I think that NYTimes dashboard is reporting cumulative cases since this started. While it can be interesting, it is not reflecting recent outbreaks unless the size is overwhelming. For example, Pitt’s number is 65, yet when you go to the university dashboard you find there are currently 16 active cases (11 students, 5 faculty).
Are there no RAs in this dorm? Or maybe it’s on-campus apartments with no RAs? Aren’t the locals getting a little restless? I would think they’d be speaking up by now.
Can someone explain how this helps? Is it just data to analyze or is it supposed to help find cases so individuals can be identified and quarantined?
I looked at Alabama dashboard. What does this mean:
310 / 29,938
University of Alabama
Does it mean they tested 29938 students and 310 tested positive? Or does it mean they have 29938 students and 310 students tested positive? When it comes to numbers, it should be more clear. They should be showing # of people tested and # of people positive.
This is awesome. I’ve been searching and searching for a school that releases the sewage testing data.
Generally schools report number tested and then number positive. On Alabama’s dashboard, those 310 students weren’t allowed to start school but I don’t know what that means exactly since I don’t think they did testing prior to arriving on campus. So those kids were quarantined after their test? Who knows. You’re right to say info isn’t specific enough.
Assuming they have hybrid courses there. Don’t know.
Wastewater and sewage have been found to have a reliable correlation to transmission, allowing local authorities to determine if they are testing enough to stay on top of outbreaks. I have no idea how timing plays a part in the analysis (lagging or leading indicator).
The UGA survey is tracking 2 facilities weekly.
Is it useful…who knows…but not for you or me.
Possibly the bigger issue is that the site you’re looking at isn’t likely meant to be the COVID “dashboard”. More details about how the UGA outbreak is impacting the community are here:
https://uhs.uga.edu/healthtopics/covid-19-health-and-exposure-updates
if the Bama girls are all isolating and not exposing anyone else, and can take their classes remotely the only infraction here is not telling the school, but secretly Bama likely doesnt want to know. how is this different if they lived in an apartment off campus somewhere?
Students, at least at Purdue, on campus or off, signed a HIPPA waiver saying they would share all test results with the University. What the 'Bama students are doing would be a violation of the Protect Purdue Pledge and grounds for suspension and expulsion hearings. The school needs the information to be able to conduct contact tracing and manage spread.
@sdl0625 Because, at least theoretically*, the school needs to alert anyone who had close contact with them so that they can quarantine and stop the spread/be on the lookout for symptoms. And someone needs to follow up every day with the positive cases to check symptoms/let them know under what circumstances they would need to go to the hospital.
*I don’t believe all schools are doing this bare basic minimum that people are entitled to from their local health department.
My son also at Michigan… Well… Leaving soon to see if they will make it to tomorrow… Hope they will…
I agree they secretly don’t want to know, but that’s my personal opinion. Kids these days can’t keep a secret to save their lives - everything ends up being found out. I’m sure the college knows this is going on all over campus (remember, these are barely 18 year olds l, not from the area, and they figured it out). The less cases they can attribute to the school, the better they look.
The NYT tracker is a bit misleading as it reports all cases since last winter. Yale has now had their first case since students started returning last week, but NYT reports 126. Those cases represent Yale New Haven Hospital employees and employees, families and retirees covered by Yale Health Plan.
The reported #s would be much more useful if the NYT used a mid-August start date.
Editing to add that I see @me29034 commented the same above.
Agree. Really tired of all this CUMULATIVE reporting. Not helpful at all for those of us trying to use Covid data NOW.
yeah, this sorta says it all about UA
Vanderbilt started classes this past Monday. They did pre-arrival testing and another test per student upon arrival. This e-mail came out this morning regarding surveillance testing during the semester. They plan to process about 1,000 per day to start.
"As we’ve discussed throughout our Return to Campus Plan communications, frequent testing is key to our efforts to slow the spread of COVID-19 on our campus. With that goal in mind, we have expanded our periodic campus testing to include mandatory, weekly testing of all undergraduates starting Monday, Aug. 31.
Currently, as a result of the significant efforts of our community to keep one another safe, we are only seeing small or limited clusters of positive cases amongst our undergraduate students. We detected this in part through our arrival testing and our robust, swift contact tracing. All individuals involved are following the university’s protocols for testing, quarantine and isolation. We expected positive cases as we ramped up our campus activity for the fall semester and these are being well managed. We have also been planning for significant periodic testing of our campus community. Based on the analysis of our public health experts, we believe enhanced weekly testing, paired with our rigorous contact tracing, will provide another key lever in our efforts to do everything we can to prevent the spread of this virus. In particular, as we conducted universal early testing, we identified many asymptomatic positive students, and, as we said we would, we are adapting plans to reflect this new information. This weekly testing will allow us to better and more quickly identify asymptomatic positive cases and localized clusters within our campus community.
Testing will be conducted in the David R. Williams II Recreation and Wellness Center at scheduled times and is mandatory for all undergraduate students who are authorized to be on campus and are engaged in on-campus, in-person activities—whether they live on campus or off campus. Those undergraduates who have elected for remote-only study are exempt. Students will receive an additional email with further instructions on registering for their testing time slot, including details on exactly where to report for testing in the Recreation and Wellness Center and what to bring. We will continue to partner with Vault—a national provider of saliva test kits, and the same provider we utilized for pre-arrival and arrival testing of undergraduates—to help us conduct these weekly tests."
In my opinion for this whole back to school experiment to work students have to legitimately care about their fellow students as a whole. When they don’t, evidenced by having large parties, waiting to test, not reporting positives, not quarantining when they suspect or know they are positive, engaging in unsafe behavior, and so on, there will be major outbreaks. If the school isn’t successful in promoting a culture where the majority of students can get behind a mentality of showing they respect and care about each other by doing the right thing, I just don’t see how they won’t have large outbreaks. But I think this starts from the top by having clear guidelines and expectations. And from parents who are encouraging their kids to make the right choices. In this case at Alabama, the parents of these girls are paying for off campus testing, food delivery, etc. They know and are condoning exactly what is going on.
The University of Georgia wastewater info is interesting, but flawed. It’s for the entire area (the town I guess), not for the university, so it won’t tell about university cases specifically.
But that’s not the main problem. Wastewater surveillance has been shown to lead surveillance testing by about three days, so one can learn, three days faster, of an outbreak. But that’s only useful if the testing is done every day. This testing is done once a week, which is almost useless. You can see by looking at the graph that the wastewater testing roughly corresponds with the testing results in Athens, as expected. It’s not clear to me what added value that once-a-week testing provides.
Thanks for explaining the wastewater testing. My money (literally LOL) is on Broad Institute for turnaround time and testing efficiency over other methods.