Last week, the Daily sat down with Chief Risk and Compliance Officer and Senior Associate Vice President Luke Figora to discuss Northwestern’s COVID-19 response, vaccination plans and student testing. This interview has been edited for clarity and brevity.
The Daily: Does the University have a threshold for implementing a Wildcat Wellness quarantine in the middle of a quarter?
Figora: I don’t think there’s a hard metric in terms of number of positive cases or a specific positivity threshold that we’ve hit that we can flip that trigger. We’ve tried to think about it more as, “Is what we’re experiencing on campus kind of sustainable from a campus environment perspective? Does the kind of transmission seem to be increasing or stable or decreasing?” If we got a sense that there were multiple large, uncontrolled clusters spread on campus, that would be more likely to push towards a Wildcat Wellness period than the number of total cases.