Letter to the Community
Unicamp in 2020, the year of the pandemic: a brief review
It is often necessary to go back years or decades to confirm whether an experience or a certain period was truly “historical”, remarkable and decisive enough to define an era and be remembered even with the displacement of time.
This is certainly not the case in 2020, in which we had the clarity of living through a historic moment of great transformation. It is more difficult to be sure which images will be most remembered from this period for each of us. The tough battle in hospitals, marks on the faces of health professionals from wearing masks so much, the hundreds of graves dug in cemeteries, children dressed as soldiers from a bomb squad to return to school and unusual home situations, such as soaping potato packets -straw as a heroic act of protecting the family's health. Which of these scenes will symbolize 2020?
At Unicamp, I add to them a snapshot that impacted me on my first trip to campus right after we suspended non-essential face-to-face activities: an unprecedented emptiness, not seen before, not even on weekends or holidays. The silence was frightening. This is not Unicamp, I thought in the first second, and then rethought: this is, yes, Unicamp – as Unicamp as it always was, because even though we are separated by dozens, hundreds and in some cases thousands of kilometers, we have never been so close, with the sense of community so clear, in 54 years of existence.
On the morning of March 12, 2020, Unicamp became the first Brazilian university to announce the suspension of classes and other non-essential face-to-face activities as a protective measure against the new coronavirus. Criticism arrived instantly, from different sides. “Alarmists”, “hasty” and other words were used in response to our announcement. But within a few days institutions across Brazil adopted the same path and the government of the State of São Paulo ordered quarantine.
Unicamp's agility was due to the fact that monitoring of the pandemic caused by the new coronavirus began more than three months before the WHO (World Health Organization) officially declared, on March 11, 2020, that the disease had spread. around the world.
The professionals responsible for risk and safety management at the Hospital de Clínicas da Unicamp turned on the yellow warning signal in November 2019. Systematic monitoring of the disease took place since the beginning of its spread in China and, as the weeks went by, the increases of cases on other continents, mainly in Europe.
Long before the first cases of Covid-19 arrived at the hospital, which would occur in March, Unicamp HC's contingency plan to face Covid-19 was ready. The first step taken by professionals from the hospital and the Faculty of Medical Sciences was to organize the flow of care for future patients from the hospital's entrance door. In parallel, preventive protocols were created to guarantee the health of all the institution's employees, a reference for a region that comprises more than 6,5 million inhabitants. The HC has also become a reference at the state level in the care of serious cases of Covid-19.
In parallel with the structuring of hospital units to face the pandemic, Unicamp's health department developed an effective strategy aimed at obtaining personal protective equipment for all employees. So that hospital supplies, both donations and purchases, were used in the best way possible, the university created a committee that directed and managed the entire flow of individual equipment according to the needs of each unit or department.
At the same time that we were rushing to take the necessary actions in health, the demand for money to fund teaching and research in this new scenario exploded.
After a great effort to reduce the budget gap generated in previous years, Unicamp found itself facing an imminent free fall in revenue (as, by law, they represent a percentage of the ICMS collected by the state, the fall would be in the same proportion as the tax that would no longer be collected). Any carelessness with money at these times could result in unthinkable situations – it would be unacceptable for a nurse to be unable to work due to lack of a mask, for example.
It was necessary to be creative and use more original sources. And so it was done: within a few days, to our relief, positive responses began to arrive: funds deposited in court (the fruits of agreements and indemnities) started to be allocated to Unicamp's coffers for hospital purchases, donations based on Resolution 313 /2020 of the National Council of Justice (CNJ). And by the end of October, judicial donations had already exceeded R$11,6 million.
In the same month, another R$2,5 million had been offered by legal entities and R$1,6 million by individuals, a case of mobilization around the university that was fundamental to the fulfillment of our mission, which filled us with pride and renewed energy to move forward. Unicamp's causes also mobilized artists in the search for financial contributions. Finally, the campaign grew and gained the name “embrace the future”.
