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Tanzina Vega: It's September 1st, and in any normal year, that would mean college students around the country would be settling into their fall semester, but as we know, 2020 is not a normal year. Many reopened colleges across the United States are struggling to prevent the spread of COVID-19. Thousands of cases have already been detected on campuses. Last week, major universities like the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and the Michigan State University reverted back to remote learning, while the University of Notre Dame suspended in-person learning for two weeks. We've been hearing from students and professors on how their schools are working to limit the spread of COVID-19 at 877-8-MY-TAKE.

Jolina: Hi, this is Jolina Rothwell. I'm calling from St. Louis, Missouri. I attend community college part-time since I work full-time. The campus is requiring masks, and they've implemented a health survey mobile app for when you have to go to campus. As far as my campus experience, I'm not nervous about in-person classes because I know my class size is already small. I think we have 10 in our class. I know the room we're meeting in. It is large enough to accommodate appropriate distancing.

Eric: This is Eric in Tampa. I am an adjunct at a major university, and we have already started on-campus. We are exercising social distancing and the wearing of masks. We have protective shields around campus, and of course, sanitizer dispensers everywhere. However, I don't think that we'll be on campus for long just because of the nature of the students and that unrealistic sense of entitlement.

Tanzina: A look at whether it's actually possible for colleges to prevent the spread of coronavirus cases among their student bodies. I'm Tanzina Vega, and that's where we start today on The Takeaway. Joining me now is Anemona Hartocollis, a national correspondent for The New York Times covering higher education. Anemona, thanks for being with us.

Anemona Hartocollis: Sure. Thanks for having me, Tanzina.

Tanzina: Also with us is Angela Clendenin, Assistant Professor in Epidemiology and Biostatistics at the Texas A&M University School of Public Health. Angela, thank you for joining us.

Angela Clendenin: Thank you very much.

Tanzina: Anemona, what are some of the most common guidelines with the understanding that each school is different and different states are doing different things, but what are some of the commonalities that in terms of what colleges are issuing to students to prevent the spread of COVID-19?

Anemona: It depends to some degree on the size of the college and the wealth of the college, and what they can afford to do, but I'd say it's pretty universal that colleges are requiring masks. There were some exceptions to that early on, and that public outcry was pretty loud from faculty and from community members, so I think that has changed. Some are doing testing of everybody, universal testing, and testing more than once or at regular intervals.

Others are doing what they're calling surveillance testing, which is more random testing of the population, or they're testing only when somebody reports symptoms. There's a range there, but masks and some degree of testing are pretty standard. Quarantining also, kids are coming from all over the country to many of these colleges so making them stay by themselves for two weeks is also sometimes part of the entry ritual.

Tanzina: Angela, despite everything that Anemona just laid out, though, we're still seeing cases of COVID-19 on college campuses. What's the disconnect here?

Angela: I think largely the issue is college campuses have the ability to control their environment that's on-campus. They can make certain requirements of students who live on-campus. They can control and disinfect the classrooms and the spaces in between buildings, but most of the transmission is happening when those students leave class. They're going off-campus. They're going and hanging out at large gatherings, and their homes, their apartments, wherever, and they're not following the guidelines that they follow when they're on-campus. It's that individual behavior aspect that one of your callers mentioned that is really leading to a lot of the continued transmission on college campuses.

Tanzina: Anemona, I think there's a lot of questions about just public schools and younger students in terms of opening and not opening, and allowing parents to have a break from younger kids, but these are college students. Why did colleges even attempt to reopen for in-person learning given the high rates of susceptibility to COVID-19 if the guidelines aren't followed.

Anemona: I think they did it for a number of reasons. One was financial, but I'm not even sure that was a major reason because some are saying they're losing money by opening because of the extra expenditure of attempting to say, stay safe, but you don't want your students to say, okay, if I can't go to campus, I'm not going to enroll, which could happen and has happened to some degree. The other is consumer demand. Students and their families, in many cases, really wanted to go back to campus. I've talked to many parents and kids at schools that are exclusively online who were grievously disappointed that this was the case.

I think they're also trying to meet that consumer demand, and most of them are doing it in a minimal way. They're not inviting everybody back. They're inviting maybe 40% or 35%, in some cases 60%, to live on campus or to take in-person classes but at the same time, many students are returning on their own and congregating in the nearby community, even if they're not taking classes in-person or living in a dorm. Kids seem to want that.

Tanzina: Angela, are you hearing anything from the faculty at Texas A&M or other schools about how they feel the administration is handling the situation because the faculty are also at risk and so are the workers in a lot of these schools.

Angela: For the most part, Texas A&M University has put a lot of safety measures in place specifically for faculty. They also allow some faculty if they are in a high-risk category. They can fill out an accommodation form and be able to teach completely online. A number of the classes that are very large, like large undergraduate classes that can't be accommodated in any of the buildings, went all online.

I think it's a conversation that you hear. Quite frankly, there are people who are very concerned about coming to campus and teaching face to face, even with safety precautions, whether that's because they're in a high-risk group, or they may be around people who are high risk. By far and large, everybody seems to be following the guidelines that they've been given, and we haven't heard a lot of rumblings, and we're about two weeks into school now.

