In college towns, virus risk seems to be rising
When college students returned to campuses around the country this fall, spurring a spike in new coronavirus infections nationwide, people like Phyllis Baukol seemed at little risk.
A classical pianist who, at 94, was ill with Alzheimer’s, she lived tucked away in a nursing home in Grand Forks, N.D., far from the classrooms, bars and fraternity houses frequented by students at the University of North Dakota.
But the surge of the virus in Grand Forks, first attributed to cases among students and then ballooning through the community, eventually reached Baukol. She tested positive this fall, and three days later, staff members pushed her bed up against a window at the nursing home so her daughter could say goodbye.
As coronavirus deaths soar across the country, deaths in communities that are home to colleges have risen faster than the rest of the nation, a New York Times analysis of 203 counties where students compose at least 10 percent of the population has found.
In late August and early September, as college students returned to campus and some institutions put into place rigorous testing programs, the number of reported infections surged. Yet because serious illness and death are rare among young coronavirus patients, it was unclear at the time whether the growth of infections on campus would translate into a major health crisis.
But since the end of August, deaths from the coronavirus have doubled in counties with a large college population, compared with a 58 percent increase in the rest of the nation. Few of the victims were college students, but rather older people and others living and working in the community.
Health officials and family members of some people who died in such counties described large surges of cases involving students followed by subsequent infections and deaths in the wider community. “When the rate of transmission in the surrounding community is high and increasing,” said Jennifer Nuzzo, a public health researcher at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, “you are going to see more deaths.”
Since the pandemic began, a Times survey has identified more than 397,000 infections at more than 1,800 colleges and universities. Those cases include more than 90 deaths involving college employees and students.
The link between an outbreak at a college and a coronavirus death in the wider community is often indirect and difficult to document, according to public health experts, especially without extensive contact tracing, which many local health departments in the United States lack resources to pursue. Deaths have soared in recent weeks, making it difficult to distinguish between outbreaks tied to campuses and health emergencies linked to other causes.
Yet in September and October, when deaths were well below earlier peaks and fairly steady, they were already rising in many college communities. That trend highlighted a central fear of health officials — that young adults with limited symptoms may unwittingly transmit the virus, increasing the possibility it would ultimately spread to someone more vulnerable.