Will Most Colleges Open This Fall?
Colleges
In April, just a few weeks after the spring semester pivoted unceremoniously to digital, Catherine Klapperich, a biomedical engineering professor at Boston University, was thinking about the fall. The Boston area had been inundated with Covid-19 cases, and at the time, tests remained scant. But the university had come to her with an unfathomable question: In four months time, how would they test students and staff when they returned to campus? The university didn’t have its own testing lab. So Klapperich, who studies medical diagnostics, was tasked with designing one.
“ We had an empty room,” Klapperich says. “Actually, we didn’t even have an empty room. We had a room we had to empty.” Her team worked to repurpose the space, in both physical and bureaucratic terms. That meant getting the right clinical licenses to perform diagnostics tests and deliver results, plus trained staff to do it. And then filling the room with a battery of robotic instruments, sequencing machines, reagents and nasal swabs.
That testing is at the center of a strategy to aggressively monitor the school for outbreaks, with “isolation dorms” on a remote patch of campus for anyone who gets sick, contact tracing staff, and apps to let students report symptoms and stay up-to-date on tests. Since the beginning of the pandemic, public health advocates have boiled down virus containment to a few simple steps. First, get the virus under control using the blunt tools of isolation and social distancing. And then, as those measures soften: Test, trace, isolate.
We all know how that’s gone. Six months into the pandemic, few places in the US have the virus under control, with the Northeast (for now) one of the major exceptions. But next month, hundreds of thousands of college students will return to campus all the same, often in places where outbreaks are actively raging, or soon could spark.
Large research universities have a leg up in offering tests. They can create pop-up labs that draw from existing resources, as schools like Boston University and UC Berkeley have done, or look to affiliated hospitals for helps. Some smaller campuses have taken a collaborative approach. A number of colleges across New England, including Wellesley, Colby, and Williams, recently signed on to send test samples to the Broad Institute, a research center affiliated with MIT and Harvard that has opened its high-throughput Covid-19 lab to other educational institutions. Others must compete for capacity at commercial labs.
There’s no guarantee that even the most rigorous testing strategies will prevent outbreaks. That will depend on the actual process going off without a hitch—no easy task with thousands of students and staff. And tests themselves don’t prevent infection. That requires mask-wearing, decontamination, and social distancing on campus. In some places, such as the Georgia public university system, professors have been fighting for those basic protections.
In the real world, repeat testing also requires an infrastructure that works smoothly. At the University of Connecticut, which plans to test a percentage of the student body each week, Gorin and her team of behavioral scientists have been developing ways to get students comfortable with the trials of repeat testing, contact tracing—and the looming possibility of being sent to an isolation dorm if they or a close contact test positive.
For now, Gorin says the university is thinking short-term—it’s “a cautious reopening,” she says. The semester ends at Thanksgiving break. After that, it’s unclear when they’ll be coming back. That will depend on what transpires in the middle of flu season and a New England winter that makes outdoor activities difficult. “I think we’re all approaching this with apprehension,” Gorin says. “We’re hopeful we can get through the fall. Spring is another question.”
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