Campus reopenings linked to thousands of new daily coronavirus cases: report – Education Dive
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Dive Brief:
- A new study suggests that reopening college campuses for in-person instruction may have fueled tens of thousands of additional coronavirus cases in the U.S.
- Researchers from several universities estimated that more than 3,000 new daily cases nationwide, on average, could be linked to colleges offering face-to-face classes, beginning around two weeks after instruction started.
- Campuses nationwide have attempted to bring students back this fall, but outbreaks have forced some to quarantine students or send them home and return to virtual courses.
Dive Insight:
Skepticism abounded as colleges reopened their campuses for the fall term amid a nationwide spike in cases. But since then, several schools have shifted temporarily or even permanently to remote classes as a result of outbreaks on campus.
The new report, which is not peer reviewed, draws on the researchers’ analysis of GPS information from cellphones, as well as publicly available health data. It is due to be published on the preprint server medRxiv.
With the cellular data, the researchers were able to track students’ arrival on campuses. They monitored the infection rates in all U.S. counties from mid-July to mid-September, which includes the period immediately before and after students returned to campuses.
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