After a month of remote instruction to start the spring semester, Penn State students returned for campus-based classes on Monday. With the return of in-person classes, the university has made some changes to its COVID-19 protocols.
Among those are an expansion of the university’s testing and contact-tracing program and plans to incrementally increase opportunities for activities and engagement outside the classroom.
“We’ve learned some lessons from the fall and we’re implementing those lessons now in the spring,” Vice President for Student Affairs Damon Sims said during an update at last week’s State College Borough Council meeting.
University Park had 5,052 positive test results among students during the fall semester.
Testing
Penn State’s expanded testing plan begins with two phases of testing all students who returned to campus and the surrounding communities. That includes those who will have a fully online course load but live in Centre County or within a 20-mile radius of a Penn State campus.
All students must have a negative result from a university-provided test on file within 72 hours before returning, a marked change from the fall when a targeted group of about 20,000 students were required to be tested before returning.
Any student who returned without a negative result on file was administered a rapid test and if necessary a confirmatory test, Kelly Wolgast, director of Penn State’s COVID-19 Operations Control Center, said.
Beginning Monday and continuing over the next two weeks, all students will be tested again, with testing taking place seven days a week in the White Building.
“The good news about this is that the rapid testing allows us to identify, we hope, the virus more quickly and if they are a positive rapid test during this arrival testing or universal testing, we can do a confirmatory PCR test right then and there,” Wolgast said. “The student doesn’t have to go anywhere else to get that test.”
The Testing and Surveillance Center (TASC) at University Park will start providing in-house diagnostic COVID-19 testing campus this semester. The TASC received provisional Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments (CLIA) certification to perform COVID-19 in November and has since been setting up the infrastructure to allow for faster turnaround time on confirmatory PCR tests. The lab began doing confirmatory testing on Feb. 8.
Throughout the semester, the university will conduct daily random surveillance testing of 2% of the campus population, up from 1% in the fall.
Walk-up testing for students identified through contact tracing or who believe they have been in close contact with someone who tested positive is available at the Hintz Family Alumni Center and Pegula Ice Arena.
Students who have COVID-19 symptoms should schedule tests through University Health Services.
Following recent Centers for Disease Control guidance, students who are in quarantine because they have been identified through contact tracing as a close contact of an individual who tested positive for COVID-19 will be able to receive a COVID-19 test during day 5-7 of their quarantine. Those who test negative on or after day 5 will be permitted to end their quarantine after seven days.
Individuals who test positive are still required to isolate for at least 10 days.
Contact tracing
The university has ramped up its systems and personnel for conducting contact tracing.
Wolgast said data collection is integrated on a new platform that automatically receives information directly from testing sources to be used by contact tracers and to identify trends and connections. The system also provides automatic notification to students and can be used to notify faculty members if a student will be out of class.
“It’s going to allow us to identify students and contact them much quicker… While we will see cases increase in the next few weeks with students coming back — that’s pretty much a given — we will be able to identify if there are particular spaces either on campus or off campus where maybe there are some clusters of cases that we need to pay attention to more closely,” Wolgast said. “This will allow us to do that better as well, this new platform that we have.”
Sims said that before in-person classes began, more than 1,400 contacts were identified since the start of calendar year.
The university now has more than 30 contact tracing staff members.
“I think we’ll do everything even better than we did in the fall and that’s certainly true with contact tracing,” Sims said.
Quarantine and Isolation
Penn State will continue using 400 rooms at Eastview Terrace as dedicated quarantine and isolation space. The rooms are for on-campus students as well as those living off-campus who do not have appropriate space to quarantine or isolate.
Case managers will continue to support students in quarantine and isolation off campus.
In addition to the change in quarantine testing protocols, the university will offer some improvements for the on-campus spaces as well. An app with meal menus, nutrition information and delivery times will be available and students will be offered virtual activities.
“They just felt lonely and isolated [in the fall],” Sims said. “We’re going to have trivia competitions, yoga, gaming, eSports, some fitness opportunities. I think there’s a virtual escape room, artistic performances discussions with peers… It’s going to be much more appealing than in the fall.”
According to the university’s COVID-19 dashboard, now updated three times a week, 19 students are in isolation and three are in quarantine as of Sunday.
