointments only. Interestingly enough, none of the other sites say this. All ages are welcome at this one. And it's at the Senior Center. So that's very inclusive of them. To schedule an appointment for this site only, you can call 888-634-1123 or you can go online to lhi.care. I'm going to sign off for today. I'm excited next week to bring Jesse Salinas, who is among many roles he plays, a assessor, clerk, recorder, and elections head at the county. And we're going to talk about how the pandemic has changed how we vote in this most pivotal and important election year. So signing off from the KDRT Studio, this is Autumn Lab Bay Renaud. You've been listening to the COVID-19 community report.