This Fall’s College Reopenings Were a Mess—Here’s How to Avoid COVID-19 Outbreaks Next Semester

Despite dire warnings this summer from public health experts, over a third of U.S. colleges and universities went full steam ahead with reopening, saying they had no choice due to financial or political pressures. The results, in some instances, have been catastrophic.

From August 26 to September 10, 2020, there were at least 62,000 new positive test results at U.S. colleges and universities. A recent preprint study reports that colleges that reopened for in-person instruction this fall probably contributed more than 3,000 cases daily to their counties. About half of the counties with colleges around the country reported their worst week for cases in August. Given these mishaps, is there any way that colleges can successfully reopen in-person instruction during this pandemic?

Protecting students from getting infected needs to remain a priority. It’s true that COVID-19 rarely kills young adults, but they can get sick and around 10% of infected people at any age can develop a long-term illness. Infected students can also infect older, vulnerable adults, including instructors and university maintenance and service staff. A recent CDC study showed that those between 20-29 years of age accounted for 20% of the new cases from June to August and in regions where infections among youth were seen, spikes in cases among seniors appeared about 9 days after spikes in the young. So, the young are contributing to community transmission and campus outbreaks can drive infection rates in the communities surrounding a university.

Campuses, like nursing homes and jails, are congregate settings and it is really hard to avert outbreaks under these kinds of living situations. The best-laid plans for reopening can still go awry. Even universities that seemed to have robust plans (like the University of Colorado, Boulder, which called itself a “COVID-19 ready campus” before reopening) have had outbreaks. The truth is you can make a situation “safer” or “less safe” but there will be an unclear demarcating line between the two, its position driven by both human behavior and the arc of the pandemic.

We need to quickly learn lessons from what went wrong with the first attempt at reopening. We should also learn from the colleges that, in the words of Erica Pandey, a business reporter at Axios, are “getting reopening right”—Middlebury College in Vermont, for example, had tested 6,735 students and staff by September 28 and has had only two infections.

We wish that universities had taken the opportunity of reopening to formally conduct large-scale, forward-looking research that could guide our knowledge of safer reopening. In the absence of such research, however, we can still make some reasonable assertions based on case studies and on scientific modeling of different scenarios. Some common strategies are emerging from these experiences that may help colleges navigate the next semester more successfully.