Shaken

In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, work-at-home mandates for the university where I work in Utah began on Monday, March 16, 2020. The University's IRB approached the work-at-home situation with a can-do attitude. We weren't sure exactly how this pandemic was going to take shape, but we were going to make it work. We started marking things off of our checklist with semi-confidence:

• • We figured out our virtual conferencing platform.

• • We wrote some initial rules of conduct for the convened meetings and disseminated them to our members.

• • We bought everyone a new set of headphones with a microphone in hopes we would have sufficient sound quality.

• • We trained two of our staff members to be meeting hosts (affectionately referred to as 'meeting Yodas'), to guide everyone to virtual meeting bliss while trouble shooting all technical problems and helping IRB discussions to go off without a hitch.

On Monday, March 16, we felt good. We had taken on the initial pandemic stress and subdued it into submission. We were ready for our first virtual convened IRB meeting at noon on Wednesday.

Then Salt Lake City experienced a 5.7 magnitude earthquake at 7:09 AM on Wednesday, March 18.

The thing that stood out most to me about the earthquake was how loud it was. Many of us in Salt Lake City were still in our beds at 7:09 AM and we were not only shaken awake, but startled from sleep by the rumbles and groans of our houses. My house rattled and boomed around me as I clung to my newborn baby and my husband ran for our toddler. The IRB staff spent the morning checking in with one another, feeling out our emotions and reporting on the state of our foundations, our pets, our WiFi. Luckily the whole of Salt Lake City experienced very little damage and the population was safe; no injuries or fatalities. We hadn't been devastated, only shaken. We decided everything was okay enough to go forward with our virtual-convened IRB meeting scheduled at noon. We experienced more than four dozen aftershocks that day. The largest—a 4.6 magnitude quake—occurred at 1:12 PM, smackdab in the middle of the convened IRB meeting. The IRB chair paused in his review, while everyone watched each other shake in their video squares on the screen. We continued to feel aftershocks for a few weeks, and each one would trigger that rudimentary fear for one's safety, the fear of the unknown, and the fear of losing control.

The day of the earthquake brought a dark cloud over the IRB staff's personal confidence for mitigating the cumulating stress. Our mood toward the pandemic's onset turned from inquisitive to somber. Though the pandemic and the earthquake were not correlated in any way, a new level of seriousness washed over us as we grappled to understand how to re-exert any modicum of control over our changing lives. We yearned for normalcy in a way distinct from the rest of the world who was also being upended by COVID-19.

Many of us at the IRB found there was one thing we could control: the review of research. Projects to study the various aspects of SARS-CoV-2 infections, testing, treatments, and pandemic social conditions came pouring in, with 32 pandemic-related projects reviewed and approved by the IRB within the first 30 days of the work-at-home mandate. We threw ourselves into the fervor for getting these studies reviewed and approved quickly, feeling it was our way of contributing to the pandemic's eventual end. We were able to prioritize these studies and complete our reviews in a fraction of the time were they to have entered our normal review queue (although, it required that non-COVID-19 studies be pushed back in the review queue). We convened some urgent IRB meetings that were not part of our regular schedule; because we had a panel with a quorum of three, we were able to quickly and easily find three IRB members at a time (out of over...