American colleges have begun limiting travel to China, even as they scramble to prepare for the potential impact of coronavirus on their home campuses.
Arizona State University, the only college with a confirmed case of the highly infectious respiratory illness, on Tuesday announced a moratorium on all college-related travel to China by students and faculty and staff members. As the State Department and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention warned against nonessential trips to China, other colleges and study-abroad providers, such as the University of Michigan and Georgetown University, also imposed restrictions. Previously, the U.S. government had urged only against travel to Wuhan, the Chinese city where the virus first emerged.
What we’re dealing with today was not what we were dealing with Friday, and by the end of the week, it could be totally different.
Colleges have longstanding experience in dealing with health and safety threats when sending students and professors abroad. But unlike the 2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome, or SARS, pandemic, when the primary concern was about risks to Americans traveling overseas, this time around, colleges must also pay close attention to possible effects of coronavirus at home. That’s because Chinese students are far and away the largest group of international students in the United States, with 370,000 enrolled in American colleges. And the risk of infection is growing just as many students return to campus for the start of the spring semester.
As a result, colleges across the United States are developing plans in case of widespread campus illness. “What we’re dealing with today was not what we were dealing with Friday, and by the end of the week, it could be totally different,” said David S. Reitman, the medical director at American University’s student-health center. “Everything is moving so fast.”
In a campuswide email, Arizona State officials confirmed that a person associated with the university had tested positive for the virus, although they have not said how the individual is affiliated with the university. The note, from Mark S. Searle, the provost, said that the individual does not live in campus housing, is not severely ill, and is currently in isolation to keep the disease from spreading.
Colleges across the country reported testing students who had recently been to Wuhan and were experiencing some of the symptoms of coronavirus, including fever and difficulty breathing. Universities including Baylor, Texas A&M, and Tennessee Tech said that students had tested negative for the illness, which can often appear much like the flu or other forms of pneumonia.
As of Tuesday night, several other colleges, such as George Mason University and Miami University of Ohio, were waiting for test results. At Yale, a Model United Nations conference was cut short after a student from China exhibited flu-like symptoms.
Because this strain of coronavirus is a new one, there is no commercial test available, and universities, hospitals, and local public-health departments must all send samples to the CDC headquarters in Atlanta. As the number of possible cases rise, it is taking longer for test results to be returned, campus health directors said.
At the University of Washington, in Seattle, one student has been cleared by testing, while two others are waiting to get their results back. The students, who were tested on Saturday, are being housed in isolation, said Wolfram Latsch, the director of study abroad.
Latsch is part of a campuswide committee, including health services, public safety, and global affairs, that has been meeting daily to coordinate strategies as well as messaging to the campus community.
So far, Washington has not halted international travel, although Latsch has been in contact with students who are currently in China to provide them with updates and to encourage them to reach out with questions or concerns. There are fewer than 10 students in China, he said, and none are in Wuhan. Students could choose to come home from China, or they could have to leave if their local Chinese university or study-abroad provider suspends their program, Latsch said.
ISEP, a study-abroad and exchange provider, will suspend a program it operates in Shanghai, said John S. Lucas, the organization’s president. The dozen students who were to have enrolled in the program had not yet arrived in China and will be offered placements in other locations, he said.
About 11,600 American students studied in China in the 2017 academic year, making it the seventh most popular destination.
Gary Rhodes, the director of the Center for Global Education and a professor of education at California State University-Dominguez Hills, said it can sometimes be safer for students and professors abroad to stay where they are. Task forces, like Washington’s, are increasingly common and can help set policy as well as communicate across campus and combat misinformation, he said.
A large research university like Ohio State University is practiced in quickly working to deal with potential public-health challenges, said Andrew M. Thomas, chief clinical officer at the university’s medical center. “It’s almost muscle memory.” But a key difference between coronavirus and earlier outbreaks, like the swine flu in 2009, or ebola in 2014, is the “scope and scale” of American higher education’s connections with China, he said.
Few institutions are as intertwined with China as Duke University, which late Tuesday announced it was restricting all university-funded travel to China. The policy does not apply to personal travel, and those with urgent research or clinical needs to travel to China can apply for an exception. The university had been constantly assessing its policy on travel to China over the past couple of weeks as the outbreak spread, said Michael J. Schoenfeld, the vice president for public affairs.
The university also has a China campus, Duke Kunshan University, outside of Shanghai. Like colleges across China, Duke Kunshan is currently closed for the Lunar New Year holiday, the equivalent of winter break. Although the university will postpone the start of the spring semester to mid-February, about 70 students remained on campus during the break, Schoenfeld said. To limit the possibility of exposure, administrators have restricted access to Duke Kunshan and are providing students with resources including dining services, health checks, and counseling.
If the public-health crisis continues beyond the scheduled February 17 reopening, the university could consider alternatives, such as online courses, holding classes in a different location, or suspending the semester, Schoenfeld said, although he cautioned it was too early to pursue such options.
New York University’s campus in Shanghai also announced that it would push back the start of the spring semester, although dormitories will be open for students who have already returned to campus.
Some NYU-Shanghai students and parents, however, have expressed concern about resuming their classes during the outbreak and have instead called for students to be relocated to New York. Half of NYU-Shanghai’s student body are not Chinese. “It defies logic to send a child into the epicenter of a global health disaster,” several parents wrote on a Facebook page for families of students on the China campus.
In an email, John Beckman, a spokesman, said NYU is working on contingency plans for the Shanghai campus. “Concern is understandable in the face of a novel, emerging, as yet not-fully-understood illness,” he wrote of the parents’ fears. “As we have looked ahead to do our academic contingency planning, the unease of NYU Shanghai students and families has definitely been in our thoughts.”
Meanwhile, a handful of NYU students missed the start of Monday’s classes in New York because of travel restrictions the Chinese government has imposed on residents of Wuhan. The university has been reaching out to professors who have these students in their classes to try to find ways that they can participate in coursework from afar. Beckman said he did not know the precise number of students at NYU, which enrolls more international students than any other American college, who were unable to start the semester on time because of coronavirus.
Because of the threat of disease, the Chinese government has also canceled the February sitting of standardized exams such as the GRE and English-language proficiency tests that students need to study abroad.
But Reitman, of American University, said the focus could soon shift away from China. Already, the coronavirus has spread to more than a dozen countries, including five cases in the United States. If the outbreak isn’t contained, students and faculty members who have never set foot in China could be a risk.
Like other campus health officials, Reitman pointed out that most of the people who have died from coronavirus were older or in poor health. Those who are younger and healthier are more likely to experience a few days’ discomfort and then recover. Still, he said, university officials had to plan for all sorts of possibilities: What would happen if ill students overwhelmed the capacity of the health center? How would the college feed a large number of students who had to be kept in isolation and couldn’t come to the dining halls? Would sick students be allowed to go home? “We have to keep our radar up,” he said, “because there’s a lot to consider.”
