COVID-19 on Campus...

that classes could be held without changing the rooms that would have been assigned prior to the virus. This would still ensure that existing rooms would be large enough to permit social distancing. Students would sit in the same assigned seats each time they attended class, to limit their total number of contacts over time and to facilitate testing and tracing. Faculty would either wear PPE or would teach behind a clear protective barrier. Hallway congestion would be the greatest remaining source of disease transmission from teachingrelated activities. All students and faculty would be required to wear N95 masks in the hallways. Once again, protecting faculty and staff without protecting students is fraught with both ethical and legal issues; any student would have the right to declare himself or herself medically vulnerable, and any self-declared vulnerable student would be entitled to remain off campus and to participate through distance learning.

This slows the spread of the virus, but perhaps not sufficiently to ensure that education can proceed without disruption. Careful monitoring is required at all times. This strategy could also be employed in industries where some work can continue to be performed by traditional labor, while other work is automated, reducing the physical proximity of employees. Unfortunately, there are very few industries where mixing virtualization and traditional labor is effective. It is easier to automate an entire production facility than it is to reengineer it to increase spacing between traditional employees. It is difficult to double the spacing between employees in a meat processing facility without doubling the size of the building or reducing output by half.

The combination of protecting senior staff and blending virtualization with traditional service delivery is possible in some industries but not others. Moreover, it is not sufficient in settings where employees or students also live together in close quarters after work, like a university or an aircraft carrier.

Strategy 4: Protect the Vulnerable and Slow the Spread of the Virus through Virtual Instruction and Redesigned Dormitory Experience

This intervention would continue full protection for faculty and staff and a mixture of in-class and virtual instruction and would change the dormitory experience to limit student exposure in living and dining spaces. Mostly dormitories have been designed to increase social interaction, with students sharing rooms, rooms divided among suites, and suites sharing lounges. It is probably not economically feasible to reduce occupancy levels for dormitories. But dormitories would need to be subdivided into discrete units, reducing the number of contacts between units. Dining schedules would need be designed around these same discrete units, again to reduce the numbers of contacts each student would have. The changes would also greatly facilitate contact tracing when an individual student did contract the virus. Additionally, shared facilities would require high levels of cleaning and disinfection.

These three interventions would greatly slow the explosive exponential spread of the virus on a campus, but the spread would still remain exponential. If the growth is sufficiently slowed, then illness will not interfere with the university’s mission. Herd immunity will emerge, either naturally as the virus slowly works its way through a campus, or more rapidly, with the introduction of a vaccine. And of course, these interventions are not appropriate in all settings where students or employees live together after work. It is impossible to redesign an aircraft carrier, or worse yet a submarine, to achieve perfectly safe living accommodations.

The combination of protecting senior staff and blending virtualization with traditional service delivery is possible in some industries but not others. Moreover, while redesign of living accommodations will be essential where students or employees live together after work, this will not always be possible.

Strategy 5: Protect the Vulnerable, Slow the Spread of the Virus through Social Distancing in the Classroom and Dorms, and Remove the Contagious through Test and Trace

The only way to eliminate exponential growth would be the nearly instantaneous removal of infected individuals from the campus and placing them in quarantine. Quarantine would not need to be onerous; students could be housed in the hotel-like facilities that many universities maintain for executive education or visiting faculty, often with its own computers in every room and its dedicated dining and exercise facilities.

Unfortunately for the purposes of disease control, many individuals in the student pool are going to be asymptomatic even when infected and contagious. Testing only when symptomatic individuals have been detected may give each infected individual many days to infect dozens of other students, many of whom will likewise be asymptomatic. Even in the presence of all forms of intervention described above, testing will need to be constant and universal, with effective contact tracing after the identification of infected individuals. Daily testing across campus will not be possible. And when a significant portion of infected individuals are asymptomatic, hot spots are likely to have grown quite large before they are detected.

One possible testing strategy has been suggested that may make frequent testing economically feasible, even if the inconvenience factor would remain quite high. The idea would be to take samples from entire living groups of maybe 100 or 200 students. The expectation is that almost all tests would be negative; a single test could then “clear” as many as 200 students. If there was even a single infection in a block of 200 students, then ten blocks of 20 students could be tested, with ever smaller test groups until the infected individuals were identified.

The optimal strategy for reopening is a combination of protecting senior staff and blending virtualization with traditional service delivery where possible. When employees live together after work this will also require redesign of living accommodations. However, this will never be entirely effective except in sealed environments like naval vessels at sea, so aggressive programs of testing and contact tracing will also be required.

Recommendations

For the remainder of this document, I will focus on academic institutions, since we are facing critical time pressure as we decide how to reopen in less than three months. Our objective, at least for elite institutions, is to preserve the quality of instruction and equally to preserve the quality of face-to-face socialization and interaction.

