Speaker 1: Welcome to Prognosis. I'm Laura Carlson. It's day two hundred
Speaker 1: and thirty seven since coronavirus was declared a global pandemic.
Speaker 1: Today's main story. The risk of COVID nineteen transmission is
Speaker 1: high on college campuses, where students live in close quarters
Speaker 1: and may avoid following social distancing rules. But one upstate
Speaker 1: New York University has stayed open and managed to control
Speaker 1: its COVID cases. But first, here's what happened in Virus
Speaker 1: News Today. Infections in the US increased by one point
Speaker 1: three percent on Friday, with Iowa, North Dakota, Michigan, and
Speaker 1: Colorado seeing the biggest single day rises. That's according to
Speaker 1: data compiled by Johns Hopkins University and Bloomberg News. Yesterday,
Speaker 1: new cases passed a hundred and twenty six thousand, a
Speaker 1: global record for a single nation. Johnson and Johnson is
Speaker 1: about to start clinical trials of its COVID nineteen vaccine
Speaker 1: in South Africa after getting regulatory approval, according to the
Speaker 1: co chair of the study in the country. Meanwhile, scientists
Speaker 1: monitoring wastewater in one region of the country detected spikes
Speaker 1: of the coronavirus in the last three weeks. The government
Speaker 1: is concerned that a lack of compliance with health guidelines
Speaker 1: may trigger a second wave. Finally, France posted a record
Speaker 1: number of new virus cases as the nation's health minister,
Speaker 1: Olivier Veron warned that a violent second wave of the
Speaker 1: illness is sweeping the country. He said virus patients now
Speaker 1: occupy more than eighty five percent of French hospitals initial
Speaker 1: intensive care facilities. Europe is battling a new surge in
Speaker 1: the IRS, with France starting a second lockdown just last
Speaker 1: week and now for today's main story, Cornell University in
Speaker 1: upstate New York welcomed around twenty four thousand people back
Speaker 1: to campus this fall. The idea of students packed into
Speaker 1: dorms and mingling in classrooms made many people nervous, But
Speaker 1: while outbreaks have plagued colleges across the country, Cornell has
Speaker 1: managed to keep a lid on its COVID cases. In fact,
Speaker 1: the college's test positivity rate has been among the lowest
Speaker 1: of any college or university in the country doing large
Speaker 1: scale testing. I spoke with reporter and a court, an
Speaker 1: alumna of Cornell about how the school has done it.
Speaker 1: You know the story with so many colleges and universities
Speaker 1: around the US for the full term has either been
Speaker 1: one of online or distance learning, and many of the
Speaker 1: stories we even have heard about students on campus has
Speaker 1: been pretty negative news UM with outbreaks and the spread
Speaker 1: of COVID, but not Cornell. And I was wondering if
Speaker 1: you might just unpack what what happened at Cornell to
Speaker 1: make it this success story. Yeah, so I would know.
Speaker 1: Cornell isn't the only school that has been able to
Speaker 1: keep cases very low, but it's what's significant is what
Speaker 1: a big school it is. Cornell reopened its campus about
Speaker 1: two thousand people in the late summer, and really what
Speaker 1: they did was kind of take all the public health
Speaker 1: measures that are recommended, and in fact, they say that
Speaker 1: their experience is a testament to the fact that the
Speaker 1: things that we've been talking to about throughout this whole pandemic,
Speaker 1: from you know, frequent testing all the way to to
Speaker 1: mask wearing and handwashing that they work. Most significant about
Speaker 1: what Cornell did, I would say is that frequent testing.
Speaker 1: They're testing about thirty five thousand students, faculty and staff
Speaker 1: a week. Undergrads are tested as frequently as twice a week.
