Consensus is quickly building among medical experts that closing a university and sending students home could very well increase the public health risk in a big way.
This was reported on nationally by Bloomberg News recently, and on Wednesday experts from the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB) weighed in.
Mike Saag, M.D., a professor of medicine in UAB’s Division of Infectious Diseases and an internationally acclaimed expert who has been on the front lines of battling COVID-19, agreed that it is safer for universities to remain open and make resources available to students as needed.
“There is a strong feeling among public health and infectious disease experts that it is safer to keep students on a college campus where there is COVID-19 spread rather than closing campus and sending students home en masse,” stated Saag, who also serves as associate dean of Global Health in the UAB School of Medicine.
In addition to Saag, UAB Senior Vice President for Medicine and School of Medicine Dean Selwyn Vickers, M.D., also said he remains focused on decreasing the rate of transmission and limiting the total number of cases by using risk mitigation strategies outlined in the UA System’s comprehensive plan, which has been hailed as a national model of excellence.
Both Vickers and Saag are members of the University of Alabama System Health and Safety Task Force. They advise that risk mitigation strategies include mandatory face coverings, isolation/quarantine space, a robust contact tracing/exposure notification protocol and ready access to healthcare services.
“Universities have leveraged medical expertise, resources and technology to implement extensive safety measures and reduce risk on campus, and plans are in place to manage the virus on campus,” Vickers commented. “Student behavior and compliance are some of the fundamental components of managing the outbreak.”
In a System statement released on Wednesday and endorsed by the UA System Task Force as a whole, Saag further warned of the hazards of sending students home.
“The risk in closing a college campus and forcing thousands of students home at once is that the virus then has the opportunity to spread more widely to other geographic locations and possibly more vulnerable populations,” Saag said.
“From a public health perspective, you want to contain and mitigate the spread of the virus,” Vickers added. “If resources are available on campus to manage an outbreak and keep it from spreading to other locations and people that may not be experiencing spread, that should be the goal.”
Yellowhammer News reported that Auburn University’s isolation/quarantine housing was at 67% of capacity as of Tuesday evening. As of Friday, the University of Alabama’s isolation/quarantine occupancy was at 36.09%. There have been no known hospitalizations of students related to COVID-19 at Auburn or across the UA System to-date.
You can follow along with the System’s online coronavirus data dashboard here. It is updated weekly.
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Sean Ross is the editor of Yellowhammer News. You can follow him on Twitter @sean_yhn
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