COLUMBUS (WCMH) — Ohio State President Michael Drake held a news conference Tuesday afternoon to discuss the university’s response to COVID-19 coronavirus.

In a statement made Monday night, OSU stated it was suspending lectures, discussion sections, seminars, and similar classroom settings and moving to virtual instruction, effective immediately and through at least March 30.

Tuesday, Drake described the task of moving to online learning in one week as ‘Herculean.’

Drake said the university is doing everything it can to ensure the continuity of students’ education.

“No one has seen this happen quite like this before, so there’s no cookbook or playbook about what one should do,” Drake said. “What we’re trying to do is to use the information we have, use the best information we can, and then make decisions that help us to move forward to protect our communities and then in the case of the university, to keep the university functioning at the highest possible level.”

Drake said he was able to draw from his experience as the Vice President for Health Affairs at the University of California during the SARS outbreak in the early 2000s when formulating his response.

“We had a choice here really of doing all we could to try to mitigate the hold and damage of the virus before we had someone become very sick, or unfortunately die, or we could wait until after that happened to do the most that we could,” he said. “We wanted to be ahead of that and do as much as we could to prevent those things from happening proactively.”

A letter from Drake, to the university community, states the school is monitoring the COVID-19 coronavirus outbreak.

“While there are no campus-associated cases of COVID-19, we know that there are at least three confirmed cases in the state of Ohio, and we expect that there will be more,” Drake writes in the letter. “We are being proactive in an effort to prevent illness and continue the important work of the university.”

Students at the school are on spring break this week.

Drake said he and his team will determine when to resume classes as normal, based on the latest information from health officials.

Three cases of COVID-19 coronavirus were confirmed in Cuyahoga County Monday, prompting Gov. Mike DeWine to declare a state of emergency.