Speaker 1: Uh and that they say that has helped them find
Speaker 1: these people who could be you know, asymptomatic silent spreaders
Speaker 1: of the virus and and really tamped down on that
Speaker 1: spread and you know, isolate people and prevent further infections
Speaker 1: on campus. Another thing that they really cite for their
Speaker 1: success has been sort of a souped up version of
Speaker 1: of contact tracing. They do something called that they call
Speaker 1: adaptive testing, which is instead of sort of adhering to
Speaker 1: the strict definition of a of a contact. You know,
Speaker 1: there are different definitions for contact tracing, but in New
Speaker 1: York State, it's someone who's been within six ft of
Speaker 1: someone who had a confirmed COVID nineteen infection for about
Speaker 1: ten minutes. So they did something a little bit more
Speaker 1: expanse of They did do contact tracing, but they also
Speaker 1: did this thing where they looked at people who might
Speaker 1: have been exposed but weren't technically close contact. So if
Speaker 1: you're living on a dorm floor and you turn out
Speaker 1: to have COVID nineteen, they might test everyone on that
Speaker 1: floor because you're all sharing a bathroom. If you're on
Speaker 1: a hockey team, maybe you weren't technically within six ft
Speaker 1: of someone for ten minutes, but you know, you're likely
Speaker 1: spending time around them and maybe you could be infected,
Speaker 1: so maybe you test the whole hockey team. So they say,
Speaker 1: this is something that kind of goes above and beyond
Speaker 1: the call of duty and you know, help them basically
Speaker 1: locked down the chains of transmission on campus. I was
Speaker 1: wondering if you might go into just actually how low
Speaker 1: the infection rate has been on campus. And I mean,
Speaker 1: among those few infections that Cornell has seen, where are
Speaker 1: we seeing transmission coming from. Is this something that students
Speaker 1: are being exposed in the classroom or or is it
Speaker 1: coming really from somewhere else. Just to start off with,
Speaker 1: I just pulled up Cornell's COVID dashboard and right now
Speaker 1: their positivity rate is point zero four percent, so you know,
Speaker 1: point zero four percent of their test return positive. That's
Speaker 1: really good. And in a recent week, a couple of
Speaker 1: weeks ago, it was actually as low as point zero
Speaker 1: zero six percent, So they were joking that they would
Speaker 1: have to add another, you know, decimal place to the
Speaker 1: online dashboard. Um, it was so low. You know, if
Speaker 1: you look at how many cases they've had since they reopened,
Speaker 1: it's been about hundred and seventy one cases from mid
Speaker 1: August to basically now through November four. That's really significant
Speaker 1: because that is very low, and they do have a
Speaker 1: lot of people, you know, thousand people on campus. You know,
Speaker 1: things didn't look like they were going to go quite
Speaker 1: this way when I first started my reporting, though, you know,
Speaker 1: I talked to a lot of people in August before
Speaker 1: campus reopened, and the plan was constantly changing. There was
Speaker 1: a lot of anxiety among people in the unity, you know, students,
Speaker 1: their parents, faculty members, because it looked like a big
Speaker 1: risk that Cornell was taking. They were bringing all these
Speaker 1: people to upstate New York, you know, at the time
Speaker 1: had been very much untouched by COVID nineteen. It was
Speaker 1: very you know, rates were very low, and so it
Speaker 1: seemed like things could go pretty awry. And in fact,
Speaker 1: you know, as students were coming back to campus, there
Speaker 1: was an early cluster of cases on campus that really
Speaker 1: raised a lot of alarm bells, you know, which was
Speaker 1: actually tied to student athletes socializing without the proper you know,
Speaker 1: social distancing and mask wearing. Um but you know, Cornell
Speaker 1: again really credits this aggressive testing and and contact tracing
Speaker 1: to helping kind of stand that chain of transmission. And
Speaker 1: in fact, you know, they did a lot of interesting
Speaker 1: modeling around how infection good spread around campus, really plotting
Speaker 1: out a lot of different scenarios. That's actually how they
Speaker 1: ended up doing so much testing. They realized they needed
Speaker 1: to in order to keep infection low, and they set
Speaker 1: out a couple of different scenarios for how you know,
Speaker 1: infections could spread. And the actual cases on campus have
Speaker 1: actually stayed so low that they've been far lower than
Speaker 1: even the most optimistic scenario, which I think is is
Speaker 1: really a testament to to what they've done. And you know,
Speaker 1: you've mentioned a lot of this plan, um, and and
Speaker 1: perhaps their success does revolve around the amount of testing
Speaker 1: that's going on, and and that's quite a significant amount
Speaker 1: of testing. I was just curious how is the university
Speaker 1: handling this this amount of regular testing. Cornell actually set
Speaker 1: up a new lab in its veterinary school to do
Speaker 1: human testing. Interestingly, a number of colleges and universities have
Speaker 1: actually done this because um, this mode of you know,
Speaker 1: the common mode of COVID nineteen testing is is something
Speaker 1: called polymaries chain reaction tests, and they're actually often you
Speaker 1: to look for disease and animals UM. The big thing
Speaker 1: that they did, and other colleges have done this too,
Speaker 1: is that they did something called pooling, where you put
Speaker 1: multiple samples together um and process them at the same time.
Speaker 1: This is something that works actually best when you don't
Speaker 1: have a lot of infection on campus, as Cornell has.
