By Aimee Green | The Oregonian/OregonLive
If Lane County is going to beat back a skyrocketing rise in new COVID-19 cases, University of Oregon freshman Brandon Orick knows one thing must stop: Parties.
“You walk around on a Friday or Saturday night and you hear loud music,” said Orick, 19. “You hear tons of people in small spaces in apartment buildings and you know that people are still pursuing a normal college experience. It’s sad and irresponsible.”
UO’s challenges are not unique as students return to college towns. All three of Oregon’s largest public universities have been nervously watching the spread of COVID-19 on and around their campuses, in an unparalleled experiment as higher education institutions across the country reopen for fall term during the pandemic.
The University of Oregon, Oregon State University and Portland State University all have enacted a long list of safety protocols, some more stringent than others. That includes holding the vast majority of classes online. But it remains unanswered whether that will be enough, especially as the 23,000-student UO has emerged as a frontrunner in fueling new cases.
Colleges across the nation have reopened with varying degrees of success — with some of the unsuccessful ones emptying their dorms and switching to all online models because of a spike in infections. One study last month found that in-person classes were responsible for 3,000 new cases per day of COVID-19 nationally, while The New York Times has documented more than 130,000 cases and 70 deaths related to higher education institutions since the pandemic began.
In Lane County, which includes the UO campus, the weekly number of new infections has exploded nine-fold since August, dwarfing the statewide rate of increase. Last week, the first of UO’s fall term, the county logged a record-breaking 245 new cases, up from 27 during the third week of August.
And in just the past two weeks, 175 UO students have tested positive, virtually all of them living off campus.
Public health officials say they’ve been able to link much of the surge in Lane County to nine separate parties or social gatherings among university students and their peer group, ages 18-28. Officials say these young adults gathered indoors, without masks and without physical distancing, to celebrate birthdays, the end of summer, the start of school or simply to party.
Officials late last month switched the county’s coronavirus alert level from “moderate” to “high,” which was accompanied by an advisory to forgo social gatherings of any size.
Even so, the parties continue. Last Saturday, Eugene police were alerted by a dozen calls from area residents to an off-campus party of more than 100 attendees, most of them college-aged. Officers arrived to discover loud music, exploding fireworks and intoxicated partygoers urinating in public and strewn across yards as far as three blocks away. One of the hosts is a UO student.
“They were not trying to hide it at all,” said county public health spokesman Jason Davis. “It was very egregious.”
Such incidents have led to plenty of tension between UO and the wider community. Public health officials confirm that, through contact tracing, young adults have been unintentionally spreading infections into older and at-risk populations, who are more likely to become severely ill or die.
But county officials have pleaded with residents not to focus blame on college students because once the virus ingrains itself, everyone’s behavior matters to stop the spread. That means physical distancing, wearing masks and washing hands.
“The operative word is ‘We,’” said Lane County Commissioner Heather Buch during a Facebook news conference last week. “This is not the time to use the words ‘They,’ ‘Them’ or ‘Those.’ Such as ‘Those college kids.’ Or ‘Those people that have parties.’ We all must accept personal responsibility for the task ahead.”
One Portland mom said her 21-year-old daughter was one of the students who came down with coronavirus after attending an indoor September birthday gathering. The UO senior had thought the gathering was harmless at the time, since she’d been hanging out with most of those friends all summer long in Eugene.
But one of the approximately seven attendees unknowingly infected several others.
The daughter, now recovered after a mild bout with the disease, didn’t want her mom using their names out of concern for the stigma that can come with making an embarrassing mistake. They’ve come to the conclusion that it’ll be tough to stop the virus from “running its course” through the university community because young adults, especially, are hard-wired to congregate.
“My husband was down there helping her move,” said the Portland woman. “The college kids are all outside hanging out and they’re trying to have fun together. No one is wearing masks. It was like a freakin’ Trump rally. My husband was like ‘Get me out of here.’ He wore a mask the whole time.”
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Like UO, OSU has seen new cases crop up — albeit at a far lower number. With more than 32,000 students, OSU has reported 46 new cases among students and employees in the two most recent weeks it has made data available.
That’s about one quarter the number at UO.
Portland State, with an enrollment of about 25,000, has seen even fewer: just two cases have been identified. But that could be because only 71 students, faculty and staff voluntarily have been tested at the student health center. Meanwhile, UO and OSU both have tested thousands.
With relatively fewer cases linked to Oregon State, surrounding Benton County hasn’t seen as large an upswing in new cases, either. But the “sporadic” number of new cases — that is, new infections that are spreading in ways that public health officials can’t nail down — reached an elevated rate.
That prompted Gov. Kate Brown last week to place all of Benton County on her coronavirus “watch list” for close monitoring and potential business restrictions.
Dr. Dean Sidelinger, the state epidemiologist and state health officer, said last month that an OSU Greek row party and social gatherings among athletes had sparked outbreaks.