Tanzina: Anemona, do you think we'll be seeing more schools cancel or suspend in-person learning as the semester is starting to get started over here?

Anemona: That's the million-dollar question. All these schools are trying to get through the semester until Thanksgiving, and then send their kids home for the rest of the semester until the spring begins, and there is a concern that there may be another wave, or that flu season will bring more of the coronavirus as well. It's not clear but Notre Dame and UNC and some of these other schools have now conducted a dress rehearsal. It has been thumpy. They found that students arrived on campus already infected, asymptomatic, didn't know they had it. A small number of infected students can quickly radiate out through their concentric circles of friends and acquaintances and strangers into a larger outbreak.

Notre Dame quickly nip that in the bud by saying, okay, we're going online-only, no more in-person classes for two weeks, which is the standard quarantine period until we get this under control though their infection rate is not zero. It's declined. It's started going down. They think that they have made progress there and are going to come back. It's a learning experience, but these schools also I think have been a little bit surprised by how tough they have to be in some cases.

All the students are signing honor codes, or if they're not signing them, they're required to abide by them saying, we're going to follow these coronavirus rules, but not through any malicious intent. Students are young and exuberant, and they forget, and they party, and even a small pizza party with your friends could turn into a vector of infection. It's been hard.

Tanzina: Anemona, are coronavirus tests available on college campuses? I mean, that's also been an issue because the time it takes to turn around test results was lagging quite a bit. People were wondering, is it even worth getting a test but that that aside, I mean, can students get tested at their college health services office, for example?

Anemona: I think for the most part they can. I would give the college's credit for being very well organized on that. University of Kentucky hired a private contractor to do the testing because they couldn't get enough testing from government sources and state and local, and who knows where else, but they've done the last, it'd look something like 22,000 tests. It's an enormous number.

There are places that expressed doubts about their ability to test everybody like University of Florida. They just didn't have the capacity to do it. That led to some outrage in Gainesville and the local community with the city commissioner saying that they were being naive.

Yes, colleges worked very systematically and very hard over the summer to make sure that they were prepared for this. Most of them have like a practically military-grade plan. It's not that testing or the infrastructure, particularly it's the vagaries of human behavior. People just don't behave the way you expect them to behave. At Syracuse University, they had to immediately suspend 23 freshmen for, again, just exuberance. They went out and a few kids started roaming around campus, and then more showed up, and then a large group was roaming around campus, and who knows what they thought they were doing. They were just celebrating being there, but it was against the rules. It's the human behavior factor that's been really tough.

Tanzina: In addition to that, Angela, I'm curious to hear your thoughts on this because these are young people, but for the most part, they're adults, and they are not living in a bubble. What happens on these campuses, I imagine, could also spread to the surrounding towns and cities that some of these colleges are in. Are you concerned about that, not just the spread on campus, but also how this could affect people off campus?

Angela: Absolutely. The thing about coronavirus in a community is you don't know who has an underlying health condition that it might make a case of corona or COVID very much more severe for them. The students are not confined to campus. As you just mentioned, they go out into the community. They're eating in restaurants. They are engaging in recreational activities. They're shopping alongside some people who could be quite frankly at very high risk of severe disease. You do get concerned about the impact that it has on the community when you do bring students back.

Tanzina: Despite the fact that we're talking about, again, young people, it feels like that the way that you stop the spread of coronavirus is by a community effort not just on campuses but by having people apply those standards even off campus. I just wonder, is there anybody who is responsible for this? Should there be a super spreader outbreak? Is it the college? Is it the students? Is it local government? I'll be honest, it feels somewhat irresponsible.

Angela: Most of the communities will also have some like mask mandate, depending on their burden of disease. Here in Bryan College Station, both our county and our cities have mask mandates, but what we're finding is that communities don't always have the law enforcement capacity, or have not been willing to enforce some of those mandates out in the community. You still have students gathering in large groups even though maybe the state has a mandate that no groups over the size of 10 should be congregating without masks, and somebody can call the law enforcement to go and break up the gathering, but law enforcement capacity is also an issue in trying to enforce those types of mandates out in the community.

Tanzina: Anemona, in terms of where colleges go from here, are schools being transparent enough with what they're telling students and the public about cases that are emerging on their campuses?

Anemona: Yes, I feel like I'm sounding like a school cheerleader here, but on the transparency score, a number of schools have what they're calling dashboards, which I was startled to see, but you can look online for your university dashboard. If you're a university student, it tells you things like how many people tested positive, how many people were tested that week. It's got all this statistical information on it. I think in their own self defense, they're being quite transparent about this because to do otherwise could be very damaging to their reputations, and their reputations are everything.

If you have a big outbreak in your campus, or infection spreads to more than the 1% or 2%, where it generally is now, you're going to be in trouble. People are going to lose confidence in you as an institution. I think there's an incentive there to be transparent, to be cautious, to be stern.

Tanzina: Anemona Hartocollis is a national correspondent for The New York Times covering higher education, and Angela Clendenin is an assistant professor in epidemiology and biostatistics at the Texas A&M University School of Public Health. Thanks to you both.

Anemona: Thank you.

Angela: Thank you. You're welcome.

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