As colleges scramble to decide on their fall-reopening plans, one aspect of campus life could provide early insight on what works and what doesn’t: football.
The first phase of the big-time college football season — voluntary workouts — has begun, with several campuses this month welcoming players back in phases. Major sports conferences and the National Collegiate Athletic Association have laid out guidelines for how colleges can restart athletic operations even as the pandemic surges in some parts of the country.
The only way they can truly mitigate risks is robust testing of people every single day. ... It’s impossible.
Dozens of athletes at several colleges have already tested positive for Covid-19, presenting a preview of what the early days of a fall semester could look like. But at some campuses, the very testing procedures that have produced positive diagnoses are more rigorous — because of the limited number of students involved — than those likely to be deployed in the fall. That disparity raises questions about whether colleges are prepared to contain sudden outbreaks.
The University of Texas at Austin reported on Thursday that 13 football players had tested positive. An Inside Higher Ed tally put the number of positive diagnoses nationwide at at least 56 as of Friday. And then on Friday evening, USA Today reported that 28 members of its athletics department, mostly football players and staff, had tested positive for Covid-19 — the largest known outbreak since athletes returned. Inside Higher Ed‘s count included only two Clemson football players.
The positive diagnoses come amid escalating concern about the well-being of athletes, called to return to campuses weeks ahead of the rest of their classmates. At the University of California at Los Angeles, 30 football players have demanded that a “third-party health official” attend football activities to make sure the program’s Covid-19 policies are being followed, according to the Los Angeles Times.
Concern is likely to grow with a rising case count. The rapidly climbing number of diagnoses could be a result of some campuses’ testing athletes upon re-entry, whether or not they show symptoms of Covid-19. Among those are Texas, Oklahoma State University, and Iowa State University. Texas tested athletes at random as they returned to the university as well as testing those who showed symptoms of the virus, while Iowa and Oklahoma State are testing all players once.
Players who test positive are told to self-isolate while officials conduct contact tracing — finding out whom they’ve interacted with recently and instructing those people to self-isolate, too.
To contact trace as quickly and accurately as possible, many universities have been keeping track of the people football players live and interact with, said Michael Huey, former president of the American College Health Association and a member of Emory University’s Covid-19 task force.
While such procedures work well with football teams — most of which include about 100 players and a limited number of coaches and sports-medicine staff members — testing and contact tracing become much more costly and difficult on a larger scale. Consider the fall semester, when millions of students are expected to stream back to campuses.
Colleges most likely won’t be able to scale up their testing procedures for athletes to an entire campus population. For example, neither Texas, Oklahoma State, nor Iowa State is planning to test all students upon their return. Rather, they will be testing students who have symptoms or have been exposed to the virus, according to university websites.
Public-health experts say the more comprehensive testing is close to the ideal containment scenario. While social distancing, masks, and other precautions are important, colleges are open to blind spots in not testing everyone frequently.
“The only way they can truly mitigate risks is robust testing of people every single day,” said Jean Chin, executive director at the University of Georgia University Health Center and an associate professor. “It would take testing people every single day or some frequency. It’s impossible.”
But the inability to test large populations frequently doesn’t mean universities can’t contain the spread of Covid-19, Chin said.
Crystal Watson, a senior scholar at the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, said that testing capacity is key. “At this point, using testing more strategically is probably a more realistic approach,” she said. If individuals can’t be tested daily, twice a week could be a more realistic frequency that could also help contain the virus, she added.
Even as the more frequent testing of athletes better positions officials to detect the virus, it’s far from perfect. Mark Coberley, associate athletics director for sports medicine at Iowa State University, said effective contact tracing and quarantining aren’t easy to pull off in practice.
While Coberley agrees that contact tracing is vital to safely reopening universities, he emphasized the need to immediately quarantine those who have been exposed to an infected person and then administer a test later during quarantine.
“What we’ve learned so far is if you want testing to be accurate, there needs to be a period of time where they’re not doing much with anyone else,” he said. “The challenge is when you’re testing to screen people, you’re screening people that don’t have any symptoms and they need to be quarantining before that.”
While contact tracing is useful in isolating those who are infected and slowing the spread, Watson said, the Covid-19 incubation period is unclear and a person could receive a negative result if tested too soon after infection.
“Even if you are testing contacts, those contacts still need to stay quarantined for two weeks, because even if they test negative in the middle of that incubation period, they may still develop symptoms or become infectious later on,” she said.
In addition to testing, college football programs have applied other measures that researchers believe can decrease the spread of Covid-19: masks worn at all times when not practicing, social distancing in enclosed spaces, and emphasizing the necessity for students to avoid crowded places, such as bars and parties, that are often a large part of collegiate life.
But there’s only so much universities and their programs can control. “The real challenge is what the college-aged students do when they’re away from the university,” Coberley said.
