As winter break comes to a close and students travel back to their campuses, Colorado colleges are hoping to avoid a repeat of a chaotic fall semester mangled by COVID-19.
“Going into the spring, there’s less focus on the universities as a sort of source [of COVID-19] as a rise in transmission and a recognition that the measures that come with the different dial ratings make a difference,” said Jude Bayham, a Colorado State University faculty member on the university’s pandemic response team and member of the Colorado School of Public Health’s state COVID-19 modeling team. “There’s just a much broader focus on the entirety of the strategy to manage the pandemic.”
University leaders across the state are crossing their fingers that they and their students have learned lessons from the fall to make the final stretch of the academic year less eventful than the previous two semesters. Universities are tweaking their game plans: delaying in-person learning from the get-go, banking on potential virus immunity and implementing robust community testing in the hopes of fending off COVID-19 surges.
Soon after the start of the fall academic year, several Colorado higher education institutions experienced COVID-19 outbreaks. While universities will likely experience an increase in virus cases as students return, the state is in a much different place now than it was in the fall when virus cases were lower, Bayham said.
The University of Colorado Boulder was the largest outbreak in the state in September and October, becoming the focus of government news conferences and public health restrictions urging young adults to stop socializing.
Other universities, including CSU and Regis University, also wound up on the state’s outbreak list. Bayham noted such outbreaks could mean a number of students now have COVID-19 immunity.
‘We might have a lot of students on campus with acquired immunity and that will serve to disrupt those infectious transmission events,” Bayham said. “How long that immunity lasts is still an open question. While COVID-19 prevalence is higher now than in the spring, the affected susceptible population on campus might actually be lower.”
Tom Gonzales, public health director for Larimer County Department of Health and Environment, said the agency works closely with CSU’s Fort Collins campus to use what they learned in the fall to make the spring semester less eventful.
The university will continue with a mix of online, in-person and hybrid courses. Masks will be mandated. The university will sustain COVID-19 testing through wastewater, saliva and nasal swabs. Isolation and quarantine rooms will be back.
Gonzales believes a marked difference between the spring and the fall will be students changing their behavior after having witnessed the virus’ impacts on their education and communities.
“We weren’t really used to all this change on campus then, but they’ve adapted well,” Gonzales said.
CSU’s semester begins Jan.19 and classes will be held remotely for the first week. Courses with a high priority for in-person learning will meet face-to-face starting the second week, the university said.
“We probably will see an uptick, but I’m just optimistic it’s going to be a lot less than what we saw in the fall semester,” Gonzales said.
At CU Boulder, classes begin Jan. 14 but will be held remotely for at least the first four weeks. Students living on campus are asked to delay their arrival as officials wait to gauge the trajectory of the highly contagious virus.
“We are asking everyone to remain in their home communities and delay travel to Boulder until we return to in-person learning,” said CU Boulder Chancellor Phil DiStefano during a December virtual town hall held to address the spring semester. “This will help reduce risk of transmission in community.”
DiStefano announced on Tuesday that he contracted COVID-19 and was experiencing mild symptoms.
Pat O’Rourke, CU Boulder’s chief operating officer, said during the fall, the flagship university spent a great deal of time thinking about the physical environment of the campus — masks, social distancing, air flow, cleaning.
“A lot of that worked really well,” O’Rourke said. “What I think we learned is the importance of the human experience.”
O’Rourke said there were no documented cases of virus transmission in the classroom, so starting the semester remotely was less about reducing COVID-19 and more about preserving students’ mental health.
University officials wanted to avoid the fall semester’s whiplash between in-person and remote learning, O’Rourke said, and ensure when students are brought back to campus, they can stay.
During the December virtual town hall, O’Rourke said asking students living on campus to stay with their families during remote learning prioritized mental health and prevented them from being cooped up in their dorm rooms restricted from interacting with others as students experienced in the fall.
Chana Goussetis, spokeswoman for Boulder County Public Health, said the local agency feels confident heading into the spring semester after setting up an infrastructure that supports enforcement and communication.
“It is quite likely that we will see an increase in the number of COVID-19 cases when students return, as we would with any large influx of individuals to the community,” Goussetis wrote in an email to The Denver Post. “However, we also know that students have a better understanding of what is expected of them and the consequences for not following public health requirements.”
Amy Noble, a 22-year-old senior at CSU, took precautions before driving down to Durango from Fort Collins for the winter break to be with her family.
Noble said she tested negative for COVID-19 and quarantined in her Fort Collins apartment the week before the trip to give her peace of mind. She plans on traveling back to Fort Collins a week before school begins and trying to stay home when she gets back.
“Going back to Fort Collins is less nerve-wracking than coming down to see my parents,” Noble said. “If I catch COVID, I’m of the mindset I’m probably going to be OK, but I don’t want to spread it to my parents. I would much rather catch it in Fort Collins than in Durango.”
Noble acknowledged she didn’t want to spread the contagious virus in Fort Collins, either, but said she thought she was being careful by not partying and only meeting up with select friends for an occasional drink or dinner out.
“My mentality is if things are opening up, then it must be safe,” Noble said. “My whole life is surrounded by younger people and students so I don’t really do too much with the greater community of Fort Collins, but I don’t want to watch it spread here, either. I’m still trying to enjoy my senior year and last semester.”
Gonzales urged any students traveling back to Fort Collins to get a free COVID-19 test upon their arrival and to make sure they follow isolation and quarantine protocols if they test positive.
At Colorado Mesa University in Grand Junction, in-person learning prevailed during the fall semester, unlike many of its peer institutions. The university plans to start this semester with in-person learning, as well.
“There were a lot of lessons learned from the fall, and one of them is we know how to do mass testing very quickly and also figured out how to put a spotlight on hot spots very quickly,” said John Marshall, CMU’s vice president for student services.
The university expects even better success after a partnership with research center Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard influenced their spring testing strategy. Instead of reserving COVID-19 testing for students living on campus, the Broad Institute’s modeling suggested better virus regulation by testing those who the campus population comes into contact with to stop spread in its tracks: faculty family members, students’ off-campus coworkers and siblings.
“They modeled that if we can divert up to half or more of our tests to the close-contact-non-CMU of the community then we actually can drive our campus infection rates down which is a really exciting proposition,” Marshall said.
Details of their revised testing strategy are being hammered out.
Nevertheless, CMU President Tim Foster said the campus will not let its guard down this spring.
“We’re fine-tuning what we did in the fall,” Foster said. “We had hundreds of students who had COVID then and probably twice as many who were asymptomatic and will never know, but we’re going to play it straight down the middle as if nobody had it and not count on immunity. We are relying on layers of protection and emerging data and science. We are in a much more informed position.”
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