Illinois Medicine

ATTHEW DURST HAD BEEN TRACKING COVID-19 since early January 2020, when the World Health Organization announced the emergence of a mysterious, coronavirus-related pneumonia in Wuhan, China. Durst—an MD/PhD student at the College of Medicine's Chicago campus—is a professed news junkie. But his assiduous tracking of the novel coronavirus was fueled by a larger sense of purpose. As president of the University Medical Student Council, which supports and promotes the interests of medical students at the College's four campuses, he felt duty-bound to inform and advocate for his fellow physicians in training as the sudden emergence and rapid spread of SARS-CoV-2 ignited a global pandemic. By the end of January, human-to-human transmission of the novel coronavirus had jumped from the original cluster of 59 cases in Wuhan to more than 9,800 cases in Germany, Japan, Taiwan, the United States and Vietnam—prompting WHO to declare a global health emergency. Durst was checking his Twitter feed, as well as international news outlets, daily for updates. Although the news was far from reassuring, he had no sense at the time of the magnitude of the impending pandemic—or how drastically his life as a third-year medical student was about to change. The lockdown By March 11, when WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic, Durst had completed his eight-week surgery rotation and was enjoying a two-week break before starting his final M3 clerkship in family medicine on March 16. "Those were the last weeks of 'semi- normality' that I can remember," he says. "I finally had time to get a haircut, see the dentist and spend some time with my wife." Meanwhile, the news was growing more alarming as the pandemic spread unchecked around the globe. "We were beginning to see that dramatic changes in our curriculum were going to be necessary," says Raymond Curry, MD, senior associate dean for educational affairs. "Because of the shortage of PPE that was plaguing the entire medical profession—and the lack of appropriate testing strategies to determine which patients might be infectious—we began to consider the possibility of pulling students out of the clinical environment. "It was a very difficult decision to make because we consider medical students to be an important part of the healthcare team in the hospital and the clinic—and they learn best by doing," he adds. "To my knowledge, there has never before been a time when medical educators found it was necessary to remove medical students from their clerkships. But we quickly determined that we could not ensure the safety of our students in any clinical settings." On Sunday, March 15— the day before Durst's family medicine rotation was set to begin—Executive Dean Mark Rosenblatt, MD, PhD, MBA, MHA, issued a university-wide memo to the College of Medicine community in Chicago, Peoria, Rockford and Urbana. "We were informed that March 16 and 17 would be considered 'clerkship holidays' with no student participation in either clinical activities or conferences," recalls Durst. "Clerkship activities would resume on March 18 without on-site clinical responsibilities of any kind. All visiting rotations would be suspended through the end of May, on-campus lectures and labs would be suspended indefinitely, and the entire medical school curriculum would be shifted online." By the following morning, all in-person education at the university's four medical school campuses and hospitals and clinics had ceased. Two days later, the Association of American Medical Colleges issued a statement urging medical schools across the nation to pause all clinical rotations—effective immediately—to give the medical education community time to procure adequate supplies of PPE and "develop appropriate educational strategies and alternative clinical experiences to best assure safe, meaningful clinical learning for students." M " " It took tremendous innovation and commitment on the part of the faculty—and resilience on the part of the student body— to keep medical education moving forward during the pandemic. Raymond Curry, MD senior associate dean for educational affairs Raymond Curry, MD P H O T O : S U S A N R E I C H Illinois Medicine | 25

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