Increased Engagement and Activities
Penn State is planning to take a phased approach to resume some out-of-classroom activities.
“We’re going to incrementally increase those opportunities for students as the virus allows, keeping close track of where the virus is and what the spread may be, pulling back if necessary,” Sims said.
Initial offerings in the four-phase plan will be “very limited” and will require student affairs approval, Sims said. During all phases, masking, social distancing and capacity limits will be required and staff and public health ambassadors will monitor for compliance.
• Phase 1: The first phase will allow for some in-person activities but will also focus on expanding remote and hybrid activities. Student organizations can hold small group, in-person meetings/events with prior approval. Groups can reserve one room per week for up to one hour for a meeting or event. Outdoor activities will be strongly encouraged.
Residence halls will expand small group activities. Campus Recreation facilities, which were open for a short time in the fall, reopened this week with reduced occupancy, a reservation process and programming limitations.
“[Campus Recreation] did a wonderful job [in the fall],” Sims said. “I think they were sort of exemplars for how this sort of thing can be done without leading to a greater spread of the virus. So we’re very optimistic about our ability to return students to those activities in a safe way.”
• Phase 2: Student organizations can hold small group, in-person meetings/events with prior approval. Performing arts groups will be able to practice within limits. More facilities will be available to student organizations. Rooms in classroom buildings can only be reserved one time per day and can only be reserved up until 10 p.m. Indoor tabling will be permitted with some restrictions. Organizations can reserve a table for up to one hour. Outdoor activities will be strongly encouraged and the University will work to make equipment and other resources available.
• Phase 3: Musical and other performing arts groups can perform before limited in-person audiences in a manner consistent with public health requirements. Student organizations will be allowed to offer prepackaged food during meetings and events. Additional spaces will begin to open for student organization activities. Tents will be provided at key locations to encourage outdoor activities as the weather improves. Campus Recreation will offer more opportunities for group fitness and other activities will continue to expand, including limited competition and more outdoor events. More opportunities for modified student retreats on campus will be made available.
• Phase 4: In-person activities will continue to expand with a strong emphasis on outdoor activities. Groups must keep track of participants. Meetings and events must be approved by designated staff and spot-checking will occur to ensure compliance. Penn State will simplify the approval and reporting processes for activities.
“There has been a lot of chatter the last few months about the lack of meaningful engagement and outside the classroom activities,” Sims said. “I think it’s been absolutely necessary given the virus and what we’re contending with. But we’ve heard a lot from students about the inability to really engage and connect with one another. I think this is particularly acute for first-year students who didn’t have those kinds of connections. They didn’t have that sense of belonging coming back. They didn’t have relationships that are formed largely through outside the classroom activities.
“So we’re determined to the fullest extent that the virus allows, but only to that extent.. to find ways, and we learned through the fall there are ways we can have some in-person experiences and do that in a responsible safe way.”
Sims said it’s part of a “carrot-and-stick” approach. The stick remains sanctions for failure to follow public health safety policies on and off campus, including violations of the borough’s COVID-19 masking and gathering ordinance.
A letter was sent to all students reminding them of expectations and the university’s COVID-19 compact, in which students acknowledge those expectations, remains in effect.
“We are not going to be patient with large gatherings of students,” Sims said, adding that “three or four” fraternity chapters had already been suspended since the start of the calendar year.
Lawrence Lokman, vice president for strategic communications, said a survey found about 97% of students said they were likely to wear a mask and maintain 6 feet physical distance in classrooms and labs in spring. Prior to the launch of the university’s “Mask Up Or Pack Up” promotional campaign in the fall, about 20% of students said they did not intend to follow guidelines.
Lokman added that 74% of students said they are worried about facing consequences for violating guidelines.
University and borough officials already have one potential challenge on the horizon: State Patty’s Day, the student-invented drinking holiday that, if it follows past precedent, would occur the weekend of Feb. 26.
“Our close partnership with the borough is going to be evident as we start to deal with some of the events that we know are coming our way, like State Patty’s Day,” Sims said last week. “We’ve already started some conversations about how to address that and our anxiety about that day and other days. But I think we have a fighting chance by combining this carrot with the stick appropriately to strike a balance between those things.”
