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OU students bring the mullet back to campus
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How Big 12 counties stack up Collegiate health experts, local leaders break down key concerns, mitigation strategies ahead of vaccine rollout, stress shared governance
BIG 12 COVID-19 CASES
JORDAN MILLER @jordanrmillerr
Per 100,000 people in each county. WVU not recorded due to proximity. Updated 1/28.
Source: Population data via U.S. Census Bureau, Texas Department of State Health Services, Oklahoma State Department of Health, Kansas Department of Health and Environment, Oklahoma State COVID-19 Dashboard, Iowa Deoartment of Public Health.
with OSU on testing protocols throughout the past semester, said Dr. Dale Bratzler, OU’s chief COVID officer. On Jan. 22, Oklahoma was 10th in the nation in terms of statewide population incidence of COVID-19, Bratzler said. Just a week prior, Oklahoma was ranked third with 103 cases per 100,000 people. Another wrinkle in university precautions, Barkin said, is that schools in some smaller communities can more easily create a “safety net” with resources to discourage off-campus travel, but schools that are more integrated within the larger communities — and have students who are
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be done on campus, but students’ behavior off-campus is where Norman residents bear the brunt of student impact. The restrictions at OU and in Norman also may not have aligned with where students returned home for the holidays; however, and off-campus guidelines were violated throughout the fall semester, especially on Campus Corner. “Where all the partying is happening, most Norman residents aren’t going. It’s just the students, but unfortunately our students do go to our restaurants, they work in our restaurants, they work in our stores, they go to our stores,” said Clark, who along with city councilmembers enacted a
“... to lay all the responsibility at the door of the student, it seems to me, is rather unfair.”
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Although cases of COVID19 increased when students returned to campus for the fall semester, cases in six of nine counties home to Big 12 Conference universities saw their biggest spikes during the holidays — after students returned home. After universities regained control of the virus’ spread when students came back, there were some smaller spikes throughout the fall months, but the counties that house OU, Oklahoma State, the University of Texas, Texas Christian University, Baylor University and Kansas State University all saw their newcase peaks after thousands of students left for the holidays, according to data compiled by The OU Daily. The true test, however, may be in a few weeks, as universities and local leadership reboot campuses for a second time amid higher numbers of cases while combating rising pandemic fatigue, vaccine rollouts and new strains of the virus. Success, according to university, city and national leaders on the subject, will ride on the key determinate from the fall — collaboration between campus and city or county officials, with the added challenge of overcoming conflicting messaging between many students’ hometowns and campuses. The Daily examined new cases between March and Jan. 15 in Big 12 counties other than West Virginia’s Monongalia County, due to regional proximity. The analysis shows Texas Tech’s Lubbock County had the highest number of days in which new cases per 100,000 people surpassed 100, at 47, with OU tied for third in the counties measured at 12 days. “If you’re telling me that people can travel on and off campus and go home on weekends to other communities, it would seem unlikely that some of the students wouldn’t be bringing COVID back to campus,” said Anita Barkin, co-chair of the COVID19 Task Force at the American College Health Association. “Especially if you’re going to communities where there’s no mask mandate. … A big part of the problem with this from the very beginning has been the mixed messaging and the fact that this has been politicized to a point where we don’t have a national strategy.” Barkin said pre- and on-arrival testing was a crucial starting point for universities that began the fall semester with in-person classes. She said following up with more frequent testing has been one of schools’ best strategies to catch false negatives or those who subsequently contracted the virus. Random testing and wastewater testing also have been successful monitoring methods, Barkin said, strategies some Big 12 schools like OU, Oklahoma State and Baylor have implemented. “So much of this is resource dependent, because smaller schools or less well-resourced schools, simply the testing is very expensive, and it’s labor intensive,” Barkin said. “So if you don’t have the money or the staffing, it’s hard to do frequent testing.” OU mailed pre-arrival testing in the spring semester for those living on campus, with the university coordinating
-Anita Barkin, Co-chair of the American College Health Association’s COVID-19 Task Force
more likely to come and go — can have difficulties containing their populations. Sarah Lawrence College in New York was an example of a smaller school that created this safety net, Barkin said, with almost 50 percent fewer undergraduate students on campus, adjusted walking routes and grab-andgo meals, among other measures according to National Geographic. Barkin also mentioned Duke University is a larger school that has managed the pandemic well. With 15,634 students, the university required students to sign a “Duke Compact,” “agreeing to observe mandatory masking, social distancing, and participation in entry and surveillance testing.” The university also developed an app monitoring student symptoms, tracked COVID tests and results and used pooled testing to maximize resource efficiency. With OU having implemented social distancing requirements, limits on class sizes and a mask mandate, Norman Mayor Breea Clark said managing students can
local mask mandate in July — even as there’s been no such statewide order — which was recently extended into March 2021. “This is obviously a very contagious virus, and so it has raised a lot of concerns about general safety in our community.” “When people are saying ‘college students are responsible,’ I’m like, ‘Well, if college students are coming from communities, or they’re hearing within their own family the minimization of the seriousness of this, how can you expect them then to come to campus and comply with everything you’re telling them to comply with, when the messaging that they’ve heard to that point has been the opposite of what you’re asking them to do?’” Barkin said. “It makes it very difficult, and to lay all the responsibility at the door of the student, it seems to me, is rather unfair.” DATA AND UNIVERSITY STRATEGIES States are in a coronavirus “red zone” if they have more than 100 cases per 100,000
