Some Colleges Learn How to Suppress Coronavirus: Extensive Testing

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Fri, 2020-10-02 09:58 — mike kraft

As campuses across the country struggle to carry on amid illnesses and outbreaks, a determined minority are beating the pandemic — at least for the moment — by holding infections to a minimum and allowing students to continue living in dorms and attend face-to-face classes.

Being located in small towns, having minimal Greek life and aggressively enforcing social-distancing measures all help in suppressing the contagion, experts say. But one major thread connects the most successful campuses: testing. Extensively.

Small colleges in New England — where the Broad Institute, a large academic laboratory affiliated with M.I.T. and Harvard, is supporting an ambitious regional testing and screening program — are showing particularly low rates of infection. But some larger schools elsewhere also have held the line, even in densely populated areas, often using their own labs.

Duke University in North Carolina, with 17,000 students, has recorded 75 confirmed cases among students and employees since early August, even as early outbreaks forced its neighbor colleges, North Carolina State and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, to move instruction entirely online for the semester.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, too, appears to be back on track after its twice-weekly testing program made news for underestimating the odds that some of its 40,000 or so students would party even when they knew they were infected.

The resulting surge in cases was followed by a crackdown on gatherings and a series of student suspensions; now infections are plummeting and the campus is again relaxing restrictions.

“They’re showing how you can keep a state school open during this pandemic, and that’s something people can copy — if it lasts,” said Carl Bergstrom, a professor of biology at the University of Washington and an infectious-disease expert. ...

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