New London — In the last couple of months, COVID-19 has been advancing across the region, but not on the campus of Connecticut College, where the disease’s seemingly inexorable march has been held in check.
The college has succeeded so well because it never let COVID-19 get a foothold, experts say.
Since Aug. 17, when it began testing students, faculty and staff, Conn, in partnership with the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, had administered 32,446 COVID-19 tests through Friday, detecting 29 positive cases among students as well as eight among employees, resulting in an exceptionally low positivity rate of 0.11%. The rate was even lower before this past week, during which nine of the student cases and two of the employee cases were detected by 2,554 tests, a rate of 0.43%.
By comparison, the state's average seven-day positivity rate, climbing for weeks, stood at 2.5% Friday. On Thursday, the one-day rate had soared to 6.1%.
Mitchell College, another private, four-year institution in New London, has had three positive test results among its 605 students. As of Oct. 22, the Coast Guard Academy, Conn’s across-the-street neighbor, had had nine, according to data compiled by The New York Times.
Over a similar period, from Aug. 21 through Friday, the number of COVID-19 cases in the nine southern New London County towns served by Ledge Light Health District had more than doubled, rising from 925 to 1,974. The number of cases in New London had gone from 221 to 635, an increase of 187%.
Those seeking the source of the local surge may want to rule out the colleges.
“I don’t think it’s the kids,” said Keith Grant, Hartford HealthCare’s senior system director for infection prevention, who helped develop Conn’s response to the coronavirus pandemic and has consulted with officials at several other colleges, including the University of Connecticut, which also has contained the virus pretty well, notwithstanding a spike in cases Friday.
Grant takes little or no credit for the success of Conn’s coronavirus-containment program, which he called “one of the best in the country, by far.” The credit, he said, belongs to Conn’s dean of students, Victor Arcelus, and the college’s students, faculty and staff.
“I have contact with multiple institutions and they’re doing something very special (at Conn),” Grant said. “It’s testament to Victor and his group. They’re at a green level, which, at this point, with New London County seeing the highest rate of increases in the state, ... that’s ridiculous.”
While testing all of its 1,350 students twice a week and faculty and staff at least once a week, Conn has been at a green or “normal” COVID-19 alert level for much of the fall, detecting no more than two positive cases among students in any week but two, including last week.
“Those are very manageable numbers,” Arcelus said.
It has a lot to do with steps Conn took to limit the prevalence of the virus among students who returned to campus in August for the fall semester. Conn required students to self-isolate for two weeks and to take a COVID-19 test before arriving in New London. The college sent at-home test kits to those who didn’t have access to testing in their hometowns. Once students arrived, they were required to immediately submit to twice-a-week testing and to quarantine for another 14 days or until they had twice tested negative.
“The onboarding process is pivotally important. The more you’re able to limit the degree to which it (the disease) comes onto campus, the more success you’re going to have,” Arcelus said.
Though costly, Conn's test-everyone-multiple-times-a-week approach is the most effective way to go about it, experts like Grant and David Paltiel of the Yale School of Medicine agree. Paltiel co-authored a study published in July that concluded that screening every student every two days, "coupled with strict behavioral interventions," would enable campuses to safely reopen.
Nevertheless, Mitchell College has been able to contain the virus by tracking the daily temperatures and health symptoms of faculty and staff through an application administered by the Broad Institute and by conducting twice-a-week surveillance, or random, testing of about 25% of its students, faculty and staff. That's about 150 tests a week, according to Britt Barry, a Mitchell spokeswoman.
As of Friday, Mitchell had conducted 1,349 tests and identified three cases of COVID-19 among students and employees, a positivity rate of 0.22%.
Of course, detecting cases is not the whole story. Those found to have the disease must be isolated and their contacts traced. At Conn, the process starts when the Broad Institute notifies the college's health director that a student has tested positive. A registered nurse, driving a vehicle outfitted with plexiglass dividers between the seats, picks the student up and takes him or her to an on-campus apartment set aside for isolation purposes. For the next 14 days, the student remains there. The college makes daily deliveries of food, and student health services checks in twice a day through telehealth visits.
