Students returning to their bedroom at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill have a new tool to help them navigate campus this semester: a COVID-19 dashboard.
Updated weekly, the CV-19 dashboard tracks various metrics, including the number of tests performed, the number of positive cases, isolation at school and quarantine capacity, and the percentage of courses taught in person, remotely, or a mix of both.
“Campus leaders wanted to make sure the Carolina community had a resource for controlling a range of data points,” said Leslie Minton, a university spokeswoman. “The dashboard was created with input from Carolina’s Infectious Diseases and Data Experts, Emergency Management Services, UNC Health and our local health department.”
As of August 4, when the dashboard was last updated, UNC-Chapel Hill had recorded 175 infections: 139 in students and 36 in university staff.
The decision to reopen campuses, and how broad, has generated national debate. Students, faculty, and staff members have criticized UNC-Chapel Hill’s initial plan to reopen, despite the province’s health department’s recommendation to go virtual for its first five weeks of the semester.
The university has since revised its redesign plan to reduce classroom occupancy to 30 percent and increase its testing capacity, frequency of public transportation and on-campus parking.
There is no existing standard for reporting coronavirus deaths on campus, nor is this information publicly monitored on a national scale. A New York Times survey found that at least 6,600 cases were related to about 270 colleges.
Universities have taken various approaches to share coronavirus updates with students and faculty.
Some schools outside of UNC-Chapel Hill, such as the University of Wisconsin-Madison, are planning to launch their own COVID-19 dashboards to raise the curtain on operational decisions. Colleges elsewhere use different methods, as the University of West Virginia publishes daily test results collected across its university system.
But others, like Arizona State University, refuse to publish any data on campus-wide. Some raise concerns about privacy, which forces students and faculty to rely on a publicly available state zip code and COVID-19 data from the state.
Some schools also use coronavirus symptom tracking apps for large groups of people.
Efforts such as the new UNC-Chapel Hill toolkit could help students make better-informed decisions about returning this fall, said one health expert.
“Information and data are essential to making healthy decisions,” said Todd McGee, spokesman for the Orange County Health Department. “The dashboard will keep the UNC community informed about the status of coronavirus on campus and guide the administration if they need to adapt to their operations.”
Earlier this week, Minton said the university shifted the dashboard from daily updates to weekly updates out of privacy concerns for students and staff – a move that was seen by the community as “unannounced, unexpected and alarming,” James Sadler said. a doctoral student at UNC-Chapel Hill’s School of Education.
Carlos Lopez, in MD-Ph.D. student in microbiology and immunology at UNC-Chapel Hill, understood the concerns about privacy that the university shared. “But switching to weekly updates causes a delay in our awareness of the situation on the ground,” he said.
“You don’t notice any increases in population-level transmission until about two to three weeks after it actually starts to increase,” Lopez said. “Add an extra week of delay to the top of the dashboard, all the way to days of delays on test results, and that easily adds to a month’s delay in our knowledge of what’s going on in the community.”
The “interesting timing” of changing the dashboard, Sadler said, follows weeks and months of students and staff urging the university to operate online during the pandemic.
On July 29, the provincial health department recommended UNC-Chapel Hill Virtual for its first five weeks of the fall semester – a memo that until a week later was largely ignored and not made public.
A group of faculty members on holiday wrote an open letter in which they expressed their fears that campus would have “too quick and complete” dire consequences.
“We recognize that some of you will have to live on campus this fall semester for financial or personal reasons, and we want to help ensure that campus is safe for you,” the professors wrote in the open letter published in the Charlotte Observer last week . “We plead with the rest of you to stay home this fall.”
On Wednesday, dozens of students and faculties staged a ‘die-in’ protest against the university’s transparency and efforts to protect its community against an outbreak.
“It is impossible to trust the motives of UNC if every decision they have taken so far is against the majority of what health officials, students and faculties think about security,” Sadler said.
In May, the university created a “roadmap” website to navigate how they should function during the school year, including an “off-ramp” plan to remove students as cases are nailed down – the number of cases to reach that threshold however, was not specified.
The roadmap also requires students to take preventative measures to limit the spread of the coronavirus.
“There are limitations in maintaining expectations,” Robert Blouin, executive vice-chancellor and provost of UNC-Chapel Hill, told a news conference Thursday. “We emphasize to our students that the community standards identified by this university extend beyond the walls of campus.”
“We expect our students to remain true to these standards,” Blouin said.
Orange County – which houses the campus – experienced 1,329 cases of COVID-19 and 47 deaths on Aug. 7, according to state health data. The cumulative rate of positive test results at school is 10.6 percent – higher than the statewide rate of 8 percent.
“What this indicates to me is that there is a great potential for outbreaks and deaths,” Sadler said.
For universities, there is a delicate balancing act between weighing financial and community concerns with guidance for public health – all though you are opposed to the grim reality that without a vaccine, regardless of how classes are held, positive cases are almost inevitable. .
“Independently, there will be an outbreak, regardless of classes in person or online,” Sadler said.