Speaker 1: You know, it's important to note that this has been
Speaker 1: a big push for Cornell, and they're running their lab
Speaker 1: you know, practically seven and and it's been difficult. You know,
Speaker 1: they set up all these centers around campus for people
Speaker 1: to get their samples collected. You know, it's a it's
Speaker 1: a nasal swab, and it's something that you know, took
Speaker 1: up a lot of their resources, but also you know
Speaker 1: a lot of participation from the community to go in
Speaker 1: and get tested so frequently. And you've raised a really
Speaker 1: important point. I think that many other colleges and universities
Speaker 1: might be looking to Cornell's policy because, I mean, in
Speaker 1: all honesty, Cornell has been able to welcome students back,
Speaker 1: They've been able to collect, particularly from the financial angle
Speaker 1: room and board rents from the students that are back
Speaker 1: on campus. Is this something that perhaps other college campuses
Speaker 1: other universities can look to Cornell as perhaps a model
Speaker 1: for how they can apply this policy on their own campuses.
Speaker 1: You know, a lot of cynics and skeptics when colleges
Speaker 1: said that they were going to reopen, pointed to the
Speaker 1: fact that college has had a real financial incentive to reopen.
Speaker 1: You know, it's hard to justify charging a lot of
Speaker 1: tuition when your students are basically, you know, at home,
Speaker 1: living with their parents, you know, taking classes online. I
Speaker 1: think for Cornell what's important to note is that they
Speaker 1: did have advantages and they and they acknowledge those advantages.
Speaker 1: You know, from the fact that Ithaca is a pretty
Speaker 1: remote location. Ithaca when you're driving up is really a
Speaker 1: lot of cows and fields. So you know, that's an
Speaker 1: advance Didge because you don't have a lot of people
Speaker 1: coming and going from other places where they can bring
Speaker 1: the virus. Although Cornell has had people bring the virus
Speaker 1: that way to campus and they've found it using that testing.
Speaker 1: And there are other advantages just conferred by their you know,
Speaker 1: financial and scientific resources that are important to note and
Speaker 1: and again might be hard for other schools to replicate,
Speaker 1: particularly if they don't you know, have these kinds of resources.
Speaker 1: And I mean here we are. It's early November, but
Speaker 1: the end of the fall semester is in sight. Students
Speaker 1: are about to leave to to go on holiday, to
Speaker 1: go back to their family and friends all over the
Speaker 1: US and the world. Is this going to affect Cornell's
Speaker 1: plan for the spring or is this fall scenario what
Speaker 1: Cornell is expecting to adopt in the spring. Yeah, Cornell
Speaker 1: is planning US spring semester, you know in person. You know,
Speaker 1: they're hoping to bring even more students back this time,
Speaker 1: hoping to do more classes in person um and they
Speaker 1: have a lot more time to plan now than they
Speaker 1: did last time. A lot of things were really quickly
Speaker 1: changing right before the semester began um, including you know,
Speaker 1: a lot of students were coming from states that had
Speaker 1: been put on New York State's quarantine list, and so
Speaker 1: that made it very difficult logistically for everyone to come back.
Speaker 1: I think it's important to think about also how things
Speaker 1: will be different in the spring semester. You know, they're
Speaker 1: planning on starting classes in February. You know, the weather
Speaker 1: in February and Ithaca can be quite cold, and as
Speaker 1: we all know, winter could be a real time of
Speaker 1: spreading COVID because of those cold temperatures, bringing people to
Speaker 1: gather inside more where they could you know, are more
Speaker 1: likely also to spread the virus. So you know, it's
Speaker 1: going to bring a new slate of challenges for Cornell.
Speaker 1: And in fact, right now the university is already seeing
Speaker 1: um infection rates in surrounding communities on the rise. And
Speaker 1: so it kind of went from the situation where the
Speaker 1: community was worried about Cornell bringing COVID to their backyards
Speaker 1: and now Cornell is is starting to warily look at
Speaker 1: the community and say, maybe people are going to get sick,
Speaker 1: you know, in our surrounding areas, and they've they've started
Speaker 1: to see some of that already. That was Emma Corp.
Speaker 1: And that's it for our show today. For coverage of
Speaker 1: the outbreak from one and twenty bureaus around the world,
Speaker 1: visit Bloomberg dot com slash coronavirus and if you like
Speaker 1: the show, please leave us a review and a rating
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Speaker 1: help more listeners find our global reporting. The Prognosis Daily
Speaker 1: edition is produced by Topha Foreheads, Jordan gas Pure, Magnus
Speaker 1: Henrickson and me Laura Carlson. Today's main story was reported
Speaker 1: by Emma Corp. Original music by Leo sidrin Our. Editors
Speaker 1: are Rick Shine and Francesco Levi. Francesca Levi is Bloomberg's
Speaker 1: head of podcasts. Thanks for listening.