The list of people and entities essential to facing this period is extensive and it would be impossible to name them all. It starts with teachers, staff and students and involves people from everywhere, in many different ways. Unicamp was strengthened by the generosity and commitment of all of them.
With this invaluable external and internal support, Unicamp was able to play an extremely important role in this major social, economic and humanitarian crisis.
Our university accounts for 8% of academic research in Brazil, 12% of national postgraduate studies and maintains leadership among Brazilian universities in patents and number of articles per capita published annually in journals indexed in the ISI/WoS database. It is in the company of other excellent public universities, which together represent the heart of Brazilian science and innovation.
This potential for innovation was immediately made available to the cause. There were dozens of works dedicated to understanding Covid-19, its effects and combating it.
Below I list some of these initiatives, which give an idea of the diversity of areas involved.
The pandemic has sparked a rush by hospitals and health systems around the world for ventilators. The equipment is used when the patient's body cannot breathe to supply the necessary amount of oxygen. In these cases, the machines do the work that the body, within a condition caused by the disease, cannot do alone. However, its inappropriate use can cause problems, such as low levels of oxygen in the blood, or even barotrauma, injuries caused by changes in pressure in the lungs.
The work of monitoring all these variables becomes more complicated in a scenario that requires care for a large number of patients, often performed by relocated or volunteer doctors, who did not perform these procedures in their daily routine.
Thinking about facilitating these actions and also contributing to industries that have adapted their production lines to manufacture lung ventilators, researchers at Unicamp developed mathematical modeling capable of simulating the way in which the air released by ventilators can behave in patients' lungs. This would be possible through the resources of computational fluid dynamics, which translates the behavior of gases and liquids into digital form.
Those involved in the project created a simple engineering procedure, in open software, so that any engineer can work with it, resulting in an effective contribution to the fight against the pandemic.
As the new coronavirus spread around the world, its potential to invade the nervous system became clear, causing symptoms ranging from loss of smell, encephalitis and stroke, to anxiety and cognitive impairment, directly or indirectly. The entry routes appear to be the olfactory nerve or the barrier of capillaries that irrigate the brain.
In October, a large group of researchers from various institutions in São Paulo and Rio, led by a professor from Unicamp, managed to demonstrate that the coronavirus enters the brain and invades astrocytes, proliferating in them and seriously altering their function of supporting neurons and synapses. This alters brain structure and causes functional impairment in the form of neurological and psychological symptoms.
Experiments conducted at Unicamp also confirmed the hypothesis that the new coronavirus (SARS-CoV-2) may be capable of infecting human fat cells and remaining inside them. This data can help to understand why obese individuals are at greater risk of developing the severe form of Covid-19.
It is also worth highlighting that researchers from Unicamp's Biology Institute (IB) developed a method that allows the genetic material of the new coronavirus to be visualized inside cells.
Finally, the race for the vaccine.
On August 6, Unicamp's Hospital de Clínicas began clinical trials of the coronavirus vaccine, which are conducted by the Butantan Institute in partnership with the Chinese pharmaceutical company Sinovac Life Science, part of the Sinovac Biotech group.
At the same time, scientists from USP and Unicamp came together to develop a nasal spray vaccine against Covid-19. The vaccine has advantages over the injectable method, including direct action on the nasal mucosa, which is one of the main entry points for the new coronavirus into the human body. In this way, the prospect is that the virus will be eliminated in the entry channel. The vaccine entered the pre-clinical testing phase, in mice, and proceeded to the production scaling stage, carried out at Unicamp.
The pandemic was also a topic of study in the humanities. One of the projects was the #MemóriasCovid19 digital platform.
With the idea of bringing together the most diverse perspectives on the pandemic caused by the new coronavirus, the platform brought together personal testimonies about isolation experiences, including the most subjective ones. Curated by researchers from nine Brazilian institutions, in addition to France and Portugal, the reports come in different formats, such as texts, photos, videos and illustrations.
