The COVID Report with David Blake: College outbreaks

Tuesday, Sept. 1

University System of Georgia colleges are back in town, and COVID is spreading at some of them.

People have been pointing out several college towns have huge outbreaks. Here is Bulloch County (Georgia Southern) and Baldwin County (Georgia College & State University).

Using our standard approach, these outbreaks are ridiculous. However, when you look at colleges in towns with larger populations, like Georgia Tech, University of Georgia or Kennesaw State, you cannot see this same magnitude of outbreak at the county level.

In Richmond County, there seems to be no outbreak at all. However, Augusta University is mostly students traveling from apartments or home, and there is little undergraduate dormitory-style housing that epidemiologists feel lend themselves so poorly to containing infectious disease.

At other campuses, there can be dozens of students per hall sharing the same single bathroom facility. Apparently, college students and college classes are not such a problem.

However, dorms do appear to be such an issue. Some of our residential colleges appear headed for herd immunity in just a few months, which was well predicted by outbreak models of unmitigated spread on college campuses. You can easily mitigate risk in the classroom, but not the dorm, I think. Another lesson taught the hard way by COVID-19.