population in a week, according to White House documents provided by the Center for Public Integrity. Lubbock County, home of Texas Tech, has had 47 such days above the 100-case benchmark since March, the highest among Big 12 universities The Daily measured. OU’s Cleveland County had 12 days, with 11 of those days — and its peak — after students left for the holidays. “I think a lot of the bump that we saw around the holidays was holiday-related,” Bratzler said. “So students went home, families got together. And that huge surge that we saw probably was related to the holidays themselves, not the fact that universities were open or closed or anything else. More people went home and did events, family events and other things, where there was a lot of travel — the most travel that we’ve had since the start of the pandemic happened over the Christmas break.” Iowa State’s Story County had the second-highest number of red zone days with 23. OU’s Cleveland County and Oklahoma State’s Payne County ranked third with 12 days. TCU’s Tarrant County had 10, Baylor University’s McLennan County had seven, Kansas State University’s Riley County had four, the University of Texas’ Travis County had one, and the University of Kansas’ Douglas County had zero red-zone days. Dr. Kristen Obbink, Iowa State’s COVID-19 public health coordinator, said it’s hard to compare universities since students’ proportion of the county population varies. For example, Iowa State’s fall 2020 enrollment of 31,825 vs. Story County’s 97,117 residents means Cyclone students comprise nearly 33 percent of the county. By comparison, OU’s fall enrollment of 27,782 translates to less than 10 percent of the county. Of the Big 12 schools The Daily examined, Iowa State has the largest student-to-county population. Oklahoma State was second, at 30.14 percent, then Kansas State at 28 percent, followed by Kansas and Texas Tech at 19.60 and just under 13 percent, respectively. Baylor, Texas and TCU students account for 7.52 percent, 3.14 percent and .54 percent of their county populations, respectively.
“Everyone has different access to testing resources ... communities can just be varied in so many different ways … even the type of testing that you’re doing,” Obbink said. “But in doing that, and then if you look at others that maybe use other types of testing, even that is hard to compare from place to place, because they just vary so much that you might be looking at apples and oranges instead of apples to apples. But yeah, certainly I think, while we do differ so much from area to area, we’ve all faced similar challenges as COVID has progressed (and) we learned to identify those.” OU has been following guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, such as physical distancing, masking and upgrading air filtration systems, Bratzler said. For OU, working with other schools on mitigation strategies has mostly been limited to state universities like Oklahoma State. “Folks from OSU and I both routinely meet with the (state) regents to help coordinate,” Bratzler said, noting Oklahoma’s two largest universities have also been helping provide guidance to the smaller schools throughout the state. Bratzler said he meets with the state regents routinely, and occasionally they have conference calls with university presidents to discuss mitigation strategies. The most interaction he has with other schools is regarding athletics, since there is a “very, very coordinated” response for all student athletes throughout the Big 12, with the conference playing 52 of 55 potential regular-season football games, according to the Associated Press. By comparison, the Big Ten Conference played 50 of 63 potential games, including the championship game, and the Pac-12 Conference played 31 of 42 potential games. OU has worked with other schools to determine protocols for stadium management, team travel and other issues regarding its athletic teams, Bratzler said, and with only one football game canceled after the new schedule was released — the Sooners’ matchup against West Virginia — he believes they’ve done well in keeping athletes safe. Between July and Dec. 26, OU
has administered more than 8,600 tests in the athletic department, with 153 positives, according to releases from the athletic department — although that number does not match the total number of reported recoveries at 294. “We looked at quite a few universities at the start of the (fall) semester about testing strategies,” Bratzler said of OU at large. “It was part of how we came up with the decision to test all the students who have moved into congregate housing. But also we decided to focus fairly specifically on how we could do testing … we did do a large random sample of residence hall students a bit earlier in the (fall) semester, but recognize that our biggest challenge is the cost of the test.” CARES act funding, which originally allocated $18 million to OU, has run out, Bratzler said. Half of those dollars went toward emergency grants to students, and remaining funding has paid for some of the on-campus testing — with all tests for Cate Center and pre-arrival testing at $100 or more per test. A new bill passed by congress did allocate additional funding for testing, and although IMMY labs — a popular Norman testing facility — shut down testing for a few days in early January, a new contract has resumed testing. OU has discussed their own random testing of the university community, but Bratzler said attorneys have advised required testing would be very difficult except in residential housing since students who live there sign a contract with the university. “That’s why we’re really excited about the rapid test, the antigen test, that we could potentially do on campus, more often, (with) bigger group of students. We’re just working through the logistics,” Bratzler said. “The biggest challenge with them is each one individually has to be handled, and you have to watch it for 15 minutes. So just the personnel to do the huge student body that we have on the Norman campus (is a challenge).” Events are planned on campus for students using the rapid antigen test, with the university initially securing around 300,000 of the see BIG 12 page 2