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Inside Higher Education
Thanksgiving ‘Exodus’ Looms
Relatively few colleges have released guidance for student travel over
Thanksgiving, even though the COVID-19 pandemic is surging nationwide
and the holiday is less than four weeks away.
By Emma Whitford
November 3, 2020
To successfully provide on-campus instruction during the pandemic,
colleges needed to prepare for several milestones. The first was
bringing students back to campus safely and without increasing
coronavirus case counts on campus and in surrounding towns and cities.
In the following months, the primary goal was to keep case counts low.
Now, colleges face another crux as students prepare to migrate home for
the Thanksgiving holiday. Some colleges altered their schedules to end
in-person instruction at the Thanksgiving holiday and finish the
semester online, while others will continue with in-person instruction
afterward. But all face the challenge of figuring out how to navigate a
holiday that revolves around travel and family gatherings when their
students could be asymptomatic carriers who don't know they have the
coronavirus.
In some ways, mitigating the spread of the virus will be more difficult
now than it was in August. Over the past month, new case counts across
the country have rocketed past previous April and July peaks, nearing
100,000 new cases daily and with few signs of slowing down anytime
soon. North Dakota, South Dakota and Wisconsin emerged as new viral hot
spots, as well as parts of Iowa, Minnesota, Montana and Wyoming.
Student travel has already been blamed for spreading COVID-19. Last
spring, counties with more returning spring breakers had higher
confirmed COVID-19 case growth rates than counties with fewer students
returning from spring break, according to research put out in May by
Daniel Mangrum, a research economist at the Federal Reserve Bank of New
York and Paul Niekamp, an assistant professor of economics at Ball
State University.
Thanksgiving travel will likely be similar, Niekamp said.
“There has always been a concern that travel by college students can
spread infections from lower mortality risk students to higher
mortality risk community members,” Niekamp said in an email. “Student
travel around Thanksgiving is particularly concerning because there
will be an exodus of students from dormitories and off-campus housing
(where roommates are typically young and low-risk) to household
environments where household members like parents and grandparents may
be higher risk.”
Health experts are already urging people not to travel for the
holidays. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says travel
increases the risk of contracting and spreading COVID-19. It says to
avoid large gatherings with people outside of one's household and
suggests virtual gatherings with friends and family as a lower-risk
activity.
“Your perception of safety may not match reality,” warned Anne Monroe,
an epidemiologist at George Washington University, in a recent
Washington Post article.
In a recent brief, the American College Health Association issued
similar warnings to colleges and students. Colleges that will continue
in-person instruction after Thanksgiving break should encourage
students to stay on campus over the holiday, hold virtual celebrations
with family and instead have a friendsgiving, according to the brief.
The University of Missouri is taking a similar approach. It plans to
continue in-person instruction after the holiday and has encouraged
students to stay on campus over the break. But the university does not
plan to widely test students before or after the break, according to
university spokesperson Christian Basi. Instead, it will continue to
test symptomatic students and students with approval from a medical
provider. The university’s testing policies fall in line with testing
regulations for Boone County, where the university is located, Basi
said.
After an outbreak at the beginning of the semester, the University of
Missouri’s COVID-19 case counts have remained relatively low. As of
Monday, there are 75 active cases on campus. This semester about 27,000
students are living on campus or in off-campus housing nearby, Basi
said.
Colleges should maintain active testing, contact tracing and other
public health measures to keep COVID-19 case counts as low as possible
before the semester ends, according to the ACHA brief. Notably, the
brief did not push widespread testing for all colleges.
“Testing is resource intense. It costs money and you have to have
people to carry it out,” said Anita Barkin, co-chair of the American
College Health Association’s COVID-19 task force. “For those schools
that are well resourced, this is a great strategy. For schools that are
not as well resourced, we didn’t want to suggest something that some
schools could not do.”
Testing strategies this fall have been largely determined by colleges’
available resources, Barkin said. Colleges have been doing what they
can to test students on campus, she said.
The ACHA brief also included advice for students who are traveling for
Thanksgiving, such as to minimize stops during travel, delay travel
plans if you’re feeling sick and quarantine for 14 days at home if
possible.
Even if students receive a negative test before traveling, they should
still practice preventative safety measures such as mask wearing and
social distancing, Barkin said. If possible, students should quarantine
for 14 days after traveling.
“If you were exposed during travel, or if you just hadn’t converted
before you left campus to a positive, you could have a false sense of
security about your status,” she said.
