TAMPA — One month has passed since the beginning of the fall semester began for students, staff, and faculty at the University of South Florida.
Donna Petersen, the dean of The College of Public Health, chairs the task force that is responsible for advising the USF leadership team on decisions related to campus operations during COVID-19. The task force includes members from USF Health, Research and Innovation, and representatives from each of USF’s campuses.
“So, it’s a broadly representative group of people from all three of our campuses that represent the various functional areas of the campus,” Petersen said on Zoom. “And we advise both the emergency operations team, who’s managing the crisis, as well as the executive policy group.”
The task force sits in between those two groups. Ordinarily, that would not happen, but because COVID-19 is a health emergency, they created this group to advise the university.
When the task force formed in early March, Petersen says they were still learning about COVID-19.
“We’re learning about this virus every day, and we were trying to think about all the implications of the virus in real-time,” Petersen said.
