As the Indiana University Bloomington campus goes into hibernation, coronavirus cases are beginning to show a resurgence around the world.
As the United States is showing up to 200,000 new cases each day in recent weeks, while the IU coronavirus dashboard shows that positivity rates on campus have not been higher than 2% since early September. IU’s director of asymptomatic testing and mitigation, Aaron Carroll, feels confident about the way that IU handled the virus so far but is nervous about the near future.
“I’m happy to see that IU has been holding the line but I’m really concerned about the state (of Indiana) and the fact that we live in the state,” said Carroll. “Clearly that has implications for our risk and the risk of our constituents.”
Carroll said, however, that the system that’s in place seems to be working for IU and emphasized that this system is out of the “epidemiology playbook” as he called it, meaning that this system was not IU’s invention.
“You need to have good symptomatic testing, be able to get everybody into care that needs it, be able to get anyone who has symptoms a test to figure out if they have COVID or not, so we can know what’s going on,” he said. “Next, you need contact tracing and isolation. We need to be able to put the people who are infected into isolation, we need to be able to put all of the close contacts into quarantine, that’s one of the best ways we know to slow it.”
Aaron Carroll, IU’s Director of Asymptomatic Testing and Mitigation, explains the challenges of containing the spread of COVID-19 in Greek Housing.
However, the higher frequency of asymptomatic mitigation testing for some students over others has made students feel that IU could have an inaccurate idea of COVID rates on campus.
“So, part of it is random, in the sense that we try to put people into boxes and then we try to sample from all those boxes,” he said. “So that includes students, faculty and staff on all of our campuses because we want to have a sense of what is the employee risk of infection, what is the dorm population’s risk of infection, what’s the off-campus student risk of infection on all of our campuses.”
After that, further testing is focused on parts of campus that they know to be at higher risk, meaning that students who live in Bloomington dorms or Greek housing are likely to be tested almost every week while those in Bloomington off-campus housing will be tested much less frequently.
On top of this, there are often weeks that IU will over-sample different groups, such as all off-campus Greek members, off-campus Bloomington students or undergraduate students, as these groups seem to test at higher levels than other kinds of students.
Although positivity rates were very high in Greek housing, leading to threatened evictions and some students being forced to go home for two weeks, Carroll says that the school has no control over whether students wanted to live in Greek housing this semester. So, instead the school provided Greek organizations with guidelines to follow in hopes that this would lower the risk in communal living environments, and off-campus leasing tips on the student affairs site.
Jeremy Whitmore is an IU senior who lives off-campus with his large group of friends. While some of his friends have had COVID, Whitmore still has yet to test positive even though he’s been called in for testing five times, the highest number of the group. However, he doesn’t mind the frequent testing he’s been called for.
IU senior Jeremy Whitmore explains why he doesn’t mind that he’s been called in for Mitigation Testing more than the average student living off campus.
“I think it’s useful just to keep numbers in check,” he said. “I also do think that it helps that we’re sort of in a bubble here. A lot of people now that bars and restaurants are kind of, you have to stick to your own crowd, so a lot of people tend to hang out with the same group of people, too. So, I think it just, in general, helps that we’re in a bubble too, more so.
Meanwhile, Aaron Carroll is looking to the epidemiology playbook to see how IU and Bloomington will fare in the near future:
“Much the same as it is now,” said Carroll. “I mean I hope that we do better, in the sense that we’re getting better at this, we sort of know what’s coming, we will have increased testing capacity for second semester, above what we had for first semester because our labs are coming online. We sort of know the curve of what to expect and so I think that we’ll be hammering things with testing really hard in the first view weeks to really just try to, uh, flatten that curve that we saw at the beginning of the semester.”
For more information on campus COVID-19 testing, visit COVID.IU.EDU.
For a live Q&A session with Aaron Carroll, register for the 12 PM “Ask Arron” session on Wednesday, December 16th here.
