Cameron Deptula is back home in Hawaii, but it’s no vacation. Since returning two weeks ago, Deptula, a sophomore at the University of California at Berkeley, has self-isolated in his childhood bedroom, coming out only to get meals his mother prepares for him and to collect insects in the backyard for an entomology class.
Deptula had already begun his isolation when the state government last Thursday mandated a 14-day quarantine for all visitors and returning residents. Though he felt healthy, and still does, he didn’t want to risk infecting his parents with the coronavirus — particularly his father, who is asthmatic and has high blood pressure.
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.
“Coming from an area with a high incidence of Covid-19,” Deptula said, referring to the disease caused by the coronavirus, “I am not so much worried about being exposed myself as that I could put my family and my community at risk.”
When colleges ended in-person classes last month and told students to move off campus, they hoped to limit the spread of the coronavirus through highly trafficked dormitories and classrooms. Public-health experts agree that colleges reduced that risk by all but shutting down their campuses. But some fear students’ unpredictable behavior could increase the likelihood that they’d bring the virus home with them to communities where people have been social-distancing for days.
Some students took a detour on their way home, to spring-break beaches or for one last blowout to celebrate the abrupt end of the semester. Already, there have been reports of students’ testing positive for Covid-19 after spring-break trips, including 28 students from the University of Texas at Austin who traveled to Mexico.
‘The Lesser of the Evils’
Although the current pandemic is without precedent in scope, previous outbreaks of infectious disease, such as meningitis and mumps, have demonstrated the value of acting quickly, said Emily Toth Martin, an associate professor of epidemiology at the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor. “Any time big groups spread out, you can reduce the rate of infection.”
In cafeterias and lecture halls, gyms and dormitories, libraries and local bars, college life is highly communal, said Jean E. Chin, chair of a special American College Health Association task force on coronavirus. When it comes to infectious disease, “that’s like setting a brush fire,” Chin said. “Dispersing them and having them shelter in place was probably the lesser of the evils.”
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, in guidance to higher-education leaders, said that suspending classes is a strategy to slow or stop further disease transmission.
Janet Baseman, associate dean for public-health practice at the University of Washington, one of the first institutions to move to online instruction, agreed that there are trade-offs to the choice college administrators faced. “We have risk to people staying, but we also know that whenever someone travels from where community-level transmission is happening to where it’s not, that’s how outbreaks get seeded.”
To mitigate the risk, students returning home must practice precautions, including washing their hands well, monitoring their symptoms, and quarantining themselves if they come from an area with a higher incidence of cases, she said. “You don’t need to hug your grandma if you just got off the plane from a hot spot.”
Spring-Break Spread
But experts said the real unanticipated variable was spring break, when some students failed to heed public-health officials’ advice not to congregate in large groups. In Florida, where state officials waited until March 20 to restrict large crowds, spring-breakers swarmed beaches, crammed into hotel rooms, and packed bars and restaurants, even as millions of Americans elsewhere sheltered in place.
A tech company created a heat map from cellphone-location data that shows some 5,000 mobile devices on a single Fort Lauderdale beach in mid-March, many belonging to college students, that then dispersed over the next week across much of the eastern half of the United States. Returning spring-breakers could thereby spread coronavirus — in addition to Texas, the University of Tampa and the University of Wisconsin at Madison have also reported that groups of students tested positive for Covid-19 following spring break.
“The timing was really terrible,” said Chin, a professor of medicine and a former executive director of the University of Georgia’s health center. “People want to break loose, and they may have thought they were invincible.”
People want to break loose, and they may have thought they were invincible.
Chin said one reason some college students may have failed to see Covid-19 as a serious threat is that early reports out of China, the origin of the pandemic, suggested that younger people were less likely to fall ill and were faster to recover. But data from the CDC show that 20 percent of all coronavirus-related hospitalizations in the United States were of adults ages 20 to 44.
Another challenge is that people who have been infected may not develop symptoms for a week or more, Martin, the Michigan professor, said. Some never do. That means students can spread the disease without realizing they have it.
But Baseman, at the University of Washington, said she did not think that the coincidence of many campus closures with spring break necessarily increased the risk. Students probably would have taken the transition to online classes as an opportunity to socialize more, no matter when it occurred, she said. Indeed, while warm-weather beaches were crowded with revelers, so, too, were plenty of Midwestern college towns, where students remained even after campus housing closed.
In Hawaii, Deptula has seen little beyond the four walls of his bedroom since his return. But not all of his friends are taking the same precautions. On social media, they post photos of hanging out in groups, he said.
Safer Staying Put?
Julio Frenk, president of the University of Miami and a former minister of health for Mexico, said that while returning spring-breakers could spread the coronavirus to their home communities, the risk would have been greater if they’d returned to campus. With 4,300 residential students at Miami, “it’s not manageable to do social distancing,” he said.
Miami eventually permitted 200 students to stay in the residence halls, including international students, those without a home to return to, and those from current coronavirus hot spots. The university also exempted some students who have family members with health-risk factors, such as lung and heart disease or weakened immune systems.
Some students say they feel much safer staying put. An Nguyen and Kaela Seiersen, two American students studying at the National University of Singapore, told The Chronicle they worried about the risks of traveling back to their home state of California, where their families are under a statewide shelter-in-place order.
Since early February, Singapore has had strict rules to limit the spread of Covid-19. Classes with more than 50 students are taught remotely, and all NUS students must log their temperatures twice a day in an online system. People who break social-distancing regulations can be fined thousands of dollars. As of Wednesday, the city-state of about six million people had reported fewer than 1,000 cases and just three coronavirus-related deaths.
When the University of Arizona, where Nguyen is a sophomore, sent her an email in mid-March telling her she had to return, she bombarded administrators with requests to stay. Her parents agreed she should remain in Singapore rather than traveling through busy airports and on a long international flight, increasing her chances of exposure.
Seiersen, a junior at Berkeley, said she and her parents had been especially alarmed by images of long lines of Americans returning through the congested few airports that remained open to international travel. “We’re young, we’re confident in our own health,” Seiersen said. “But what if we contracted it in the airport and brought it back to our families? What if our families all got it?”
She too petitioned her home university, and both women were allowed to stay in Singapore through the end of the semester.
But even if most students are now off campus, Baseman, the Washington professor, said colleges still have a responsibility to communicate with them about ways to mitigate the risks of Covid-19, to themselves and to their families. “There are a lot of mixed messages out there,” she said, “and colleges can play an important role in elevating messages from public-health officials.”