I would not be comfortable making a recommendation for any single campus, even my own, before completing additional refinements to the model and calibration of its results. But it is possible to offer some tentative guidance. If a university does choose to open in the Fall, it will need to adopt the following practices, all of which are contained in Strategy 5.

It will be necessary to provide protection to faculty, who because of their age are more vulnerable and more likely to experience severe health consequences.

It will be possible to operate the university with a mixture of in-class and virtual instruction, provided that social distancing can be maintained in dormitories as well. The degree of social distancing will need to be carefully calibrated to ensure that the level of illness on campus does not become so high that it makes instruction impossible.

For legal and ethical reasons students must be permitted to self-identify as vulnerable. Those students will remain off campus and will participate in only virtual instruction.

Frequent testing and rapid social tracing will be essential to slow outbreaks of the virus, which inevitably will occur.

For some schools within a university, like a medical school, a veterinary school, or a dental school, physical operations with social distancing will be required. This is likewise going to be necessary for most graduate students in most experimental disciplines that require laboratory work.

Implementation

Implementation strategies will be slightly different for every campus, but for instruction currently based on lecture formats, like undergraduate programs and MBA programs, the following will be necessary:

Optimal redesign of classrooms and of passage between classes;

Optimal redesign of dormitories and dining experiences;

Provision of safe dining options for students who eat in class or between classes;

A clear explanation for students of what their options truly are — help make the campus safe or revert to lockdown. That means that compliance is in best interests of all students;

And design of the least intrusive enforcement mechanism.

All college faculty and administrators were once undergraduates. We all remember drinking before we reached legal drinking age. We all remember at least some use of recreational drugs, at least among some of our friends. We all remember ignoring rules about being in a boyfriend’s dorm room after hours or sleeping in a girlfriend’s dorm room when her roommate was conveniently out. We did not follow rules. We especially did not follow rules when we thought we would not be caught, or we thought the penalty for violating the rules was not really severe.

Students are not going to see the risk of COVID-19 as severe for them. They will not be certain that violating a social distancing norm will expose them, or that exposure will lead to illness, or that illness would be severe for them. They are not going to give up seeing friends or lovers. Redesign of living on-campus units will be the most ineffective part of the transformation, and campus living will be the most vulnerable part of the redesigned campus. And students will — quite reasonably — resist tracking through their phones. Where they sleep, and who they sleep with, and how late they are up drinking, and who they drink with, are all data they will not wish to share with their universities or with anyone else.

So how do universities gain any cooperation from students at all? I suggest the following:

We start with a clear explanation of the university’s model, its assumptions, and the resulting design criteria. Students need to know what their school is doing and why.

We provide a clear explanation of the results of the optimization model, the implications for on-campus transmission and illness, and the implications for keeping campus open vs. having to deal with campus closure and lockdown again. The students need to trust the university’s design, and they must understand that we are trying to provide the most intimate and safest environment possible, with minimum possible intrusion.

Enforcement must not be based on students’ phones! Every student would have a unique RFD token. Without the token they would not be admitted to any classroom building. That would ensure that students only attended class on days that they were permitted to attend. Cellphone data will not be collected.

Students will be encouraged to remain within their dormitory dining cohort and their dormitory living cohort. We understand that this cannot and probably should not be rigorously enforced. There will be times when students meet friends and dates. There will be leakage between cohorts. Our models and our response to entry of the virus must account for leakage. Super-spreader events should be banned; there probably will not be giant on-campus parties in the foreseeable future.

Contact tracing will be essential and contact tracing must be automatic, secure, and private. I think we need an app that lets students record their contacts with other students automatically and that keeps that information secure. Information should capture who was met but not when or where or for how long, other than to be able to identify the day. When students are contacted for contact tracing, they will be expected to share this information voluntarily, but they cannot be compelled to do so and even this limited data cannot be accessed by anyone without a warrant legally authorizing access to their phones.

Testing must be frequent. Students who have contracted the virus, whether they are symptomatic or not, must be quarantined, and quarantine must be without stigma. Ideally, quarantine of students who reside in dormitories would be in facilities nicer than existing dormitory facilities. Students who live off campus will be expected to quarantine at home. Students who are quarantined will have their RFD tags noted and will automatically be denied access to classroom buildings and dormitories.

Contact tracing must be immediate, compassionate, and anonymous. Students who have been exposed must be notified. They must be told as gently as possible. And they must not be told the name of the individual who may have exposed them.

The entire process must be transparent. Students must know the reason for each measure that has been imposed. And they must be able to know the state of the disease on campus at any time, including within their individual school and within their discrete living and dining cohorts.