Maryland stay-at-home order effective at 8 p.m.

March 30, 2020

Dear Faculty, Students, and Staff:

Maryland Gov. Larry Hogan today issued a stay-at-home order effective at 8 p.m. tonight to enforce physical distancing measures and restrict Marylanders to only essential activities to combat the spread of COVID-19. Your commitment during the last few weeks to shift to remote learning, adopt expansive telework policies, and wind down all but COVID-19-related and essential research functions means that Johns Hopkins University is well positioned to comply with the letter and spirit of the governor’s order.

Because of Hopkins’ unique role in the fight against the COVID-19 pandemic, both in the clinical care and research spheres, we have a substantial number of employees across the university, health system, and Applied Physics Laboratory who are considered essential under the governor’s order. We are taking appropriate precautions to keep them safe as they do this crucial work, such as providing personal protective equipment where appropriate, altering schedules to minimize personal contact, and providing guidance on preventive hygiene and physical distancing.

• JHU Essential Employees: Human Resources will shortly be contacting the university’s essential employees with instructions and documentation of their status. If you do not receive that communication but believe you should be considered essential (for example because of your role in providing or supporting patient care or maintaining critical university operations or infrastructure), please contact your manager or Human Resources representative. In addition to information about credentialing, the Human Resources communication will provide information about accessing child care options.
• Other JHU Employees: All other JHU employees should continue to work remotely. As the needs of our health system and university change in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, some of you may be called upon to serve in essential capacities. In that case, your divisional supervisors will work with you to prepare for any new role. As ever, we are deeply appreciative of your flexibility and dedication in such extraordinary circumstances.

We wish to echo Governor Hogan’s sense of urgency about the seriousness of the threat from this virus. All reliable public health guidance indicates that we are still at the beginning of this crisis and that it will get significantly worse. Our best hope of mitigating the devastating impacts is strict adherence to prescribed physical distancing practices.

We are immeasurably grateful to our employees who are performing essential work to combat this disease. For the rest of us, the single most important thing we can do to fight this pandemic is to heed the governor’s order and the advice of our own public health experts: Stay home.

We thank you all for your devotion to our university, to our communities, and to the world in this extraordinary time.

Be well and stay safe,

Sunil Kumar
Provost and Senior Vice President for Academic Affairs

Daniel Ennis
Senior Vice President for Finance and Administration

Heidi Conway
Vice President for Human Resources