NATE FELTMAN: Daniels leads Purdue with data, innovation

As we have come to expect, President Mitch Daniels of Purdue University is leading.

After serving presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush, holding an executive role at Eli Lilly and Co., two terms as Indiana’s governor and now seven years into his presidency at Purdue, Hoosiers have benefited from and relied upon Daniels’ leadership.

So in a time of crisis, where better to look for sound judgment and direction?

In a recent letter to incoming freshmen and returning students, Daniels wrote that assuming governmental authorities permit reopening of school, “Purdue University, for its part, intends to accept students on campus in typical numbers this fall, sober about the certain problems that the COVID-19 virus represents, but determined not to surrender helplessly to those difficulties but to tackle and manage them aggressively and creatively.”

Daniels notes at least 80% of the Purdue community is 35 years old or younger and that “all data to date tell us that the COVID-19 virus, while it transmits rapidly in this age group, poses close to zero lethal threat to them.”

Daniels acknowledges the virus poses a serious health risk to older demographic groups, especially those with underlying health conditions, and the Purdue community includes people who have such health conditions.

He discusses using innovation to ensure learning continues in the most favorable setting for students and the most protective setting for those at high risk. He mentions reduced class sizes, more online instruction and virtual lab work, and using Purdue’s own laboratory for testing students and then quarantining and contact tracing

Daniels says that the shutdown was necessary but has come with real costs. He notes that “a return-to-operations strategy is undergirded by a fundamental conviction that even a phenomenon as menacing as COVID-19 is one of the inevitable risks of life” and that “closing down our entire society … comes at extraordinary costs, as much human as economic, and at some point, clearly before next fall, those will begin to vastly outweigh the benefits of its continuance.”

It is worth remembering that the health experts told us in mid-March that we must shelter in place and close down our way of life and commerce for two weeks in order to “flatten the curve” of infection and avoid overrunning our hospitals. Now, seven weeks in, the curve has flattened and the shutdown has bought us valuable time to slow transmission, begin research on treatments, begin testing on a larger scale and prepare for a world with new protocols aimed at preventing transmission until a vaccine arrives.

While we don’t have great data yet, the data we do have tells us COVID-19 is less deadly than the flu for young people, but likely more deadly than the flu for those older, especially those with underlying health conditions. The data argues in favor of allowing the young and healthy to get back to work and school and making accommodations for those more at risk. We need to let individuals make their own decisions about what is in their own best interests.

Daniels’ optimistic, innovative and data-driven approach strikes the right tone and balance. While his letter addresses Purdue’s fall semester, much of Daniels’ reasoning can be applied to our broader circumstances.

There are risks every day when we get out of bed. Yes, we must protect the most vulnerable among us, but it is now time to let Indiana residents make health and economic decisions for themselves before the “cure” for COVID-19 becomes much worse than the disease.

By the way, President Daniels sure has a nice ring to it.•

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Feltman is incoming CEO and a shareholder in IBJ Corp. To comment, send email to nfeltman@ibj.com.