*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/This article is a preprint and has not been certified by peer review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
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