Colgate University proved why testing is key to opening campus amid coronavirus pandemic

Aarthi Swaminathan
·Reporter
Updated ·4 min read

Some colleges managed to salvage the fall semester by bringing students back to campus amid the coronavirus pandemic.

The key to success? Lots and lots of testing.

Colgate University in upstate New York is one of the schools that prioritized testing early on. The 200-year-old college has conducted roughly 11,000 COVID-19 tests for its 3,000 students, according to the school’s dashboard. The school also engaged in wastewater sampling to detect COVID cases.

“Testing that many people that often has allowed us to stay safe and remain open,” Colgate Dean Paul McLoughlin told Yahoo Finance Live (video above). “But also, it is what's necessary. It's allowed us to sort of identify early.”

Colgate, which is currently reporting 0% positivity rates for four weeks in a row, has offered its students antigen tests on a voluntary basis between November 16 and 17 before students head home for Thanksgiving. Furthermore, the school will move to virtual instruction after the Thanksgiving break. (Vanderbilt, another school that successfully reopened campus, moved to virtual instruction the week before Thanksgiving.)

When students return to campus in the spring, they’ll be required to submit a negative COVID-19 test prior to their arrival. They’ll be given at-home tests. And after that, they’ll be tested again 24 hours after their arrival and will also be quarantined.

HAMILTON, NEW YORK, UNITED STATES - 2015/10/11: Colgate University campus. (Photo by John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Colgate University campus in 2015. (Photo by John Greim/LightRocket via Getty Images)

Testing approaches vary significantly

Other schools that tested early and often managed to get a handle on the highly infectious disease.

A recent report published by the CDC, and written by Duke professors and researchers, stated that 10,265 Duke students had been tested nearly 69,000 times in the fall. 84 were positive, with half of those cases being asymptomatic.

Before coming back to campus, students self-quarantined at home for 14 days and were subjected to “entry testing.”

They then signed a “Duke Compact,” a document which Colgate asked its students to acknowledge, in which they agreed to mandatory masking, social distancing, and participating in entry and surveillance testing. Those who missed scheduled tests lost access to the campus facilities and services, so compliance was pretty high at 95%.

The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign had a similar aggressive strategy to detect coronavirus cases. At one point in August, the school had reportedly performed about 2% of all COVID-19 tests in the entire country.

CHAMPAIGN, IL - NOVEMBER 07: Big Ten Network sideline reporter Elise Menaker during a college football game between the Minnesota Golden Gophers and Illinois Fighting Illini on November 7, 2020 at Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Ill (Photo by James Black/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)
Big Ten Network sideline reporter Elise Menaker during a college football game between the Minnesota Golden Gophers and Illinois Fighting Illini on November 7, 2020 at Memorial Stadium in Champaign, Ill (Photo by James Black/Icon Sportswire via Getty Images)

At the other end of the spectrum, many states had vague testing policies, as reported by NPR.

This included Long Island University, which had shut down in-person instruction in October due to a surge in cases on campus. The school was reported to have ramped up surveillance testing and wastewater sampling and subsequently resumed in-person classes. The school is now offering exit testing for students who are leaving for the Thanksgiving break.

“We have learned a lot as the semester has gone on, and that has influenced our activities this term but also our plans for the Spring '21,” Colgate’s McLoughlin said.

For instance, when it came to wastewater testing, “we can actually collect about 24 hours of waste, a sample of that, and look at the prevalence of the virus in that wastewater,” he explained.

They also did targeted testing, McLoughlin added, so that “when we would see the virus in a particular area, we would then over-sample that particular residence hall in order to identify someone who maybe had the virus and is shedding it through waste but not shedding it to a place where they are, in fact, infecting their peers.”

A positivity rate over 5% is problematic for any community, indicating that more testing is needed, and the U.S. as a whole is at nearly 10%. (Johns Hopkins)
A positivity rate over 5% is problematic for any community, indicating that more testing is needed, and the U.S. as a whole is at nearly 10%. (Johns Hopkins)

Colgate dean: Covid playbook is not just about testing

The playbook isn’t just about testing, McLoughlin stressed.

“It was testing as a part of a comprehensive plan,” he said. Tracing came next and then isolating the affected students.

“But it was our students' commitment to the Commitment to Community Health, which is our sort of public health compact,” McLoughlin said. “They wore their mask on campus everywhere, into the Village. They were good about not gathering in large groups.”

And “at the end of the day, there's a financial cost to opening a campus and remaining open as we have in-person instruction, but there's also a human cost,” McLoughlin added. “And our staff are tired, I will say that, since I was last here.”

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