Money advanced for testing on college campuses
University of Arkansas System President Donald R. Bobbitt told a panel earlier this week that early indicators show the coronavirus hasn’t discouraged students from enrolling for the fall semester.
“Students have not been shy about sending in deposits and making other overt gestures that they’re going to arrive in the fall,” he told the state’s Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security Act Steering Committee.
The committee advanced $28.2 million from the state’s $1.25 billion CARES Act distribution for testing, protective equipment, cleaning supplies and contact tracing for public and private institutions of higher learning that serve more than 160,000 students and employ 25,000 people.
More than 30,000 students live in on-campus housing, according to information presented to the committee. Bobbitt said their proximity to each other, social nature, mobility and willful tendencies will challenge institutions’ ability to contain the virus. The pandemic closed campuses in the spring.
“This group is highly mobile,” he said. “They will move from campus to campus, from community to community. They are invincible, in the sense that they can handle almost anything. And they’re highly
social. All three of those characteristics, which I think are generalizations but not untrue, make it difficult for us to be able to keep our campuses open in the fall.”
Social distancing is also a challenge in residence halls, he said, as is isolating symptomatic students.
“Although we require masks when (social distancing) can’t be maintained, it’s been my experience that we don’t always get our college students to follow every directive that authority gives,” he said. “I can’t imagine someone who’s mildly, or even hardly at all symptomatic, agreeing to quarantine themselves for a period of time. I certainly can’t see this demographic, based on my experience, quarantining for longer than a day, particularly when they don’t feel poorly and they have other obligations.”
Those tendencies require a testing protocol that can give results quickly, he said. The $10.2 million advanced for campus testing included point-of-care diagnostic machines, but Bobbitt said not all campus health centers have the certifications or personnel to operate rapid-testing equipment. Those institutions will have to develop partnerships with the Arkansas Department of Health and courier services that deliver specimens to labs.
Symptomatic students would be tested under the protocol, as well as contacts they have made with other people.
The $28.2 million request included $13 million in protective equipment and supplies that will be acquired through the Health Department’s supply chain and Department of Finance and Administrations approved vendor list. Bobbitt said buying materials in bulk, rather than institutions competing for supplies on the open market, will save money.
“It seems logical to me that buying it in larger quantities as opposed to one-offs is going to get us more equipment for the same expenditure of funds,” he said. “It could then be distributed on some metric the (steering committee) could agree on.”
The budget submitted to the committee included funds for 44 million disinfectant wipes, 236 million milliliters of hand sanitizer and 185,000 thermometers.
The committee and Legislature approved $20 million in CARES Act funding last month for the Health Department to contract more than 300 contact tracers. Spending the committee gave a do-pass recommendation to earlier this week included $5 million to augment the contact tracing scale up underway at the
Health Department and University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences. The additional funding would establish contact tracing capabilities on college and university campuses.
Bobbitt said the University of Arkansas, Fayetteville is expecting its enrollment, which was more than 27,000 in the fall of 2018, to decrease by 400 to 600 students. He said based on deposits for residence halls and sign-ups for virtual orientations at other schools, statewide enrollment numbers are expected to be similar to last year.
“At least in the case of Fayetteville, they’re cautiously optimistic that they could be down just a small percentage from where they were last fall or perhaps even flat,” he said, explaining that how the virus progresses over the summer will influence fall enrollment.
“If we see some big disruptions in public announcements of outbreaks, we might see an increase in our two-year campuses, people staying close to home and still continuing to make progress toward completing their core with the intent that once the situation stabilizes they would transfer. So right now, we’re pivoting on the public perception on how the summer goes.”
Bobbitt said larger colleges and universities are better positioned to endure another closure of their campuses than smaller institutions.
“We have great concern, particularly for our institutions located in highly rural areas, whether they would be able to push through another shutdown,” he said.