School of Public Health Staff Were Laid Off in Order to Pay for Unnecessary and Pointless COVID Testing

Back in July, the School of Public Health community was notified that we had to endure "painful" layoffs of a number of staff due to budget shortfalls for the fall semester. What we weren't told, however, was that many of these layoffs were "necessary" because the School was implementing an enormously expensive COVID testing system in order to be able to "safely" bring back hundreds of students onto campus so that we could continue to market our "Learn from Anywhere" program of in-person classes (mixed with an online option for those who are particularly vulnerable to complications of COVID or who are simply anxious about dying unnecessarily). The inordinate cost of this testing program is certainly a reason why the School was "forced" to make the "painful" decision to lay off a number of our staff.

However, what is truly "painful" is the fact that these layoffs, or at least a portion of them, were necessitated solely because the School was obstinate about holding in-person classes. Had the School chosen the more sensible online-only option, then we would not be bringing hundreds of students onto the campus and would therefore avoid the costs of this exorbitantly expensive testing program.

The program calls for every student to be tested weekly. Assuming that we have about 600 students who would need to tested and 14 weeks of class, that amounts to more than 6,000 tests. At a cost of $100 per test, the price tag for this testing would be $600,000. This is probably a conservative estimate as it doesn't include any of the staff, equipment, and reagent costs. But it makes the point: we're likely talking about at least 10 staff members who "needed" to be laid off in order to allow the resources for this testing.

And what do we gain from the program? Nothing. From a didactic perspective, there is no question that this confusing, cumbersome, hybrid approach is far inferior to simply having online classes, as so many other schools of public health have realized (including both of the other schools of public health in Boston). As I have explained in other posts, the only thing we gain from this is financial: preserving tuition dollars from students who we were afraid might have deferred or gone elsewhere had we not assured them back in the late spring that we would be offering in-person classes this fall.

The bottom line is that these layoffs, or at least some of them, were not a "painful" decision necessary because after doing everything it could to save money, the School just couldn't afford to continue employing these victims of a budget shortfall. What was truly painful was the decision to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on an inordinate amount of COVID testing that would not have been necessary in the first place had we done the responsible thing and made the health of our community and our world our highest priority.

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