Arkansas Democrat-Gazette

Virus ravages colleges; Trump urges vigilance

- COMPILED BY DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE STAFF FROM WIRE REPORTS

STORRS, Conn. — With the coronaviru­s spreading through colleges at alarming rates, universiti­es are scrambling to find quarantine locations in dormitory buildings and off-campus properties to isolate the thousands of students who have caught covid-19 or been exposed to it.

Separately, President Donald Trump is urging Americans to “remain vigilant” about the coronaviru­s over the Labor Day weekend.

Trump said at a White House briefing Friday that “we need everybody to be careful” and to “apply common sense” in their interactio­ns with one another.

Dr. Anthony Fauci, the nation’s top infectious-disease expert, said last week that several states that have seen jumps in coronaviru­s caseloads should be especially vigilant during the holiday weekend. They are Arkansas, North Dakota, South Dakota, Iowa, Illinois, Indiana and

Missouri.

Sacred Heart University has converted a 34-room guesthouse at the former Connecticu­t headquarte­rs of General Electric to quarantine students. The University of South Carolina ran out of space at a dormitory for quarantine­d students and began sending them to rooms it rented in hotel-like quarters at a training center for prosecutor­s. The Air Force Academy sent 400 cadets to hotels to free up space on its Colorado base for quarantine­s.

The actions again demonstrat­e how the virus has uprooted traditiona­l campus life amid a pandemic that has killed nearly 190,000 people in the U.S. and proved to be especially problemati­c for universiti­es since the start of the school year. Many colleges quickly scrapped in-person learning in favor of online after cases began to spike, bars have been shut down in college towns, and students, fraterniti­es and sororities have been repeatedly discipline­d for parties and large gatherings.

Health officials, such as White House coronaviru­s task force member Dr. Deborah Birx, have been urging colleges to keep students on campus to avoid them infecting members of their family and community.

At Sacred Heart, which acquired the 66-acre GE campus in 2016, the guesthouse that once provided rooms for visiting corporate executives will be used for the rest of the year to isolate any of its 3,000 students who test positive for covid-19 and are unable to return home, said Gary MacNamara, the school’s director of public safety.

Rooms are stocked with snacks, and equipped with TVs and work stations for remote learning. Health officials will do periodic checkups, security is stationed outside

and card swipes keep track of who enters or leaves.

Ryan Bologna has been locked in his dorm room at the University of Connecticu­t since 12 cases were found in his building last week. He’s allowed to go to a dining hall next door, but has had no other contact with the outside world.

Zoom classes, virtual marching band practice and video gaming are not what the communicat­ions major had envisioned for the start of his senior year.

“I do have friends I’ve made throughout the years that I can talk to,” he said. “But if I were a freshman, I’d be really struggling right now as far as the social aspect.”

Isolating students seems to be working in states like Connecticu­t, where the infection rate at the University of Connecticu­t on Thursday was 1.34% among residentia­l students tested for the virus.

CAMPUS CASES

But the results haven’t been as good elsewhere. The University of Alabama

recently informed students in half of a five-story complex that they had to move to other housing to make room for infected or potentiall­y infected students because two other quarantine-and-isolation facilities would reach capacity.

So far, more than 1,000 students on the Tuscaloosa campus have tested positive since mid-August. As of Thursday, the system’s online dashboard showed that its quarantine

housing was 36% full.

The university banned on-campus events for two weeks, and the city of Tuscaloosa ordered bars closed amid concern about virus spread. The football-obsessed school is still planning to allow fans for games — with a ban on tailgating — when the Crimson Tide begins its season this month.

The University of South Carolina has about 35,000 students on its main Columbia campus. More than 1,400 have tested positive for covid-19 so far, with many more ordered into quarantine after exposure to covid-positive students.

They were first housed in a dormitory called Bates West, where some students are allowed to room together. But once that filled up, the university began sending students off-campus to a training center for prosecutor­s.

“We do feel like we can surge additional space, either on campus or nearby, to support the students,” said Larry Thomas, a school spokesman.

Brown University in

Rhode Island has delayed the start of in-person learning until next month at the earliest because of concerns over where to put people who might test positive. Schools such as Georgia College & State University, a 7,000-student school in Milledgevi­lle that has reported more than 600 cases since the beginning of August, are telling students that if they have covid-19, they should leave campus.

HOME OR QUARANTINE?

There’s a debate in the health community about whether to send students home or keep them in quarantine.

Dr. Joseph Gerald, associate professor of public health policy and management at the University of Arizona, said the idea of identifyin­g cases, contact tracing and quarantini­ng is the right approach. He said it’s just going to be hard to do in dorms, fraternity houses or places where students congregate.

“One of the things we’re struggling with here at the University of Arizona is what to do with multistory buildings, where kids need to get to their rooms, but we have one or two elevators,” he said. “It’s not really possible to make an elevator safe.”

Dr. Peter Hotez, a Baylor College of Medicine infectious-disease expert, dean of the National School for Tropical Medicine and co-director of Texas Children’s Hospital Center for Vaccine Developmen­t, said many colleges simply cannot open safely.

“There’s only so much you can do with Plexiglas and social distancing and testing,” he said. “That will help get you about 20% to 30% of the way, the other 70% is whether you have an adequate suppressio­n of transmissi­on. You might get away with it at Bowdoin College … but clearly it’s going to fail at the University of Alabama, the University of Georgia and places like that.”

In a New York Times review

of 203 counties in the country where students comprise at least 10% of the population, about half experience­d their worst weeks of the pandemic since Aug. 1. In about half of those, figures showed the number of new infections is peaking right now.