As noted at the beginning of this text, there is no doubt that 2020 will be a landmark year in history, unfortunately for very bad reasons. This documentation will be valuable in understanding your impact.
All this effort, however, could not divert Unicamp from its main activity, which is training people.
When non-face-to-face activities were interrupted, starting on March 13th, the most optimistic forecast was to resume them on the 29th of the same month. On the 16th, however, the deadline was postponed for the first time, to April 12th. From then on, the deadline was extended repeatedly, depending on the evolution of the pandemic.
Suspension was the best way, there's no doubt about it. But that doesn't mean it was an easy decision and a smooth path.
From the beginning, it was clear that this would be a situation of "emergency remote teaching", in which teachers would adapt their classes in the best possible way (that is, with limitations), and not education mediated by technology, which will present itself as complementary option in the near future, with a new range of possibilities and certainly another teaching style.
One of the biggest challenges faced was dealing with the socioeconomic disparity among those enrolled at Unicamp, half of whom come from public schools. Not everyone had the technological infrastructure to attend classes properly. It was a problem that the university tried to minimize by providing notebooks, tablets, emergency grants or internet packages to students who needed them, upon request and income criteria.
And so we arrive at the present moment and the difficult decisions we have to make.
If stopping was very difficult, planning your return has been much more complicated. It is simply impossible to predict the future, and have an idea of how the pandemic will behave, when we will have vaccines, and how the situation will evolve in the cities where we have campuses. On the other hand, it is always important, in these nebulous moments, to stay focused on our mission and values. In this sense, the impossibility of face-to-face activities was beginning to significantly hinder several research groups, which had practical and/or experimental activities interrupted for more than six months. Furthermore, this negative impact began to become unsustainable for thousands of master's and doctoral students, who depend on practical activities, experiments, libraries, archives, among other equipment. For undergraduate students, there are several areas where it was not possible to remotely replace practical or laboratory classes, with extremely varied themes, including, for example, dental clinic practices, chemistry laboratories, electronics laboratories, orchestral practice, among others. We have an obligation, as a public university, to seek opportunities for this generation of students to graduate, as many already have postgraduate degrees or jobs lined up.
To carry out this return, three main elements are mandatory. 1) testing of the entire community returning to campuses: all students, employees and teachers returning to face-to-face activities are being tested by CECOM before returning; 2) Compulsory daily completion of a basic symptom survey: we developed an application that allows, using seven questions about common symptoms, to determine whether the person is fit to go to Unicamp that day. Otherwise, instructions are given on the procedures to be followed; 3) mandatory attendance of teleclasses with procedures to be followed by everyone: classes were prepared for all categories, to detail the expected and fundamental behaviors to be followed by the entire community to prevent the spread of the virus.
Naturally, the university also prepared itself, adapting physical spaces for this gradual and partial return, and ensuring cleaning products, alcohol gel, posters, and other essential requirements for this moment. But obviously, containing the pandemic is a collective effort, in which everyone needs to collaborate so that the situation improves every day. At all times, we also highlight that we will return to the previous situation if the pandemic worsens. Unicamp's return plan quickly became a reference in Brazil and Latin America, due to its level of detail and care for everyone's health.
At this time, as this very difficult year comes to an end, the assessment of the measures taken by Unicamp, both with regard to its contribution to combating the pandemic at a national and global level, and with regard to maintaining its essential activities, It looks very positive. The university knew how to use its best – creativity, commitment to research and teaching, even in such adverse conditions, and social responsibility – to remain faithful to its mission and fundamental objectives.
For me, therefore, the image that summarizes this moment is not just a visual image, but a mental image: the deserted campus and at the same time so populated with hope, commitment, a sense of belonging from each of its students, employees and teacher to the same body, in the joint fight for the common good.
I wish everyone a healthy 2021!
University City “Zeferino Vaz”
Campinas, December 18, 2020
Marcelo Knobel
Rector of the State University of Campinas - Brazil
