COLLEGES TO UP COVID-19 TESTING

Schools want students tested before leaving for Thanksgiving break

A new surge of coronavirus infections is sweeping the nation, just as San Diego colleges prepare to send students off for the Thanksgiving holiday.

UC San Diego urged students to get tested before leaving to avoid unwittingly spreading the virus. After the holiday, UCSD and San Diego State University will begin testing many of its students weekly, rather than bi-weekly, for COVID-19 to help slow transmission. The schools were working out the details on Friday.

Meanwhile, the University of San Diego was saying goodbye to its undergraduates, who’ve been asked to finish the semester from home to reduce the possibility that they’d bring the virus back to campus.

“We just want to keep people safe,” said James T. Harris,usd’s president.

Similar scenes were playing out across the country as colleges and universities did everything from close dorms early to shift ever-more courses online.

“Our message is take home love and gratitude, not the virus,” said Dr. Angela Scioscia, interim executive director of student health and well-being at UCSD.

The situation was further complicated Friday by the governors of California, Oregon and Washington, who urged residents traveling out of state and visitors from other states to self-quarantine for two weeks. There’s a lot of movement among students between, and within, those three states.

Manyi Leung, a senior who is studying business at UCSD, isn’t going home for the holidays, choosing safety over chance.

“I decided to stay in San Diego because I am from the San Francisco Bay Area,” Leung said. “Although the chances of spreading COVID via plane is not as high as we once thought it would be, a gathering at the waiting gate can turn into a hot spot easily. Moreover, having a gathering of your family together would also be dangerous.

“I’d rather be safe than be sorry, and there will be more Thanksgiving celebrations to come in the future if my family was not hurt by COVID.”

gathering of your family together would also be dangerous.

“I’d rather be safe than be sorry, and there will be more Thanksgiving celebrations to come in the future if my family was not hurt by COVID.”

Local college students are taking most, if not all, of their courses online this fall. But UCSD and SDSU, which are among the state’s largest public universities, decided that it would be prudent to conduct COVID testing on students who live on campus, take on-campus classes or visit the schools to conduct research. That’s upwards of 15,000 students.

SDSU enacted mandatory testing after the fall semester began. By then, the university was in the midst of a large COVID-19 outbreak that involved both residential students and those living nearby, in places like College Area.

More than 1,300 students have tested positive for the virus. But the number of infections began to sharply fall in the latter part of September, after SDSU made a bigger effort to convince students to wear masks and practice social distancing.

“I think that students came to understand the risks, and that we could better manage this by doing more testing,” said Libby Skiles, director of student health services at SDSU.

UCSD, one of the nation’s largest research universities, attacked the problem early, developing a major student testing program last spring. The university refined the program over the summer and sought even deeper buy-in from students. The university also began looking for traces of COVID-19 in the waste water of many buildings, a test that shows promise for spotting the presence, and possible origin, of the virus.

The approach seems to have worked. Only 70 students have tested positive for COVID since the fall quarter started in late September.

Scioscia said UCSD also has succeeded because “we now have the capacity and the infrastructure to do more frequent testing and get the results back in a timely way.”

USD, a private liberal arts college, went a different way. It had students begin the fall semester earlier than usual in hopes of getting most instruction done by Thanksgiving, negating the need to bring residential students back to campus.

Nearly 200 students tested positive for the virus. But fewer than 20 of them lived in university housing.

Even so, it has been a difficult autumn.

“People want definitive answers about what’s going on,” Harris said. “That’s not easy because things keep changing. It’s been a bizarre fall, and it doesn’t look like spring will be much different.”