OSU spokesman Steve Clark disputed the use of the term “outbreaks,” saying in one case a sorority party netted two positive test results — below the threshold of five cases for which the term is traditionally used. Clark also said the virus spread among some student athletes because they lived or worked out together, not because they were gathering socially.
Even so, there’s no doubt cases have ticked up in Corvallis since early September, when students started moving back and holding parties or smaller get-togethers.
Clark said the university prepared by instituting safety protocols to tamp down transmission before it could get out of control.
“This was fully anticipated and part of our overall strategy,” Clark said.
OSU is the only one of Oregon’s three largest universities testing sewage for elevated levels of COVID-19 through its TRACE program.
Researchers are monitoring wastewater from dorms, sororities and fraternities and some off-campus and on-campus buildings in an effort to detect the virus early.
Last week, the wastewater flowing from one dorm and a nearby off-campus apartment complex triggered an alert. University officials tested 309 students and offered them a place to isolate in a designated residence hall with 195 beds if they tested positive. It turns out no one did. Officials suspect that the virus detected in the sewage could have come from a visitor to the buildings or from one of the residents who chose not to be tested, but instead agreed to quarantine.
In addition, OSU is testing 1,000 randomly selected students, faculty and staff each week to keep tabs on the prevalence of the virus within the university community.
The university is periodically testing hundreds of residents in other areas of Corvallis to monitor the virus’ spread throughout the city, as well. A sampling this past weekend concluded about three in 1,000 Corvallis residents was actively infected.
OSU and UO tested every student who was moving into the dorms this September, at a cost of $25 to $30 each. PSU, meanwhile, chose to test new dorm residents only if they were showing symptoms or had recently had close contact with a known case.
To help limit potential exposures, PSU required residents to live one per dorm room. OSU and UO did not eliminate roommates but gave residents the option of living alone or with one roommate.
Although UO didn’t have numbers to share, residence hall occupancy at PSU and OSU is less than half of what it was last fall because a significant number of students have chosen to take their online classes from their hometowns.
At PSU, 97% of the courses are being taught remotely. At OSU, it’s about 95% and UO 83%.
That’s in sync with the approach many other universities across the country have taken.
According to a tracking project of nearly 3,000 schools by Davidson College, only 44% of colleges and universities surveyed chose to hold classes entirely or almost entirely online. About 27% have chosen in-person or almost entirely in-person, while most of the rest have selected a mix of the two.
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As Oregon’s colleges and universities have fired up mostly remote learning, some community members have questioned if proceeding with courses at all was the right choice.
Whether courses are in-person or entirely online, significant numbers of students still have chosen to live in their college towns.
Chris Sinclair, a mathematics professor at UO, said it’s frustrating to watch COVID-19 counts rise among students and the greater community because it was predictable given what’s happened at institutions that started opening nearly two months before UO.
“There has been an influx of young people into Lane County from all over the country and then these people have parties and we’re in the situation we’re in,” said Sinclair, who is president of the faculty union, United Academics.
Some institutions such as Cornell University in New York state have required students to sign behavior contracts with teeth, including booting students from in-person classes and university housing for not complying with social distancing and mask requirements. Cornell also tested all students upon their arrival for fall term and continues to test undergraduate students twice a week and graduate students and employees at varying rates.
UO has asked students to sign a behavioral pledge, but it doesn’t lay out explicit punishments for violators. The university also isn’t regularly testing any students, with the exception of daily testing of some fall athletes, including football players.
Many, including Sinclair, suspect that frequent testing of all students and employees would probably be too expensive for public universities such as UO. But the university, he believes, should be upfront about all the COVID-19 decisions it makes instead of painting a “rosy” picture.
Being upfront means explaining the risks and benefits of starting up Pac-12 football in November, a decision likely driven by the many millions of dollars the sport draws in, Sinclair said. Sinclair and officials from the Oregon Health Authority worry football games, even with no fans in the stands, will lead to a jump in infections as people gather together to watch televised games.
“These decisions are not necessarily unreasonable, but fess up and let people know that at times you have made decisions for pragmatic reasons and doing so increases the risk to students, faculty, staff and the community,” Sinclair said. “So that we can have that conversation instead of pretending the university is doing everything it can.”
Kay Jarvis, a UO spokeswoman, said the administration has instituted many policies that aim to curb transmission, including offering each student two masks and a thermometer, educating them about COVID-19 testing locations, providing a dorm for on-campus residents to isolate in and discount hotel rooms for off-campus residents and enlisting campus police to join Eugene police in “party patrols” on Thursday, Friday and Saturday nights. If students violate the university’s code of student conduct – which requires masks and physical distancing –they could face penalties as tough as suspension or expulsion, Jarvis said.
River Veek, a 20-year-old junior at UO, thinks the behavior of a segment of students has got to change. Veek said he’s seen the off-campus parties and believes they’ll continue to drive infections, which means he’ll continue to get what he feels is a diminished quality of education through online classes.
“People are doing things that are extending this longer than it needs to be,” Veek said. “I get really frustrated. I just want classes to be in-person again and the only way that’s going to happen is if everyone does their part.”