College COVID-19 testing can reduce deaths in local communities
Getting a COVID-19 test has become a regular part of many college students’ lives. That ritual may protect not just those students’ classmates and professors but also their municipal bus drivers, neighbors and other members of the local community, a new study suggests.
Counties where colleges and universities did COVID-19 testing saw fewer COVID-19 cases and deaths than ones with schools that did not do any testing in the fall of 2020, researchers report June 23 in PLOS Digital Health. While previous analyses have shown that counties with colleges that brought students back to campus had more COVID-19 cases than those that continued online instruction, this is the first look at the impact of campus testing on those communities on a national scale (SN: 2/23/21).
“It’s tough to think of universities as just silos within cities; it’s just much more permeable than that,” says Brennan Klein, a network scientist at Northeastern University in Boston.
Colleges that tested their students generally did not see significantly lower case counts than schools that didn’t do testing, Klein and his colleagues found. But the communities surrounding these schools did see fewer cases and deaths. That’s because towns with colleges conducting regular testing had a more accurate sense of how much COVID-19 was circulating in their communities, Klein says, which allowed those towns to understand the risk level and put masking policies and other mitigation strategies in place.
The results highlight the crucial role testing can continue to play as students return to campus this fall, says Sam Scarpino, vice president of pathogen surveillance at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Pandemic Prevention Institute in Washington, D.C. Testing “may not be optional in the fall if we want to keep colleges and universities open safely,” he says.
Finding a flight path
As SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19 rapidly spread around the world in the spring of 2020, it had a swift impact on U.S. college students. Most were abruptly sent home from their dorm rooms, lecture halls, study abroad programs and even spring break outings to spend what would be the remainder of the semester online. And with the start of the fall semester just months away, schools were “flying blind” as to how to bring students back to campus safely, Klein says.
That fall, Klein, Scarpino and their collaborators began to put together a potential flight path for schools by collecting data from COVID-19 dashboards created by universities and the counties surrounding those schools to track cases. The researchers classified schools based on whether they had opted for entirely online learning or in-person teaching. They then divided the schools with in-person learning based on whether they did any…
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