After planning to require students to sit only three feet away from one another in classrooms — a policy that departed from standard public-health guidelines — the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill said on Tuesday that it will strive to keep students six feet apart.
“We have configured our classrooms to accommodate 6 feet of physical distancing for students participating in on-campus learning this fall, so that will be the standard for our classrooms unless a school requests and the University grants an exception,” read the emailed statement, in response to questions about the three-feet policy. “Planning for the Roadmap is a fluid process and we expect ongoing changes to align with public health best practices and guidance, as well as feedback from the University community. We will post weekly updates on the Carolina Together website so everyone can stay informed as those changes are made.” UNC Chapel Hill has named its return-to-campus procedures “Roadmap for Fall 2020.”
Until Tuesday, the university’s reopening website stated that in “the classroom setting, students, faculty, staff, and visitors must observe a minimum of 3 feet physical distancing ‘mask to mask.’ Masks must be worn in these spaces.”
Some faculty members and parents of students were uncomfortable with the idea of keeping students only three feet apart, according to a Monday report by the TV news station WRAL. Sometime Tuesday, UNC Chapel Hill appeared to edit a major page on its fall-2020 site, so the page no longer makes any mention of three feet, and only urges “students, staff, faculty and visitors to stay at least 6 feet away from other people whenever possible in all indoor and outdoor settings.”
Using three feet instead of six, as a guide for social distancing, conflicts with the vast majority of other colleges’ plans. Last month, The Chronicle examined more than a dozen colleges’ return-to-campus plans. All either said they planned to maintain six feet between students in classrooms or did not specify any particular distance. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s guidance for higher education suggests institutions “space seating/desks at least 6 feet apart when feasible.”
“The U.S. standard is six feet,” said George Rutherford, an epidemiologist at the University of California at San Francisco. “I think it confuses everybody when you jump around on standards. Having declared that six feet’s the standard, let’s just stick with that. It’s not going to make things worse. It might make it better.”
There has been one recent meta-analysis of previously published studies, about the transmission of Covid-19, SARS, and MERS, which found that one meter of social distancing does help reduce the transmission of these closely related viruses. However, major U.S. health authorities don’t seem to have publicly taken up the idea that one meter — or about three feet — is an acceptable social distance for the Covid-19 pandemic. “Nobody’s embracing it,” said Jean E. Chin, chair of the American College Health Association’s Covid-19 Task Force.
Chin declined to say whether using a three-feet rule is risky, but did say: “It’s not standard fare, I would tell you, for regular classroom seating.”
In addition, as of Tuesday, a UNC campus-health webpage describing the university’s contact-tracing policy stated that “individuals who maintain at least 3 feet physical separation in a classroom or congregate setting while masked will typically not be considered a close contact.”
“That’s wrong,” Rutherford said. “That’s absurd.” The CDC’s public guide to contact tracing defines a “close contact” as “any individual who was within 6 feet of an infected person for at least 15 minutes starting from 2 days before illness onset (or, for asymptomatic patients, 2 days prior to positive specimen collection).”
The university didn’t answer a question about how it chose three-feet’s distance as the cutoff for contact tracing. As of Wednesday, the phrase “3 feet” on the campus-health website had been altered to read “6 feet.”
