Thanksgiving holiday for this year is just a week ahead! Unlike previous Thanksgiving holidays though, this year, many colleges and universities in the United States decided to end their face to face instructions to mitigate the COVID spread on their campuses. Likewise, higher education institutions have adopted a new standard to see if they have had a successful year or semester – COVID-19 infection rate on campus.
The article titled What Counts as Success in a COVID Semester by Elizabeth Redden looked into multiple American campuses that did a great job managing low infection rates to figure out what made them stand out. The article shares some of the working papers and researches on how college reopenings impacted surrounding communities and how frequently U.S. colleges are conducting COVID testing. It concludes that aggressive testing on campus is the key to the low infection rate. In this blog, I will summarize these findings from the article to urge the importance of aggressive testing programs including entry and exit testing on campuses.
Some colleges that have reported low case counts share certain characteristics: they have aggressive testing programs combined with robust contact tracing and quarantine/isolation capacities, and they’re located in Northeastern states that have been relatively less hard hit by the pandemic in recent months.
What Counts as Success in a COVID Semester
Contents
- Examples of universities that have had below 1 infection rate
- Interesting researches on COVID and higher education
Examples of universities that have had below 1 infection rate
From the article, it was clear to see how aggressive testing has helped colleges and universities to keep the lower infection rate. In addition, big universities where have their own labs, thus able to contact tracing and process samples, showed remarkably lower- even below 0.5- positivity rates.
Below is the table that you can see three exemplary universities that have kept case numbers down through frequent testing. These colleges require students to get tested as much as twice weekly (or every three days) or at least weekly. I hoped to see more colleges that have robust testing programs but according to the research that I am going to share in the next paragraph, only 6% of universities test all students on a regular basis.
| University | Testing Program | Testing Result | Note |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cornell University | All undergrad students and some employees are getting tested twice weekly and grad students, professional students, and some employees are tested weekly. | 0.2 percent weekly | Cornell built its own lab for processing samples |
| University of Vermont | Weekly required testing for all students | 0.01 percent positivity. Total 27 cases from Aug to Nov 2020 | Vermont celebrated the milestone of its 100,000th test administered on campus at the end of October. |
| Northeastern University | Students get tested every three days and faculty members, staff, and contractors get tested twice weekly. | 0.05 transmission rate (165 positive cases out of 320,764 tests). | Northeastern built its own testing lab and is handling contact tracing itself. |
Interesting researches on COVID and higher education
Effects of COVID on higher education
While the number of confirmed cases is skyrocketing nationally, not every college has a clear testing plan according to a recent analysis of testing strategies. The College Crisis Initiative at Davidson College in North Carolina had a look at more than 1,400 colleges and found that “two-thirds of colleges and universities have no clear testing plan or are only testing “at-risk” students, those who are symptomatic or who have had contact with an infected individual.” Additionally, the analysis found that just “25 percent of colleges are conducting mass screening or random ‘surveillance’ testing of students, and only 6 percent are routinely testing all of their students.”
Although the numbers are small, The New York Times also has tracked more than 214,000 COVID cases at American higher education institutions and found at least 75 deaths since the pandemic began. Amongst 75, most of the deaths involved college employees as the virus has more impacts on older people. There were several students as well who died due to COVId or COVID-related complications.
If you would like to have a glance at the COVID-19 outbreak in U.S. colleges and universities, you can do so by going to College COVID-19 Outbreak Watchlist. This watchlist is an interactive tool to see COVID-19 outbreak levels of each college and university by green, yellow, and red.
Effects of COVID on the college community
There was another interesting working paper on how in-person college re-openings this semester impacted surrounding neighbors. The paper, wrote by researchers and scholars from four different universities and hasn’t been peer-reviewed yet, concluded that estimated that “in-person college reopenings this fall were associated with increases in cases in surrounding counties and were associated with an additional 3,000 COVID cases per day in the U.S.”
In sum, reports and numbers show that aggressive and regular testing is the key to manage cases on campus and surrounding counties successfully. As we get closer to the end of the semester, exit and entry testing will be a great idea along with regular testings for safe study, work, and living environment for students, employees, and neighbors respectively.