Contact tracing immediately begins. The infected student's close contacts are required to quarantine where they live. They can leave to get food via a special dining hall entrance and to walk around campus, but they must avoid gatherings.
Students in isolation and quarantine continue their courses online.
Four weeks ago, Conn's mostly flat curve developed a spike. An outbreak among four students occasioned contact tracing that uncovered seven more cases.
"It's got to be a community effort. Everyone's got to be engaged," Arcelus said. "If students are not complying with expectations (spelled out in the 'Camels Care' pledge they're asked to take), they risk being sent home to finish the semester remotely."
Transgressions that can get a student sent home — not suspended, Arcelus noted — include hosting dorm-room gatherings of more people than can stay safely distanced. Nineteen Conn students have been sent home for breaking such rules.
Transparency, innovation at UConn
Eleanor Daugherty, the University of Connecticut’s associate vice president for student affairs and dean of students, said the state’s flagship university has had success containing the virus because it hasn’t relied on a single tool. In addition to robust testing of students, faculty and staff, it also tests wastewater collected at several campus locations and has pursued a pooled sampling method that increases the speed and volume of testing.
More important, she said, students have been willing to cooperate.
“We wanted a model of compliance, not one based on enforcement,” Daugherty said. “We didn’t want our message to be dictatorial or to threaten ‘there will be consequences.’ We did research over the summer that showed students wanted to be back (on campus). The motivation was there.”
Developments last week changed the complexion of things, at least temporarily.
"I'm worried," Daugherty wrote Friday in a letter to students. "Earlier this morning, the medical team informed me that we have nine reported off-campus positive cases among our students, in addition to three on campus. This presents a jump in the off-campus positivity rate to 5.6% and is UConn's highest single-day total in weeks."
Daugherty announced she was prohibiting students living on campus from attending off-campus social gatherings through 8 a.m. Wednesday.
Embracing transparency, UConn posts its COVID-19 data on an online “dashboard,” which as of Friday indicated there were 15 current COVID-19 cases among the 5,000 students living on and near its Storrs campus, a positivity rate of 0.30%. Since Sept. 13, the university, which also partners with the Broad Institute, had conducted 20,371 tests that yielded 224 positives, a rate of 1.1%.
Since Sept. 13, another 99 students commuting to in-person classes at Storrs had tested positive, while no cases had been detected among students enrolled at UConn’s satellite campuses, including Avery Point in Groton.
As of Friday, 20 of 3,979 faculty and staff had tested positive, a rate of 0.50%.
Daugherty said UConn has the capacity to conduct 300 to 500 tests five times a week. It tests anyone with symptoms and does surveillance testing to find the disease among those who aren’t exhibiting symptoms. Wastewater testing, launched with UConn’s Institute for System Genomics and its Microbial Analysis, Resources and Services laboratory, or MARS, can detect the presence of COVID-19 genes in human waste as much as a week before regular testing would find it.
“That can help us pinpoint where the virus is prevalent,” Daugherty said.
Similar testing is taking place in New London, Norwich and other municipalities in the state in connection with a Yale University study of the technique.
Through pooled sampling, UConn is further speeding things up by testing combined saliva samples from as many as 10 students. Only if the combined sample comes back positive do the students need to be tested individually.
Despite administrators’ best efforts and planning, well-publicized outbreaks of COVID-19 have occurred in residence halls on and near the Storrs campus. When necessary, the university has placed entire dormitories on quarantine, Daugherty said.
“Going into this, we knew we needed to build a bubble,” she said. “We knew it was going to be flimsy, but it has emerged. We want to keep that bubble intact. ... We’ve had to ask tremendous things of our students. That's why I have such great admiration for them.”
At the end of her letter Friday, Daugherty called on students to redouble their efforts.
"We've got this," she wrote.
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