While most campus health centers have sent sick students back to their dormitories with masks and lessons in “respiratory etiquette,” a few have been able to segregate them in separate buildings.
For Carnegie Mellon University, in Pittsburgh, those efforts appear to be paying off as the number of quarantined students has dropped significantly over the past few weeks.
“The flu hit just as first-year students were completing orientation, so we had a lot of folks brand-new to the city and campus running high fevers and not feeling well,” says Anita L. Barkin, director of student health services.
Sick students who live within 150 miles are asked to return home in a private vehicle to recover. If that isn’t possible, “we look at their living situation in the residence hall,” says Ms. Barkin. “If they have one or more roommates and share a communal bath, and we can’t be confident that they could successfully self-isolate, we provide isolation housing.”
The university was able to move some students into a vacant sorority building that was about to be renovated. A few more went into an unoccupied building that had been used by student organizations, while others spilled over into a small office building whose occupants were temporarily relocated.
Only a few faculty and staff members have reported flu symptoms, and Ms. Barkin says she is unaware of any major disruptions in class schedules.
Campus health officials know that not everyone who has come down with the flu is reporting it. “I don’t know how many students hid out and didn’t tell anyone because they didn’t want to go into isolation,” Ms. Barkin says.
The university moved beds into the two unused buildings and installed window air-conditioning units as the temperatures outside climbed into the low 90s. During peak occupancy, each of the three isolation buildings had a round-the-clock nurse. Dining-service workers dropped off meals, which were delivered to the rooms by staff members.
Among the sick students was Grace Nam, a sophomore who visited the health center this month after she started coughing, felt dizzy, and came down with a fever. The center called the staff member assigned to her campus apartment building, who took her to an isolation apartment across the courtyard from her room. During her weekend there, nurses checked on her every few hours, monitored her temperature, and delivered food and lots of water.
When she had been fever-free for 24 hours, she was released. As she wrote in an e-mail message, “It wasn’t a horrible experience, but one I’d rather not go through ever again.”