Despite the surge in cases, there has been no uptick in deaths in college communitie­s, data shows. This suggests that most of the infections are stemming from campuses, since young people who contract the virus are far less likely to die than are older people. However, leaders fear that young people who are infected will contribute to a spread of the virus throughout the community.

COLLEGE SURGES

The surge in infections reported by county health department­s comes as many college administra­tions are also disclosing clusters on their campuses.

■ Brazos County, Texas, home to Texas A&M University, added 742 new coronaviru­s cases during the last week of August, the county’s worst week so far.

■ Pitt County, North Carolina, site of East Carolina University, saw its coronaviru­s cases rise above 800 in a single week at the end of August. The Times has identified at least 846 infections involving students, and faculty and staff members since mid-August.

■ In South Dakota’s Clay and Brookings counties, ballooning infections in the past two weeks have reflected outbreaks at the state’s major universiti­es.

■ In McLean County, Illinois, the virus has been spreading as more than 1,200 people have contracted it at Illinois State University.

■ At Washington State University and the University of Idaho, about 8 miles apart, combined coronaviru­s cases have risen since early July to more than 300 infections. In

ties — rural Whitman County, Washington, and Latah County, Idaho — cases per week have climbed from low single-digits in the first three months of the pandemic, to double-digits in July, to more than 300 cases in the last week of August.

The Times has collected infection data from state and local health department­s and individual colleges. Academic institutio­ns generally report cases involving students, and faculty and staff members, while the countywide data includes infections for all residents of the county.

It’s unclear precisely how the figures overlap and how many infections in a community outside of campus are definitive­ly tied to campus outbreaks.

But epidemiolo­gists have warned that, even with exceptiona­l contact tracing, it would be difficult to completely contain the virus on a campus when students shop, eat and drink in town, and local residents work at the college.

The pandemic has hurt colleges’ finances in multiple ways, adding pressure on many schools to get students back to campus. It has caused enrollment declines as students have opted for

gap years or chosen to stay closer to home, added substantia­l costs for safety measures, reduced revenue from student room and board, and canceled money-generating athletic events.

AROUND THE WORLD

Elsewhere in the world, India’s coronaviru­s caseload surpassed 4 million Saturday, deepening misery in the country’s vast hinterland­s, where surges have crippled the underfunde­d health care system.

Initially, the virus ravaged India’s sprawling and densely populated cities. It has since stretched to almost every state, spreading through villages and small towns.

For more than two months, the economy remained shuttered, buying time for health workers to prepare for the worst.

But with the cost of the restrictio­ns also rising, authoritie­s saw no choice but to reopen businesses and everyday activities.

In Italy, the daily number of coronaviru­s deaths has been rising, with 16 registered Saturday by the Health Ministry.

That’s five more than the previous day. However, those numbers are dramatical­ly lower than in the early weeks of the pandemic in the nation, when hundreds of people were dying daily.

Meanwhile, the personal doctor of Silvio Berlusconi has expressed “cautious but reasonable optimism” for the former Italian leader’s recovery from the coronaviru­s.

The 83-year-old Berlusconi was hospitaliz­ed in Milan after testing positive last week.

Dr. Alberto Zangrillo said in a written statement Saturday that Berlusconi’s clinical condition remains stable.

Separately, Pope Francis will visit Assisi next month, in his first visit outside Rome since the coronaviru­s pandemic.

He’ll journey to Assisi, the birthplace in the central Italian region of Umbria of his namesake saint. He’ll sign an authoritat­ive papal letter to clergy and faithful worldwide, the Vatican said Saturday.

The encyclical is expected to stress the value of brotherly relations during and after the pandemic.

Informatio­n for this article was contribute­d by Pat Eaton-Robb, Jeff Amy, Haleluya Hadero, Sheikh Saaliq, Biswajeet Banerjee and Aniruddha Ghosal of The Associated Press; and by Sarah Watson, Shawn Hubler, Danielle Ivory and Robert Gebeloff of The New York Times.

 ?? (AP/Manish Swarup) ?? A health worker tests a man for the coronaviru­s Saturday in New Delhi as India’s coronaviru­s caseload has topped 4 million, with the virus spreading from cities into the country’s vast hinterland­s and crippling an underfunde­d health care system. More photos at arkansason­line.com/96covid/.
(AP/Manish Swarup) A health worker tests a man for the coronaviru­s Saturday in New Delhi as India’s coronaviru­s caseload has topped 4 million, with the virus spreading from cities into the country’s vast hinterland­s and crippling an underfunde­d health care system. More photos at arkansason­line.com/96covid/.
 ?? (AP/Missourian/Dan Shular) ?? Partiers congregate on the balcony of an apartment in downtown Columbia, Mo., near the University of Missouri campus. As cases spike in college towns, bars have been shut down and students, fraterniti­es and sororities have faced discipline for parties and large events.
(AP/Missourian/Dan Shular) Partiers congregate on the balcony of an apartment in downtown Columbia, Mo., near the University of Missouri campus. As cases spike in college towns, bars have been shut down and students, fraterniti­es and sororities have faced discipline for parties and large events.
 ?? (AP/The Daily Times/Scott Keller) ?? Alcoa, Tenn., High School students gather in the student section Friday for the school’s football game against visiting Scott High School.
(AP/The Daily Times/Scott Keller) Alcoa, Tenn., High School students gather in the student section Friday for the school’s football game against visiting Scott High School.

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