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Thursday, March 10, 2022

The Davis Bubble

The Sacramento Bee praises UC-Davis for including the City of Davis within its coronavirus bubble rather than sealing off the campus:

...More than a year and a half in, this experiment — a cooperative project placing a university and its adjoining city inside a single, coordinated health bubble — has delivered superior results. Both town and gown have consistently experienced COVID-19 infection and test positivity rates markedly lower than those recorded in the surrounding region and statewide, according to reviews of state and local data. The program, Healthy Davis Together, includes free saliva-based testing, vaccination, masks, and isolation or quarantine housing if needed. As part of the effort, UC researchers are regularly testing city wastewater for signs of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19, and workers from the program routinely screen children in the local school district. A 200-plus army of UC Davis undergraduate “health ambassadors” raises awareness in the community, with help from a public relations firm. Even during the omicron surge, the program ramped up in time to prevent runaway infection rates...

Full story at: https://www.sacbee.com/news/coronavirus/article259127193.html.

It should be noted that what worked for Davis really wouldn't have been practical for an urban campus such as UCLA's. Davis' population is under 70,000 and it is not just a subdivision of a larger urban area such as, say, Beverly Hills. What would a bubble over LA even mean? But UC-Davis surely does deserve credit for applying its model, given the local geography. The Bee article indicates that other universities around the country that are associated with small cities didn't do what Davis did.

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