As higher education works to navigate the pandemic, a new study notes that COVID-19 prevention strategies can be as effective as the new vaccines.
The study, co-authored by a multidisciplinary research team, including infectious disease clinicians, epidemiologists and biostatisticians, found that extensive distancing and mandatory mask-wearing alone can prevent 87% of campus COVID-19 infections and the cost is only $170 per infection prevented. Adding routine testing increases that cost substantially. While testing would increase prevention to between 92% to 96%, the cost per infection prevented would be between $2,000 to $17,000 each, depending on the frequency of testing.
“Routing testing at current prices is expensive,” said Dr. Elena Losina, the lead author of the report and director of the Policy and Innovation eValuations in Orthopedic Treatments Center. Losina also serves as co-director of Orthopedic and Arthritis Center for Outcomes Research at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and she serves as the Robert W. Lovett professor of orthopedic surgery at Harvard Medical School. “It could help to reduce infections further, but at greater cost.
“The solution to this is fast approval of inexpensive rapid tests that could be offered at much lower costs,” she added. “We hope that our work could expedite the production and use of inexpensive rapid screening tests that could be used in both private and publicly funded colleges and universities.”
Losina said that the analysis suggests in the absence of routine testing, rigorous implementation of and adherence to mask-wearing and social distancing protocols can lead to the prevention of the majority of COVID-19 cases on college campuses.
Individuals at a campus that has followed those protocols agree.
At Sacred Heart University in Connecticut, the contact tracing team found with those measures in place, there was no spread of COVID-19 in the classrooms.
