Will lessons learned in the fall help Kentucky colleges face spring’s COVID-19 challenges?
Centre College received a substantial gift in late November — but not the kind of checkbook contribution schools are used to receiving.
The parent of a Centre student made a philanthropic splash, not with cash, but with a donation of 10,000 rapid COVID-19 tests which can deliver results in minutes rather than days — much-valued currency in these pandemic times.
For the Danville campus, which performed over 6,000 tests searching for the virus among its student body last semester, the donation will allow the college to expand its testing scope and will allow Centre students to know whether they’re carrying the virus before they even get the keys to move back into their dorm rooms this spring.
In the coming weeks, students across the state will return to campuses offering their second full semester of the COVID-19 college experience and higher education institutions will get to see if lessons learned in the fall will make for a healthier spring.
The classroom setting will remain similar to last semester. Students will likely find their classmates on a computer screen or at a desk six feet away. But the largest changes on campus will come in the wider availability and array of COVID-19 testing procedures that have been made attainable even to smaller colleges who might face tighter budgets.
And college administrators are hoping that after all the nasal swabbing and saliva collecting, they’ll be able to give students and employees the shots in the arm necessary for moving into a post-COVID-19 world.
Colleges now have access to a wide variety of testing options
At Centre, the 10,000 antigen rapid tests — supplied by Dr. Young Hong of New Jersey-based pharmaceutical company AccessBio — will be supplemented by 3,000 Abbott rapid tests the college secured, said Kathy Jones, the college’s director of student health.
Last fall, Centre tested 25 percent of its student population weekly. Jones said this year the college will be able to weekly test the 600 or so students who moved onto campus ahead of the regular semester for some specially designed pre-semester courses. Then in early February when the campus will be closer to its over 1,000 student capacity, Jones said the college hopes to test every student weekly for at least the first two weeks.
Other schools are making similar testing ramp-ups. The University of Kentucky, which will begin its return testing of all students who plan to be physically present on campus this week, will continue to have required, regular testing for students throughout the semester. The frequency of the testing is still being determined.
As University of Pikeville students moved back onto campus this week, students were able to take the self-administered COVID-19 test which also returns results in minutes, said Burton Webb, the university’s president.
The self-administered BinaxNOW test used by the university, which is performed with a nasal swab, does have a relatively high false positive rate, Webb said. So students who test positive with it get referred to have a follow-up PCR test — the kind where someone else inserts the nasal swab and can take longer than a day to give results.
After move-in, all students at the Pikeville campus will do weekly pooled saliva surveillance testing.
“That one’s really simple, because they’ll just show up at a designated location and spit in a tube,” Webb said.
For saliva testing, the university will collect saliva samples of groups of students and test the sample once for the presence of the virus. If the sample tests positive, then that batch of students would get a round of individual tests to determine who among them has contracted the disease.
A delayed start for some schools
UPike is also no stranger to using time and distance to defuse an outbreak. The school opted to temporarily close campus last fall after a surge in cases and exposures was depleting the university’s supply of quarantine beds. The measure worked “extraordinarily well,” as case numbers remained low for the rest of the semester after students returned from the pandemic-enforced hiatus, Webb said.
Madison County’s Berea College is also hoping time away from campus can lower the likelihood of an early semester case surge. In December, Berea President Lyle Roelofs announced in an email that the school would be delaying the return of students to campus and the start of classes would be pushed into early February to avoid a post-holiday spike.
“We reasoned, based on how things were developing after Thanksgiving, that January would be a pretty tough month,” Roelofs said in an interview. “There wouldn’t be very many vaccinations available yet for vulnerable populations, and cases would likely be surging after the holidays. And that seems to have been borne out by what we’re seeing in Kentucky.”
The Berea campus will also continue regular, recurring testing of students and employees, as it did in the fall, but with potentially increased frequency, Roelofs said. The college’s testing suppliers are also gaining access to new types of tests, including rapid tests, he said.
Essentially across the board, spring break has been eliminated from college calendars as schools hope to discourage travel and keep students close to campus. Berea is no different, Roelofs said, as all three of the recorded positive cases among the school’s students in the fall came via travel.
Will COVID-19 vaccines make for a normal fall 2021?
Schools are already seeing on-campus healthcare employees vaccinated and are hoping supply will increase to the point later in the semester where all employees and potentially students can be vaccinated.
At Centre, Jones said the four full-time workers in the student health office who see symptomatic students received their vaccines in the first week of January at the Boyle County Health Department. Not long after the college’s athletic training staff — who have functioned as contact tracers — were also vaccinated.
Centre hopes to be able to provide the vaccine on campus and has applied to be a vaccine provider, Jones said. They’re already making accommodations. When it was clear that the vaccine refrigerator in the student health office couldn’t get cold enough to store the COVID-19 vaccine, Jones said the school is opting to use chest freezers that belong to the biology department.
Many of the faculty at UPike’s medical school and optometry college have already been vaccinated, Webb said. The university is also “mounting a small army of students” in nursing and medical programs that would go assist Pikeville Medical Center’s vaccine distribution plans.
UK officials said they’ve vaccinated thousands of healthcare workers in the university’s hospital and recently began to vaccinate some faculty, staff and students outside of healthcare settings.
College administrators are optimistic that widespread vaccine rollouts in the coming months will mean a return to closer to normal operations by the fall. But in the meantime, they’re still working to keep their employees and students vigilant against the virus.
In March, it will be nearly a year since the coronavirus was first reported in Kentucky, and Berea was the state’s first college to announce that campus would be closing over concerns about the virus. Roelofs hasn’t forgotten that and in many of his campus updates, he reminds students and employees how far they’ve come.
“Most of us, when when we entered into this middle of March, last spring, we thought well, maybe by summer, or certainly by fall, we’ll be OK,” Roelofs said. “I don’t think any of us realized the duration of the ordeal we were facing.”