The State University of New York system announced recently that it will
test all students using on-campus facilities prior to the Thanksgiving
holiday. This includes students taking at least one class on campus;
students using campus services such as the gym, dining hall and
library; and students who work on campus. Exact testing schedules will
vary by campus, said Holly Liapis, a university system spokesperson.
Most SUNY students will finish their semester online after the break.
Testing 140,000 students is resource intensive, but not necessarily
more so than the surveillance testing procedures the system already has
in place, Liapis said.
The system works with the SUNY Upstate Medical University, which can
administer about 200,000 tests each week. Bulk testing is cheaper for
the system -- pooled surveillance testing costs about $15 per test
compared with $100 to $125 per test for individual tests, Liapis said.
If students receive a positive test, they will be required to
quarantine on campus over the break until they are cleared by the local
public health department, she said.
“We’ve been testing regularly, and our positives are low, so our hope
is that there won’t be too many that will test positive,” Liapis said.
The system has space to quarantine students if necessary, she said.
Pennsylvania State University released a thorough departure plan that
encourages students to get tested prior to leaving campus for
Thanksgiving and finishing their studies online. Boston University has
asked students to stay on campus over the holiday break. The university
will hold in-person classes for the remainder of the semester, but it
asked those who go home during the break to stay home and finish the
semester virtually.
The Commission on Independent Colleges and Universities in New York
said it is working to provide guidance to its members about the
Thanksgiving holiday. CICU has been touting a low testing positivity
rate for its 108 private, not-for-profit members this fall.
“Our members’ commitment to safety will continue through the
Thanksgiving holiday and the end of the fall semester,” said Mary Beth
Labate, CICU president, in an emailed statement. “We are working
closely with state leaders and look forward to a continued partnership
focused on keeping students and communities safe as students begin to
leave campuses and travel home for the holidays and when they return
for the spring semester.”
The U.S. Department of Education has not put together specific guidance
on Thanksgiving travel but pointed to existing guidance from the CDC on
college reopening.
More and more colleges have released travel guidance for students in
the past couple of weeks. Still, relatively few have issued guidance at
all.
Two weeks ago, very few colleges had said anything about the holiday,
according to Dan Brennan, co-chief of operations at the College Crisis
Initiative, called C2i, at Davidson College. More than two-thirds of
colleges have no testing plan in place for the fall semester, so it’s
not surprising that few have developed testing plans for Thanksgiving
departure, Brennan said.
As of Monday, C2i’s understanding was that very few colleges have put
out pre-Thanksgiving plans, Brennan said. But the initiative is
currently collecting data to confirm this.
In a random sample of 50 institutions taken about two weeks ago, only
one had a pre-Thanksgiving plan for sending students home, Chris
Marsicano, assistant professor of the practice of higher education at
Davidson College and founding director of the College Crisis
Initiative, said during a recent American Enterprise Institute panel.
He urged colleges to get a plan together as soon as possible.
“You can’t just release everybody out, you’ve got to come up with a
plan,” Marsicano said during the panel. “Those institutions that have
done well, that have had low case counts, that plan can be send
everybody home. But for those institutions that are struggling to keep
the virus at bay -- maybe you pay for testing for those two weeks
before you send everyone home.”
Colleges are looking for help crafting guidance, according to ACHA’s Barkin.
“We had a high level of interest in the document we put forth,” Barkin
said about the brief. “Certainly, schools are thinking about the safest
way to continue after a break in the semester.”
Even with the end of the semester coming up, colleges’ instruction
plans are still shifting. On Monday, the University of Arizona
announced it will hold classes virtually after the Thanksgiving
holiday, a change to prior plans. A spike in large gatherings over the
Halloween weekend, as well as increasing COVID-19 case counts
nationwide, prompted the shift.
Lebanon Valley College, a small private institution in Annville, Pa.,
also announced it would go fully remote at the end of this week. Few
students have tested positive for the virus this semester, but more
than 100 students are currently listed as self-isolating or
quarantining.
“There has been an increase in the number of tests administered to
campus community members and some recent positive results. There has
also been an uptick in the number of students in isolation and
quarantine, with growing numbers of individuals identified as close
contacts,” James MacLaren, president of Lebanon Valley College, wrote
in a message to students. “While there is no crystal ball to project
the future, there is significant evidence that we should manage the
situation before an outbreak occurs on campus.”
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