Colleges race to offer safe campuses
SAN DIEGO – When students arrive at the University of California San Diego in August, they will find coronavirus testing stations strategically planted throughout the campus.
To determine if they have been infected, they will take a swab, dab it with nasal slime and leave the sample in a collection box. Bar codes with the packets will be linked to their personal medical records and cellphone numbers.
Within a day, students can expect results via text message. For those who test positive, it will set in motion a huge response system that includes medical care, isolation and contact tracing.
Robert Schooley, chief of the infectious diseases division at UC San Diego Health, said the reopening plan, dubbed Return to Learn, has multiple scenarios for campus life, and surveillance results will dictate which one administrators deploy. Researchers will even pull manhole covers to check campus sewage for coronavirus levels.
“We want to be able to adjust what we do to what is happening,” Schooley said. “We’ll have a continuous, very broad vision of what’s going on with our testing. And we believe information is a good way to make decisions.”
That’s the new paradigm at one of America’s roughly 4,300 colleges and universities, where administrators are anxiously pushing to resume classes this fall in the face of an unpredictable pandemic. An early vaccine could dramatically ease their stress. A resurgence of infections – possibly coupled with a flu outbreak – would do the opposite.
For now, school presidents are betting on a smorgasbord of viral testing systems and a rejiggered academic format. Nearly all universities tout hybrid teaching – a mix of online and in-person classes – and strict guidelines for social distancing and masks.
But there’s resistance from some faculty, health experts and others who fear that testing programs are inadequate and that college party culture could wipe out even the best safeguards.
“This is all terra incognita,” said Terry Hartle, senior vice president with the American Council on Education. “They don’t teach this in college presidents’ school . ... Every school is taking steps they couldn’t have imagined a year ago.”
American colleges and universities offer petri-dish conditions for the coronavirus: Thousands of people from around the globe converge to live, study, eat, work and play in crowded quarters where lofty intellectualism intertwines with partying. Although youthfulness reduces the deathly peril of COVID-19, it is no shield against infection and transmission. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention said young people are driving a surge of cases in the South and West.
Nearly all college reopening plans stress that the uncertainty of the pandemic requires flexibility to expand or contract operations.
At the University of Arizona, President Robert C. Robbins, a physician, made news in late April by getting his blood drawn for testing as he announced the Tucson campus would fully reopen Aug. 24. Now, with coronavirus spreading rapidly in Arizona, Robbins is having second thoughts. During a briefing in late June, he said, “If I had to say today, would we open? No.”