Higher education responses to COVID-19 in the United States: Evidence for the impacts of university policy

Brennan Klein,  Nicholas Generous,  Matteo Chinazzi, Zarana Bhadricha, Rishab Gunashekar, Preeti Kori, Bodian Li,  Stefan McCabe,  Jon Green,  David Lazer,  Christopher R. Marsicano,  Samuel V. Scarpino,  Alessandro Vespignani

doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2021.10.07.21264419

This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review [what does this mean?]. It reports new medical research that has yet to be evaluated and so should not be used to guide clinical practice.

Abstract

With a dataset of testing and case counts from over 1,400 institutions of higher education (IHEs) in the United States, we analyze the number of infections and deaths from SARS-CoV-2 in the counties surrounding these IHEs during the Fall 2020 semester (August to December, 2020). We used a matching procedure designed to create groups of counties that are aligned along age, race, income, population, and urban/rural categories—socio-demographic variables that have been shown to be correlated with COVID-19 outcomes. We find that counties with IHEs that remained primarily online experienced fewer cases and deaths during the Fall 2020 semester; whereas before and after the semester, these two groups had almost identical COVID-19 incidence. Additionally, we see fewer deaths in counties with IHEs that reported conducting any on-campus testing compared to those that reported none. We complement the statistical analysis with a case study of IHEs in Massachusetts—a rich data state in our dataset—which further highlights the importance of IHE-affiliated testing for the broader community. The results in this work suggest that campus testing can itself be thought of as a mitigation policy and that allocating additional resources to IHEs to support efforts to regularly test students and staff would be beneficial to mitigating the spread of COVID-19 in the general population.

https://www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1101/2021.10.07.21264419v1