Connecticut colleges seeing few COVID-19 cases

Numbers far down from last year after initiation of vaccine mandates

After nearly all Connecticut colleges and universities chose to require COVID-19 vaccination for all students returning to campus this fall, most have recorded few coronavirus cases in the early weeks of the semester, numbers from the schools show.

That marks a dramatic change from last fall, when COVID-19 cases surged on college campuses, leading schools to quarantine dorms, send home students who violated social distancing rules and, in one case, threaten to halt all in-person classes.

The change is particularly notable at UConn, which last year experienced hundreds of COVID-19 cases and was forced to quarantine entire dormitories on several occasions. So far this fall, the university has reported only 18 cases among students on its Storrs campus.

Elly Daugherty, UConn’s dean of students, attributed the relatively low incidence of COVID-19 cases to the school’s vaccine mandate, which allows for religious and medical exemptions.

“Vaccination is the quick answer,” Daugherty said. “But having a compassionate introduction to a new requirement during an unsettling time was really essential.”

Connecticut’s other public universities have had similar success in limiting COVID-19 on campus so far this fall. Central Connecticut State has reported 12 cases among residential students and staff since late August. Southern Connecticut State has reported 11 cases among residential students, Eastern Connecticut State has reported seven, and Western Connecticut State has reported only one.

The same has been true of the

state’s private universities. According to the Connecticut Conference of Independent Colleges, the organization’s 13 schools have recorded 430 positive results among students out of 93,016 since Aug. 23, for a positivity rate of 0.51%.

Things haven’t been universally smooth — Connecticut College briefly switched to remote classes in early September amid a bump in cases, while Sacred Heart has experienced a spike in recent weeks as well — but at most local colleges COVID-19 transmission has been mild and manageable.

Officials say high levels of vaccination have not only limited cases but also allowed schools to lighten up on pandemic-related restrictions they imposed last year. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention currently offers separate sets of guidance for campuses where nearly everyone is vaccinated and for those with lower rates of vaccination, with vaccinated campuses given more leeway.

“Last year if a person was identified as a close contact of someone who had COVID, they would be placed in isolation for 10 days,” said Dr. Tom McLarney, medical director at Wesleyan, where 99% of students are vaccinated. “Now, with the CDC’s guidelines if somebody is fully vaccinated, asymptomatic and identified as a close contact, they can continue to go to class; they can continue to go to dining; they can continue life as normal.”

Though nearly all Connecticut colleges and universities have required vaccination for students, control measures have differed from campus to campus in other ways. For example, whereas most schools have limited testing to unvaccinated students and those with symptoms, Wesleyan continues to require twice-weekly testing for all students.

“We feel as a course of safety that we would start the semester with twicea-week testing,” McLarney said. “We’re going to be monitoring the cases that we have, and if at any point we really have a flattening of the curve, there’s a possibility that we can scale back.”

UConn doesn’t test vaccinated students regularly but does monitor potential outbreaks through wastewater analysis, which provides some warning ahead of budding outbreaks.

“The comfort in [not testing widely] comes from our reliance on the wastewater system,” she said. “I’m able to monitor that and see if I see any aberrant presence of COVID that’s not consistent with our testing, and if there were, then I would then do more extensive PCR-based testing to figure out where that is.”

It helps, college officials say, that they’ve been managing COVID-19 for more than a year now. After spending much of last year figuring out best-practices on the fly, officials say they now feel more comfortable dealing with cases when they crop up.

“Last year when you found out you had a positive student it was almost like a panic,” said Jessica Nicklin, associate vice president for student success at the University of Hartford. “Now if you get a positive student, there’s a little more comfort in knowing, ‘OK, this is what we have to do.’ ”