In the midst of an unprecedented pandemic, Tufts University, Middlebury College, and New York University are considering how to donate their dorms and other buildings to local hospitals in case of a surge in patients.
If the spread of the new coronavirus in the United States isn’t controlled, the number of Covid-19 patients needing hospital care is expected to far outstrip the number of available beds, according to a recent estimate from researchers at the Harvard Global Health Institute. Meanwhile, colleges have sent hundreds of thousands of students home from their residence halls in an attempt to reduce the number of students living in close proximity.
As colleges and universities have struggled to devise policies to respond to the quickly evolving situation, here are links to The Chronicle’s key coverage of how this worldwide health crisis is affecting campuses.
At some institutions, administrators have come to see their emptied campuses as an opportunity to help.
“It became clear that, if we organized ourselves correctly, we would be able to assist our hospitals,” said Anthony P. Monaco, president of Tufts, in Medford, Mass. The university has offered residential units on campus to Tufts Medical Center patients who need rehab services, such as postsurgery physical therapy, so that the center’s hospital beds will be freed for Covid-19 patients.
In an op-ed in The Boston Globe, Monaco urged other universities to take similar stock of their grounds and offer up space to local hospitals. Tufts students were given six days to move out of their dorms last week, before a student who lived in an off-campus apartment tested positive for the coronavirus.
At Middlebury, officials offered the local Porter Medical Center the use of some of the Vermont college’s buildings, and drained the campus’s ice-hockey rink so it could house a pop-up hospital, if needed.
At NYU, a widely circulated email from Marc Wais, senior vice president for student affairs, told dorm residents that they needed to pack their belongings — or allow the university to store them — because “there are significant indications that the state, as part of its contingency planning, is looking at university dormitories as settings for overflow beds from hospitals grappling with potentially overwhelming numbers of sick patients.”
“NYU has an institutional responsibility to help,” Wais wrote.
Although some reports said NYU dorms were being considered for housing Covid-19 patients, dorms would most likely not be the first — or second, or third — choice for people with confirmed infections, said Terri Rebmann, director of the Institute for Biosecurity at Saint Louis University.
Dorms can’t easily be set up to provide intensive care. They often don’t have spacious-enough hallways for workers to roll in large equipment. If a college has allowed some students to remain in on-campus housing, there’s a risk they’d be exposed to the virus, if they’re sharing a building with coronavirus patients. And even if there were no exposure risk, “there would still be a lot of concern from parents, if there was one dorm of university students and then — next door, or even across campus — there was another dorm filled with Covid-19 patients,” Rebmann said.
In seeking space for a surge of hospital patients, health-care leaders often look for buildings like warehouses or sports arenas — “big, open, flat space,” Rebmann said. There, a hospital could set up cots, partitions, and stations for workers to don protective gear, and doctors and nurses could move easily between patients.
Dorms might make more sense to house people who need to be quarantined for 14 days because they’ve been exposed to others with known coronavirus infections, but who haven’t themselves tested positive or shown symptoms, Rebmann said. If they tested positive, they could then be moved to a hospital or other more-sophisticated isolation unit. At this point in the pandemic in the United States, health officials usually ask people to quarantine at home, not in another facility, but if that should change, dorms could be used.
Monaco suggested dorms could also be used to house health-care workers who are treating Covid-19 patients and don’t want to stay in their own homes because they have family members who are especially vulnerable to the virus.
In every community with a college or university, what’s needed in case of a coronavirus surge will differ, Monaco and Rebmann said. The college’s buildings and resources could be critical in some, if less helpful in others. “It’s a good conversation to have, in terms of community planning,” Rebmann said.
All of that is possible because colleges have booted their students from their dorms, a hardship for many, especially low-income students. But, Michael J. Huey argues, it had to be done. “Social distancing is very important in the face of this pandemic,” said Huey, a physician who is retired from directing Emory University’s student-health services and is a member of the American College Health Association’s Covid-19 task force. “It wasn’t a perfect solution. It had some consequences which were not positive. This next step could be, in some ways, making lemonade out of some lemons.”
