Colleges advised to keep students during outbreak

classes remote and clamp down on interactions first to see whether that slowed the spread.

Notre Dame had a solid plan for reopening its campus, Fox said.

The challenge was the magnitude and the velocity of cases, he said. When it hit, the school ramped up testing, added more isolation beds and expanded contact tracing. Together with tight restrictions on interactions between those living on and off campus, Notre Dame slowed cases from jumping to communities surrounding the school.

If students live relatively nearby or are in-state, tracers can do their job, said Howard Koh, former assistant secretary for health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and a professor at the Harvard T.H. Chan School of Public Health. If students leave the state to go home, tracing is less effective.

“That will make the job very difficult, if not impossible,” he said.

Contact tracing can help manage outbreaks when done correctly. The U.S. has struggled with it for many reasons, including getting people to answer their phone and respond truthfully. That’s even harder at college, when students worry about being disciplined for violating rules: Many schools have put limits on parties and other gatherings to reduce COVID-19 risks. Young people also relish finally being back with their friends.

“The more contacts a person has, the harder contact tracing can be,” said Amesh Adalja, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins University Center for Health Security. “People may not even know who they’re in contact with, especially if they are drinking.”

Effective programs interview patients as soon as possible after a diagnosis to find out where they went while contagious.

The tracers then contact anyone the patients encountered to ask about possible exposure. It’s usually recommended that those contacts enter quarantine and monitor themselves for symptoms.