Heading home for the holiday? Get a virus test, colleges say

SALT LAKE CITY

As college students prepare to go home for the holidays, some schools are quickly ramping up COVID19 testing to try to keep infections from spreading further as the coronavirus surges across the U.S.

Thousands of cases have been connected to campuses since some colleges reopened this fall, forcing students to quarantine in dorms and shifting classes online. Now, many students are heading home for Thanksgiving, raising the risk of the virus spreading among family, friends and other travellers.

“The responsibility and the reach of the impact is not just to the student body anymore, it’s to those close contacts,” said Emily Rounds, a student who helps collect data on college testing plans nationwide for the Crisis College Initiative at Davidson College.

Colleges’ pandemic plans vary widely. About one-third of four-year colleges started primarily in person this fall, the initiative’s researchers found as they tracked about 1,400 schools.

Only about 100 colleges initially tested all students once or twice a week, regardless of symptoms, as part of their back-to-school plans. Many more tested random samples of students or tested those with symptoms — neither of which is considered enough to stop the spread of the disease, said Christopher Marsicano, an education professor at Davidson who founded the project.

Since early November, though, the researchers have seen a noticeable uptick in schools requiring or encouraging students to get tested before Thanksgiving. For many colleges, the holiday marks the end of in-person learning for the year, whether moving classes online was always the plan to keep students from bringing the virus back to campus or it became the response to soaring infections nationwide, which have now surpassed 11.7 million.

Some colleges are turning to states for help paying for the extra tests, while others are relying on those developed by their own researchers.