: Colleges are trying to prevent superspreader events as they prepare for a mass migration of students going home

There’s evidence to indicate that many colleges’ decisions to invite students back to campus contributed to the increase in positive COVID-19 cases across the country. Now experts are worried that sending students home en masse could have a similar impact. 

Walter Casey, a political science professor at Texas A&M University-Texarkana and a member of the Texas Emergency Management Advisory Group, who has worked on models tracking and projecting the spread of COVID-19, said he estimates that after coming to college and circulating in the community, roughly 2 in 15 students will be heading back to their town or city as asymptomatic carriers of the virus. 

“We’re creeping up on a very frightening phase in the spread of the disease,” Casey said. 

Joshua Salomon, a professor of medicine at Stanford University and the director of the Prevention Policy Modeling Lab, a research consortium focused on modeling related to infectious disease, said Thanksgiving has “the makings of a real tragedy for lots of reasons,” including that students will be dispersing across the country.

“We know that colleges that are not adequately testing are very likely to have a lot of silent spread going on,” he said.  “If they’re sending students home without a rigorous testing regime in place then they’re almost certainly going to be sending some students home,” carrying the virus.  

A college with rigorous testing is keeping students ‘in the bubble’ as long as possible

At Colby College, students were tested before returning to campus in August, and they were also tested three times a week in the first few weeks following their arrival and twice weekly after that. Officials there are trying to “keep everybody in the bubble right up until Thanksgiving, so that we know they’re being tested twice a week, we know they’re being safe and healthy,” said Doug Terp, the school’s vice president for administration and chief financial officer. 

The school’s last day of classes before they send students home for Thanksgiving is Tuesday, Nov. 24 and they’ll be offering COVID tests right up until the end of the last class that day, said Terp, who oversaw the school’s return to campus plan. They’ll also be sending students home with information about travel conditions as well as tips for keeping safe while on the road — for example, if you’re driving, fill up the tank before you leave and minimize stops. 

They’ll also be providing grab and go food that students can take with them on their travel to avoid entering restaurants or other public places unnecessarily on their journey. 

In addition, school officials are asking students to remain as vigilant as they were on campus about following mask-wearing, social distancing and other guidelines when they go home, Terp said. 

“We want to be sure they understand you could have a negative test result on Tuesday and if you’re driving to Virginia and you need to stop for gas twice and you stop for lunch and dinner, you may have been fine when you left here, but that doesn’t mean you couldn’t interact with someone on the way,” that could put you at risk of exposure, Terp said. 

“You still need to take all of those precautions that we ask people to do here, you need to bring that home,” he added. “If you’re not in this testing regime it’s all that more critical.” If students do test positive before they leave campus, the college will encourage them to isolate at the school and ensure they have housing, medical attention, food service and that their other needs are met, he said. 

Officials also expect that roughly 70 or 80 students will remain on campus through Thanksgiving and the December break either because they can’t travel home or home is not an optimal setting for them to perform well on exams, Terp said. The school will be providing a scaled back version of the food, transportation and other amenities it already offers and still be requiring twice weekly testing for students. 

Some colleges encourage students to refrain from non-essential activity in the weeks leading up to the holiday

At the University of Illinois, where officials have received attention both for the school’s robust testing program — and a brief uptick in cases in September — they’re advising students to get two negative COVID tests four days apart before heading home.

“The last thing we want to do is send students home infected and put their families at risk,” said Rebecca Lee Smith, an associate professor of pathobiology at U of I and one of the architects of the school’s COVID mitigation strategy. 

In addition to encouraging students to take advantage of the school’s vigorous testing capabilities, U of I officials are also urging students to refrain from leaving their homes other than to participate in class, secure food or exercise in the weeks leading up to Thanksgiving, Smith said. In fact, they’ve already advised students to limit their time outside their homes to nonessential activities due to rising positivity rates in the state. 

Though classes will be completely remote starting the week of Thanksgiving, the school will be maintaining its testing infrastructure throughout the rest of the year — except for two-day closures surrounding Thanksgiving, Christmas and New Year’s. The school is discouraging students with off-campus housing from returning to Urbana-Champaign, Smith said, but if they do they’ll be required to maintain their testing schedule. 

‘Now, it’s later’

In early summer, when many colleges initially made plans to send students home at Thanksgiving there was reason to believe that the country might have the pandemic under control before heading into the winter. Given that logic, sending students home before flu season would begin in earnest made sense as a strategy for preventing the spread of the disease on campus during the colder months. 

But in the intervening time between when colleges made that decision and when they’re being forced to execute on it, “some of the public health guidance has changed, the condition of the virus around the country has changed,” said Robert Kelchen, a professor of higher education at Seton Hall University. 

“The main focus was getting students to campus and they’ll figure everything out later. Now it’s later,” he said. With a few notable exceptions — for example, the State University of New York system will be requiring students to test negative for COVID within 10 days prior to leaving campus — “I haven’t seen a lot of good information on what colleges are doing about Thanksgiving,” Kelchen said, “which is a little bit of a concern given that we’re that close.”

Some schools are inviting students to stay over the break

Instead of sending students home, some colleges are encouraging them to stay on campus during Thanksgiving. At St. Joseph’s College of Maine, officials decided to invite everyone to remain at the college in part because some students were participating in hands-on programs, like nursing or environmental science that would continue to need access to in-person courses after the holiday. 

“It is actually safer on campus than flying to the winds and coming back or even going back to some communities which might be hot sports, and so ideally everybody would stay,” said Olivier Griswold, the chief brand and marketing officer at the school.  

The college is asking its 700 students studying on campus, including commuter students,  to tell them where they plan to spend the holiday. So far, about 41 have said they plan to stay on campus, 439 have said they will go home and then return to the college and 231 will go home and stay there, Griswold said. The school expects those numbers may shift as Thanksgiving nears, particularly if government guidance changes. 

For example, Maine’s governor recently removed a testing and quarantining exemption from certain nearby states, making it more difficult for students to return to campus from those states if they leave. 

Those who decide to return will be taken straight to the school’s health and wellness center when they drive through the campus’ gates for a COVID-19 test and then will be tested again a few days later, he said. 

Even in typical years, the school has some students who stay on campus during Thanksgiving, either because they’re international students or because their home isn’t a place they want to return to. But given that they expect to have more students remain for Thanksgiving this year, “there’s more pressure on us to provide the kind of experience that they might expect when they go home,” Griswold said. 

“We’re going to have turkey, we’re going to have all the fixings,” Griswold said. “We’re going to try to make it feel as much like home as we possibly can, while acknowledging that this is a very strange time to be holding a holiday at a college.”