Just one week after starting classes, the University of Notre Dame saw a worrying jump in coronavirus cases among students. In response, the president, the Rev. John I. Jenkins, announced a two-week pause in campus life. Undergraduate classes would all be held online, public spaces would be closed, and students living off campus would be asked to stay away and interact only with their housemates.
Now, a month later, Notre Dame’s numbers are back down. As of Thursday, the university estimates, there were 51 active infections on campus, down from the total of 191 cases over two days that had prompted the university to move classes online. “The two-week return to virtual class only helped in a number of ways,” said Paul J. Browne, a university spokesman. “It was those factors that led us to getting to a better place once we returned to in-person classes.”
Numerous other institutions struggling with case spikes have tried two-week pauses, including Temple University and the University of Arizona, the University of Colorado at Boulder, the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, and the University of Wisconsin’s Madison and La Crosse campuses.
Those temporary, campuswide quarantines are a standard public-health measure and a smart idea to try, experts say. As long as institutions can support students during the lockdowns, they’re a good alternative to sending students home, a step that risks spreading the infection to students’ families and their home communities. “Having a two-week pause is a very reasonable strategy,” said Howard K. Koh, a professor of public-health leadership at Harvard University and former commissioner of public health for Massachusetts.
A pause, if strictly followed, breaks the chains of transmission.
A pause, if strictly followed, breaks the chains of transmission. It keeps people who are already infected from infecting others, including those who may not yet know they’re infected and might otherwise hang out with friends and in public spaces.
At Notre Dame, administrators saw that students living off campus had a much higher coronavirus-infection rate than did students living on campus. The pause kept those two groups of students from mixing, Browne said. In addition, it gave the university time to do contact tracing, which revealed that most students were spreading infections not in huge parties but in small, indoor, off-campus gatherings with no masks.
“There was some feeling, as long as they weren’t massive numbers, that they were safe,” Browne said. “That was not the case. It also gave us an opportunity to better educate everyone — faculty, staff, students — on our health protocols and how the virus could spread.”
In addition to Notre Dame, a two-week pause appears to have made a difference at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, which called for one after a steady rise in cases, then a two-day spike, during which the campus saw a total of 429 new positive tests. On September 15, the latest day available on Illinois’s Covid-19 data dashboard, the university reported 45 new positives, on par with the numbers from mid-August, when the fall semester began.
A two-week pause can identify many people who are infected because nearly everyone who feels symptoms of Covid-19 begins to notice them within 14 days (unless they never experience symptoms). So during a given pause, a number of students will start feeling ill, seek help, get the care they need, and not transmit the virus. Campuses may opt to increase their testing during the pause, to help catch even more infections.
However, there is no consensus on how colleges should use coronavirus tests to support in-person activities, Koh said. “There are no national guidelines and still very, very little research on this.”
While a promising practice, two-week pauses don’t always allow campuses to go back to in-person learning. In one recent example, Temple began a pause on August 31, after a week in which the campus saw 211 new coronavirus cases, up from an average of 35 a week from March through early August. Three days later, the president and provost announced Temple was flipping online.
Case numbers were just too high. The university and the Philadelphia Department of Public Health feared the infection would move out into the city around the urban campus, said Raymond Betzner, a Temple spokesman.
Still, the pause was useful. It gave the university and the city time to do contact tracing, which showed, as at Notre Dame, that infections were mostly happening in small, off-campus social gatherings. “You’re in your household with three other roommates, and you decide to have a couple of friends over and have pizza and beer and watch a ballgame,” Betzner said.
“The pause was useful to help us get a better understanding of what was going on, and to give us the time to make the decision we needed to make,” he said.
The pause was useful to help us get a better understanding of what was going on, and to give us the time to make the decision we needed to make.
Of course it’s possible, even essential, for colleges to do contact tracing while open for in-person activity, but Temple found it easier during the campuswide quarantine. “That’s hard to do when the train is running 60 miles per hour down the track,” Betzner said. “If the train is in the station and it’s paused, then it gives you the opportunity to do that hard work.”
Once a two-week pause is over, even if it’s successful, people will need to continue to follow recommended practices to prevent new coronavirus infections, including wearing masks, staying a safe distance from one another, washing hands frequently, and not going to packed parties and bars, warned Anita Barkin, co-chair of the American College Health Association’s Covid-19 Task Force. “Just because you’ve lowered your prevalence of disease because of a 14-day quarantine doesn’t mean you can let your guard down,” she said. “College campuses, it’s a dynamic environment, and people are going on and off campus, so you could always have a reintroduction of Covid.”
“And then you’re looking at another potential 14-day quarantine,” she said.
While it hasn’t happened yet, Barkin guessed that if an institution found it needed to do multiple two-week pauses, it might decide it would be better for students’ learning to hold classes entirely online.
