BY MICHAEL SCHWALBE
Last summer, even as COVID-19 cases were surging, university leaders in North Carolina tried to engineer a return to normal by August 2020. It famously failed. Soon after the start of the semester yielded a burst of COVID-19 clusters, the state’s two flagship universities, UNC–Chapel Hill and North Carolina State University, shut down and switched to online instruction.
The Daily Tar Heel, UNC’s campus newspaper, editorialized about the fiasco under the headline “We All Saw This Coming.” Most of my colleagues did. Independent infectious disease experts did. Students did. Anyone with an inkling of how college students behave predicted that campus reopenings would invite superspreading events and lead to scores of new cases. Why, then, were administrators so blind?
One explanation is that political and economic pressures led administrators to see what they wanted to see. Any pause in rising case numbers was taken as a sign that the pandemic was abating. Although mask-wearing had become politically charged and COVID-19 denial was widespread, administrators assured us that students are smart and would follow safety protocols. It was optimism to the point of delusion.
Are we headed down the same path again? So it seems, here in North Carolina. UNC–Chapel Hill chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz has said that he expects to “really restore the residential campus environment everyone is craving”—in just a few months. This means nearly full dorms and in-person classes with no distancing requirements. Vaccinations and masks, Guskiewicz has said, should suffice to thwart transmission of the coronavirus.
Peter Hans, president of the UNC system, likewise wants a return to normal. “Now that students are lining up for vaccines and case counts have declined across the state,” Hans said in an April 7 email to system employees, “I’m optimistic that we’ll have a fall semester much closer to normal than I dared to hope earlier this year.”
Case counts in North Carolina are indeed down since the peak in January. But the ongoing trend line shows a small uptick. Daily case counts are about the same as in August 2020 and higher than the counts that prompted shutdowns last spring. The more deadly and easily transmissible B. 1.1.7 and P. 1 variants are also reported to be spreading among younger populations. Viewed soberly, the data hardly seem to say that normal is just around the corner.
Things are different now, administrators will insist. Most importantly, we have effective vaccines, upon which administrators are relying to enable a return to full campus life. But this too seems overly optimistic. As of mid-April, only about 30 percent of the adult population in North Carolina is fully vaccinated. It seems unlikely that we’ll reach herd immunity levels—at least 80 percent of the population vaccinated—by August. Vaccine supply in some parts of the state is already starting to exceed demand.
Even worse, some research shows that younger Americans are least likely to say that they’ll get vaccinated. Because the state legislature and UNC Board of Governors are dominated by Republicans, it’s unlikely that vaccination will be required for returning students and employees. Recent polls by Monmouth University and Quinnipiac University have found that about 45 percent of Republicans say they do not plan to get vaccinated.
By August 2021, bustling campuses the size of small cities will offer the coronavirus plenty of dry brush to burn through, a metaphor epidemiologist Michael Osterholm used last year when many states relaxed restrictions prematurely. Remixing students from around the country and the world will also create conditions ripe for the emergence of new variants.
University administrators in North Carolina have touted low on-campus positivity rates as evidence that anti-COVID-19 measures have made universities safe environments during the pandemic. UNC–Chapel Hill and my university, NC State, are each reporting testing positivity rates since January 2021 of under 1 percent.
These low rates are misleading, however, in that they result from repeated testing of the same people—as if testing the same thousand people twice is equivalent to testing a random sample of two thousand different people. For North Carolina as a whole, the positivity rate is about 7 percent, which is closer to what we can expect when campuses repopulate, safety protocols are relaxed, and boundaries between campuses and communities dissolve.
Highlighting low positivity rates distorts in another way: it deflects attention from actual case numbers. Since the start of the spring 2021 semester, UNC–Chapel Hill has had over nine hundred COVID-19 cases, and NC State over 1,500. These cases have occurred despite few classes being taught in person, low dorm density, and good safety compliance. When I mention these numbers to my colleagues, they seem surprised, even a bit annoyed, as if being reminded of global warming on a pleasantly cool day.
Ironically, the more that administrators succeed in defining things as normal, the harder it will be to enforce the safety measures that have made a difference this past year. After all, if things are back to normal, students are likely to think, why do we have to wear masks or avoid parties? All that COVID-19 stuff is behind us. The chancellor said so.
It’s also not clear—at least it hasn’t been made clear to faculty, who have largely been excluded from making campus COVID-19 policies—what kind of “normal” administrators have in mind. Indications are that social distancing will be abandoned, and many of us will again be sardined in windowless classrooms. As I discovered to my surprise a month ago, the classrooms faculty have been assigned for the fall do not allow for six feet, or even three feet, of distancing.
Will masks still be required? That’s not clear either. And even if they are required, how much protection will they afford students and faculty who breathe the same air in three-hour classes? The transmission of the virus depends not only on proximity but on length of exposure.
I am as eager as anyone to get past the pandemic. But it appears that administrators, under political and economic pressure to return to normal, are again seeing what they want to see and ignoring facts that don’t support their upbeat vision. In the context of science, we would recognize the problem as one of motivated reasoning—starting with a desired conclusion and mustering data to support it. In the context of a pandemic, the results could be not merely farcical but tragic.
Guest blogger Michael Schwalbe is professor of sociology at North Carolina State University.
