Colleges gaining ground against virus
The smaller schools that test extensively are showing success
In rural Iowa, just one of the 875 students on Cornell College’s campus has tested positive for the coronavirus this semester. At Amherst College in Massachusetts, the number of undergraduate virus cases has been a bit higher: three.
And Colby College’s rigorous measures have so thoroughly contained the virus that students like Logan Morrione can wander on and off the Waterville, Maine, campus, attend most classes in person and even do without masks in some social situations — privileges that students elsewhere can only dream of.
“At first, we weren’t allowed to see anyone except for our roommates, but now it’s kind of free range,” said Morrione, a 19-year-old sophomore.
As campuses across the country struggle to carry on amid illnesses and outbreaks, a determined minority are beating the pandemic — at least for the moment — by holding infections to a minimum and allowing students to continue living in dorms and attend face-toface classes.
Being located in small towns, having minimal Greek life and aggressively enforcing social distancing all help in suppressing the contagion, experts say. But one major thread connects the most successful campuses: testing. Extensively.
Small colleges in New England — where the Broad Institute, a large academic laboratory affiliated with MIT and Harvard, is supporting an ambitious regional testing and screening program — are showing particularly low rates of infection. But some larger schools elsewhere also have held the line, even in densely populated areas, often using their own labs.
Duke University in North Carolina, with 17,000 students, has recorded just 75 confirmed cases among students and employees since early August, even as early outbreaks forced North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to move instruction entirely online for the semester.
The success stories stand in relief against all that has not worked.
Hoping to offer some semblance of a normal college experience despite the coronavirus — and to recoup
significant financial losses from earlier in the pandemic — more than one-third of U.S. colleges invited students back for the fall, offering socially distanced campus housing and at least some face-to-face classes. Within weeks, however, campuses hadjoined cruise ships, nursing homes, prisons and meatpacking plants on the short list of coronavirus hot spots.
Research indicates that fast, widespread and frequent testing of people with and without symptoms is the best way to pinpoint and stop potential outbreaks. People infected with the coronavirus are most contagious in the days before they display symptoms, and up to 40% of infected people are asymptomatic, according to research and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.
But mass testing is costly and vulnerable to backlogs — private labs can take days and charge up to $150 to process a standard nasal swab test. It has also received mixed support from federal health officials, who have largely left states, cities and campuses to devise their own programs.
In an analysis of reopening plans that looked at some 500 universities this summer, a team from the California Institute of Technol
ogy found that 54% were performing coronavirus testing and 27% were testing undergraduates upon re-entry. A smaller percentage — one college in five — planned to do regular testing.
Many schools, the survey found, echoed Trump administration health guidance in choosing to limit testing to students who are symptomatic, arguing, for example, that mass testing on campus that included asymptomatic students would create a “false sense of security.”
One thing that is working has been the partnership between the Broad Institute and more than 100 colleges in New England, which are testing students frequently and paying $25 to $30 per test to have the samples processed overnight at the institute’s lab in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
The program has allowed Colby College, with about 2,000 students on its rural Maine campus, to test each student before and after arrival on campus, then twice weekly thereafter, using a nasal swab PCR test that takes less than three minutes to conduct. Faculty and staff are also tested twice weekly. So far, the campus has had 11 positive tests, a few of which turned out to be false positives, said David Greene, the school’s president.
In one case, the testing identified a student who had apparently caught the coronavirus on the way to campus and did not have a sufficient viral load to test positively upon entry. By the time the infection was caught in the next round of testing two days later, contact tracing revealed that a roommate had been infected.
“It could have been 150 people, and we kept it to one person,” Greene said.
At Delaware State University, a historically Black college with about 1,800 of its 5,000 students living on campus this semester, partnerships with the nonprofit Testing for America and the Thurgood Marshall College Fund, among other nonprofit groups, have enabled twice-weekly testing. That has freed the school to offer some classes in person, and to continue housing on campus hundreds of vulnerable or low-income students who might have had nowhereelse to go, TonyAllen, the school’s president, said.
Less than 1% of tests have turned up positive, and none have been the result of community spread on campus. “There’s a heightened sensitivity here and at other HBCUs in other parts of the country because of the disproportionate impact the pandemic is having on the community,” he said.