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As colleges prepare to open—or not open—their campuses to students for the upcoming school year, scientists have come up with a scenario they say could limit the spread of the coronavirus. Testing every student every two days and quickly isolating those with positive results should avoid widespread SARS-CoV-2 infections on college campuses, whereas only testing students with symptoms would not, according to a modeling study published Friday (July 31) in JAMA Network Open.
The researchers used an initial scenario with 5,000 students on campus, 10 of whom were carrying the coronavirus. They varied how many people each student infects, the frequency of testing, and the sensitivity of the tests used—that is, how often they correctly identify a person as infected.
If students were tested each day with a test with a sensitivity of 70 percent, 162 would become infected over the course of an 80-day semester, ...
