Tracking campus cases can help nearby towns assess risk and take safety measures when needed.
As SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 rapidly spread around the world in the spring of 2020, it had a swift impact on U.S. college students. Most were abruptly sent home from their dorm rooms, lecture halls, study abroad programs and even spring break outings to spend what would be the remainder of the semester online. And with the start of the fall semester just months away, schools were “flying blind” as to how to bring students back to campus safely, Klein says.
It’s not a perfect comparison, Klein says, because this method groups schools that did one round of testing with those that did consistent surveillance testing. But the team’s analyses still generally show how colleges’ pandemic response impacted their local communities. Once students left for winter break, campus testing stopped – so overall local testing dropped. When students returned for spring semester in February 2021, area cases spiked — possibly driven by students bringing the coronavirus back from their travels and by being exposed to local residents whose cases may have been missed due to the drop in local testing. Students returned “to a town that has more COVID than they realize” Klein says.
. By mid-March, the university reduced the spread of cases on campus and the town once again had a lower COVID-19 case rate than its neighbors for the remainder of the semester, the team found.It’s helpful to know that testing overall helped protect local communities, says David Paltiel, a public health researcher at the Yale School of Public Health who was not involved with the study.