Very Frequent Testing?

Blog readers will have seen yesterday's posting on UCLA's decision to cut back on the (relatively few) in-person courses planned for fall quarter and on how students would be housed on campus.* We continue to note the paradox of students coming to campus, housed one-in-a-room, and sitting in those rooms doing online courses. Meanwhile, the faculty - who will be teaching those courses - will not generally be on campus as per the same posting. The posting - which reproduces an official email - references testing for coronavirus. The item below suggests that the testing of students referenced in that email should be quite frequent, which is expensive. So the question remains: What benefit is there for students to be on campus given the need for social distancing, frequent testing, etc.?

From Inside Higher Ed: A new modeling study published Friday by researchers at Harvard and Yale Universities concluded that a safe way to bring college students back to campus this fall would be to test them for COVID-19 every two days using "a rapid, inexpensive, and even poorly sensitive" test, and to couple this testing with strict behavioral strategies to keep the virus’s rate of transmission (Rt) -- the average number of individuals infected by a single contagious person -- below 2.5.

Such a strategy, the authors wrote, “was estimated to yield a modest number of containable infections and to be cost-effective.”

They added, “This sets a very high bar -- logistically, financially, and behaviorally -- that may be beyond the reach of many university administrators and the students in their care.”

The study, “Assessment of SARS-CoV-2 Screening Strategies to Permit the Safe Reopening of College Campuses in the United States,” appeared in JAMA Network Open, an open-access journal published by the American Medical Association...

Full story at https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2020/08/03/study-recommends-testing-students-every-two-days-college-football-players-push-back (Link to JAMA Network Open article included.)

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*http://uclafacultyassociation.blogspot.com/2020/08/fall-quarter-update.html