Part 1: Here’s How College Campuses Are Trying to Stop Coronavirus Outbreaks This Fall by Dan Vergano, BuzzFeed News

“Frat parties, football teams, and college bars were all petri dishes for fresh COVID-19 outbreaks this summer, and public health experts are warning that we’ll see even more as campuses around the country reopen this fall. And there will be a whole new hot spot thrown into the mix: dorms.

“The college campus has emerged as the latest setting for the confusion, fear, and politics of the US coronavirus outbreak. Filled with close living in dorms, young people who enjoy partying, and older at-risk staff, colleges pose a risk comparable to past disease outbreaks on cruise ships and in prisons…

“As college administrators nationwide have this month announced reopening plans, their chief guidance has been a CDC ‘considerations’ document updated on June 30. It calls for ‘promoting behaviors that reduce spread, maintaining healthy environments, maintaining healthy operations, and preparing for when someone gets sick,’ all within the confines of a regular schedule of on-campus virus tests to nip outbreaks in the bud.

“Still, ‘it’s not going to be 100% safe, even if all the mitigation steps are taken,’ Crystal Watson of the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security, a coauthor of a June guide to reopening for college administrators, told BuzzFeed News. The simple reality is that the pandemic will still be raging in the fall, and that COVID-19 is an infectious respiratory disease most commonly spread by indoor exposure to infected people for lengths of time shorter than most college lectures — a disease that most of humanity has no immunity to. ‘You obviously have to have a plan in place to get infections down, or you are going to see exponential growth in cases,’ University of Washington epidemiologist Carl Bergstrom told BuzzFeed News, ‘which could get ugly fast. If colleges don’t have a plan, they have no business reopening.’

“Colleges and universities across the country have a plethora of plans, almost all moving either heavily or completely online. Harvard’s decision to go fully online highlighted a curious paradox — one of the nation’s perceived highest-status universities embracing the operating plan of traditionally online schools like the University of Phoenix.

“Still, the nation's 50 largest college and university groups — which serve more than 2.7 million of the nation’s more than 6.3 million college students — are offering some form of live instruction, including the massive Lone Star College System in Texas and big state schools like Arizona State, the University of Texas, and Michigan State. About 44% of those 2.7 million students are being offered ‘hybrid’ classes with a mixture of virtual and in-person instruction. Another 21% of those students are attending schools that are continuing face-to-face education.

“Hybrid arrangements vary across institutions. Many involve reduced-occupancy classrooms driven by the need for individual 6-foot spacing, streaming or prerecorded classes, and less crowded dorm rooms, with triple rooms becoming doubles and doubles becoming singles. Labs and other hands-on classes continue. Most require masks and 6-foot-spacing rules, a requirement highlighted by the University System of Georgia backing down from making masks optional rather than required in classrooms.

“‘I don’t feel this plan is safe,’ University of Illinois archaeology professor Lisa Lucero told BuzzFeed News, as she prepares for hybrid classes on a campus of more than 50,000 students. ‘Staggering classes, extending times classes, teaching on Saturdays, etcetera, are great ideas, but it will still be crowded parts of the time,’ said Lucero. ‘The only reasonable, safe thing is to plan for online teaching for the fall semester, period. The issue would then be tuition and fee reductions — which is a conversation I think universities’ administrators don’t want?’ ‘I am torn,’ she added. ‘I really feel for students, especially first-year undergraduates and graduate students. But we are living in crazy times.’

“In a wider survey of more than 1,100 schools, but which doesn’t account for enrollment numbers, the Chronicle of Higher Education has found about 58% of them will have students return to campus. Compared against the top 50 enrollment schools, where only around 21% emphasize in-person classes, that suggests a lot of smaller schools are aiming to keep instruction in the classroom, a place seen as a key virus transmission point of concern in most plans. What is certain is that the pandemic, now responsible for more than 3 million confirmed cases and over 135,000 deaths in the US, takes hallmarks of college life and turns them into outbreak risks… (BuzzFeed News).