Fall move-in poses challenge for UC San Diego
Officials aim to avoid a student-driven virus outbreak like the one seen across town at San Diego State.
SAN DIEGO — San Diego State is reeling from a widespread coronavirus outbreak. Is the same thing about to happen at UC San Diego?
The answer will begin to emerge this week as 7,500 undergraduates start to move into meticulously cleaned dorms on the sprawling La Jolla campus for the start of the fall quarter.
UC San Diego has been running drills that simulate mass infections, but even that may not have fully prepared the university for what it is about to face as it begins its 60th year.
College students nationwide have been shrugging off the pandemic, leading to tens of thousands of coronavirus infections and billions of dollars in costs.
The trouble spots include San Diego State, which is providing mostly online classes to about 35,000 students this fall, most of whom won’t be on campus.
But the university wanted to offer a semblance of normality to some of its youngest students. So it put 2,600 of them in dorms with the proviso that everyone wear masks and maintain social distance.
San Diego State didn’t pressure students to comply or require that everyone get tested for the coronavirus.
Many students ended up ignoring the rules. Over two weekends in August, the San Diego Union-Tribune watched hundreds of them roaming without masks.
At a party on Pontiac Street in the College Area neighborhood, about 35 students had to squeeze past one another to get around. Not far away, other maskless students lingered outside the Paseo Place housing complex, two blocks from the student health center.
Within two weeks, the coronavirus was spreading rapidly. Dorm students were placed in quarantine. The few in-person classes were shifted online. The campus enlisted administrators to help patrol the streets for students flouting the rules. And last week, San Diego State began requiring oncampus dorm students to be tested for the coronavirus.
“The university knew over the summer that students were having parties in the College Area and that they could spread the virus, but they did not do enough to make sure things wouldn’t get out of hand,” said Scott Kelley, a microbiologist at San Diego State who studies how aerosols spread indoors.
“We can spend $8 million on a basketball coach, $30 million on [a stadium site in] Mission Valley, but we can’t do things to make sure students wear masks and get tested,” he said. “It doesn’t make any sense.”
To date, at least 785 San Diego State students have tested positive for the coronavirus, a number that could contribute to another round of state-ordered restrictions on where people can go and what they can do in San Diego County.
The university’s neighbors in the College Area are especially worried about being infected by students. County health officials say students have already spread the virus to at least seven people outside the San Diego State community.
Less than 20 miles away, UC San Diego has been planning for what it should do when 38,000 students begin the fall quarter Sept. 28 with a slate of mostly online classes.
About 11,000 undergraduate and graduate students will live in campus housing.
The university will try to prevent an outbreak by conducting regular mandatory testing, monitoring wastewater for the virus and getting people to use a cellphone app that tells them if they’ve had contact with infected people.
UC San Diego also will have student ambassadors moving about, helping coax students into wearing masks and staying six feet apart. The stakes are high. “If we can’t open the school in a way they can stay here, we’ve got to either close the school or lock them down in dorm rooms,” said Dr. Robert Schooley, a professor of medicine who is helping guide UC San Diego’s Return to Learn program. “Nobody wants to spend the next four years with what they hoped would be their college lives in their grandmother’s attic with an iPad, looking at lectures on Zoom.
“We’ve got a virus that only induces short-term immunity,” he added. “People are already getting reinfected who were infected back in February.”
At the moment, UC San Diego, which has had 264 people test positive for the virus since March, likes its odds for success.
The campus predicts that few of the 7,500 undergraduates moving into dorms will test positive. And those who do will be quickly isolated.
“Maybe it will be 30, maybe it will be 20, maybe it will be 40,” said Dr. Angela Scioscia, interim student health director at UC San Diego. “I don’t expect 100. That would be a bit of a surprise.”