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Colleges may be COVID superspreaders in their area, study finds. Here are the numbers

A study of 30 college campuses across the nation suggests the education hubs are potential coronavirus superspreaders in their counties.

In some colleges, one in five students had contracted COVID-19 by the end of their fall term, which took place between Aug. 15 and Dec. 11. In about half of the schools studied, peak infections that were “well above” 1,000 cases per 100,000 people per week occurred within the first two weeks of class.

A computer model developed by Stanford University scientists also shows that 17 college outbreaks “translated directly into peaks of infection within their home counties,” in just two weeks, despite schools being able to control COVID-19 spread within their own campus, according to the study published Wednesday in the journal Computer Methods in Biomechanics and Biomedical Engineering.

What’s more, all of the studied institutions exceeded what policy makers consider the high risk threshold for counties — 50 cases per 100,000 people. Three schools surpassed that mark by “two orders of magnitude,” the researchers said in a news release.

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The picture by the end of the fall semester was grim. The number of students who had gotten sick with COVID-19 was more than twice the national average throughout the fall, with a 10% and 5.3% recovered coronavirus population, respectively.

But the findings weren’t all that dark.

COVID-19 deaths on college campuses, which were mainly among employees and not students, had a rate of 0.02%, the study said, which is “well below the average death rate for COVID-19.”

Containing coronavirus outbreaks on campuses also proved possible. The researchers said regular testing, compliance with local regulations such as social distancing and mask wearing, contact tracing and “flexible transitions” from in-person to online classes were able to reduce peak infections in about two weeks.

A Stanford University study of 30 college campuses across the nation suggests the education hubs are potential coronavirus superspreaders in their counties.
A Stanford University study of 30 college campuses across the nation suggests the education hubs are potential coronavirus superspreaders in their counties.

“Strikingly, these local campus outbreaks rapidly spread across the entire county and triggered a peak in new infections in neighbouring communities in more than half of the cases,” study senior author Ellen Kuhl, a mechanical engineering professor at Stanford University in California, said in the news release.

“It is becoming increasingly clear that these initial college outbreaks are unrelated to the national outbreak dynamics. Instead, they are independent local events driven by campus reopening and inviting students back to campus,” Kuhl added.

The Stanford team used advanced modeling that considers real-time COVID-19 case and death data to predict how the disease spreads across campuses, using information from publicly available dashboards from 30 schools.

The colleges were either teaching in person, online or a combination of both, and all had cumulative coronavirus case numbers over 100. Schools in California, Florida, Texas, Georgia, Kentucky, North Carolina and New York were included in the study, among others.

The Ohio State University (5,806), University of Florida (5,630), Clemson University in South Carolina (5,431) and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (5,182) all exceeded 5,000 COVID-19 cases within their fall semester, according to the research.

A total of 18 schools experienced their maximum number of infections between Aug. 19 and Oct. 10, which was between the second and third waves of COVID-19 peak cases in the U.S. This suggests that outbreaks on college campuses happen independently from national trends, the researchers said, and are driven by students interacting on school grounds.

The institution that had the worst COVID-19 numbers was the University of Notre Dame in Indiana, where more than 90% of students don’t live in the state.

Before the first day of in-person fall classes, the school tested all 12,607 students, and only nine tested positive. About a week later, 147 students had become infected.

By the end of the fall semester, 1,831 students contracted the virus, or about 14.5% of the student population. In comparison, St. Joseph County, where the school is located, had an infection rate of 7.8% at the same time, which was above the state’s average of 6.5%.

The researchers say this indicates “that the initial outbreak at the University of Notre Dame had superspreading-like effects on its home county.”

This same trend was present at 17 other schools included in the study.