The 5 Biggest Lessons We’ve Learned About How Coronavirus Spreads on Campus – The Chronicle of Higher Education
When colleges shifted operations online in the spring because of Covid-19, so much remained in question. How did the new coronavirus spread? What were its ill effects? Could colleges open for in-person instruction in the 2020-21 academic year, and what would happen if they did?
As the fall term comes to a close, we now have some hard-earned answers. These five lessons may shape institutions’ responses both to the coming spring semester and to pandemics and other public-health threats in the future.
1. With precautions in place, classrooms and other formal on-campus spaces aren’t important vectors of viral spread.
As institutions prepared to hold in-person classes this fall, they paid special attention to their classrooms, libraries, student unions, and other on-campus spaces. They removed seats, installed plexiglass, and updated ventilation systems. They required people to wear masks on campus, and, to varying degrees, they let staff and faculty members work from home.
In general, they’ve succeeded. They’ve prevented infections in those places. Classroom, office, and study-space transmission has occurred, but it’s not the major cause of college outbreaks. (Residence halls are an exception; for more on that, see Lesson 3.) At Temple University and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, both of which had to flip online because they couldn’t contain student infections, administrators cited no instances of student-to-faculty transmission.