Can we learn to live with virus?

Most of the focus on Arizona State University’s reopening strategy has been on data and transparency, about whether the university is trying to downplay how many COVID-19 cases are on campus.

But we’ve mostly missed the larger story about why ASU still has students in classrooms and dorms when many universities are scaling back.

President Michael Crow believes that the novel coronavirus is not going away.

He says that even if we find a vaccine, there’s no guarantee that it will provide protection forever.

And even if it does, this probably won’t be the last coronavirus to cause a pandemic. Crow points out that there have been three major coronavirus outbreaks (SARS, MERS and COVID-19) in the last two decades.

So, in Crow’s view, we can’t just hunker down and wait for this to all go away — particularly in essential enterprises like education.

We can’t put training the next round of doctors, nurses, engineers and educators on hold until life goes back to normal, he argues.

Because this is the new normal. And we need to find ways to operate through it.

Crow assumes that students will contract the coronavirus, and that 1% to 2% of the university population will be positive at any given time.

But his is not a fatalist, “everyone’s going to get it, so we might as well just do what we’re going to do” argument, a la those who have pressed for a full reopening of society without precautions.

Resuming for the fall semester was about lowering the risk of community spread as much as possible, and making available the tools to quickly identify, isolate and care for those who do contract the disease.

That’s why, Crow says, the university gave students flexibility to attend remotely or in-person with reduced classroom capacity, why it spent months developing a saliva-based COVID-19 test and a daily health check app, why it is randomly testing segments of the university population, why it set aside space to isolate and care for those who test positive, why it reworked its buildings to improve ventilation and encourage physical distancing, and why it adjusted protocols in the residence halls when students quickly tested positive there.

It makes sense.

If there’s one thing I’ve come to realize about the coronavirus pandemic, it’s that living with this long term is about balancing what are often competing needs. It’s about learning the level of risk in daily activities and choosing to engage in those that are most appropriate for you and your immediate family.

That requires a lot of nuance. Getting together with grandma might be OK in the backyard, for example, if there are just a couple of you visiting and you’re all staying six feet away from each other. But it might not be such a good idea if the group grows, the yard isn’t big enough to distance and no one is wearing masks.

That said, the debate on how we move forward has been mostly binary. It’s either no masks and no physical distancing or locking yourself in your house until there’s a vaccine.

Crow contends that even if we have a vaccine, we could still be back in this place six months, a year or maybe five years from now. He says we’ve got to learn to live with this.

I know. Doing so is far more complicated for those of us who are or live with others who are at high risk for serious disease.

But I appreciate his point that somehow, someway, we must learn to do daily activities in the safest mode possible, without forcing folks to shelter in place every time there is a spike in cases.

ASU has created a plan to pivot between various forms of operation, in classrooms and its residence halls, based on levels of community spread and the university’s ability to isolate and care for the sick.

Mask wearing and physical distancing are at its base, along with robust testing — including random sampling — to quickly identify the sick and ensure that the metrics guiding its decisions are accurate.

It’s a solid strategy, and not just for managing a younger population that can often be asymptomatic. The lessons ASU learns from its testing and contact tracing efforts could have much wider applicability in our community.

Granted, ASU could do a much better job of explaining what it learns and why it is making changes to its plans when it thinks it can do better. The university has created a lot of needless confusion.

A decision to move up finals by a week and make that week online-only was released late on a Friday with no explanation, for example, sending some students into a tizzy. A university spokesperson said three days later that the move was to simplify the week between Thanksgiving and finals, particularly when so many students travel home for Thanksgiving.

These minor uproars are unfortunate, because they obscure the larger strategy behind ASU’s plans. If nothing else, that strategy deserves much wider understanding and debate — both on and off campus.