White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator visits Penn State, emphasizes importance of testing
Dr. Deborah Birx, the White House Coronavirus Task Force coordinator, praised Penn State’s unique COVID-19 messaging Wednesday — such as “Mask Up or Pack Up” — while emphasizing the importance of increased testing across all universities, as part of her national tour of information gathering on higher education.
Birx, a Penn State alum who addressed masked reporters outside the Penn Stater Hotel & Conference Center around noon Wednesday, declined to directly criticize the university’s surveillance testing program, which daily tests about 1% of the campus population. But, during a 20-minute press conference, she repeatedly pointed to other universities that are testing their entire populations weekly.
“I would always be happy if we had 100% of students tested weekly,” Birx said. “Because I think testing changes behavior.”
If students know what behaviors lead to spread and know they’ll be tested, they’re more likely to avoid such behavior, Birx said, alluding to sports teams’ ability to avoid the virus. But she was also quick to add that “there’s no suggestion” widespread undetected COVID-19 is on Penn State’s campus.
“So what they’re doing is working,” she added, following a private roundtable with university leadership, students and health care professionals. “I would always like to see more.”
Two weeks ago, Birx’s colleagues at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention wrote a piece that essentially recommended two-phased universal screening for colleges, where all students are tested pre-arrival and tested again about a week after arrival. When asked Wednesday if large universities such as Penn State should reopen in the spring if they can’t implement such measures, or cannot at least commit to universal pre-arrival testing, she deflected the question.
When pressed again, Birx said she doesn’t like to offer definitive answers because some universities that avoided pre-arrival testing still found success. However, she acknowledged more frequent testing appeared to lower the infection rate.
“I think what we’re seeing across the United States, at most universities that weren’t doing every student every week or more frequently, we’re seeing rates between 10% and 15% of the university student population becoming infected,” she said.
“... I think what we want to do is really investigate whether weekly testing or twice a week testing does produce that behavioral change that results in less test positivity, and less students getting affected. So what I would do is I would look at the rates at Boston University, University of New Hampshire, University of Vermont, who are doing weekly or twice a week testing and compare them to Mississippi, University of Mississippi, University of Alabama, Penn State and other colleges that were doing surveillance testing. And you’ll get an idea about that what I think is really behavioral change induced by repeat testing.”
Boston University, for example, has seen just 150 positive cases out of more than 230,000 tests. Penn State has seen 3,362 positive cases out of more than 45,000 tests.
Birx said she’s seen a number of recurring themes during her travels, which have entailed about 30 university visits — and one of those is that transmission is not occurring in the classroom. Instead, it’s often happening among on- and off-campus living spaces, where safety precautions like mask-wearing and social-distancing routinely aren’t followed as closely as in public spaces.
Birx, a native of Carlisle, said wastewater testing and other forms of testing could help curtail concerns of the “silent spread” of the virus. And she said Penn State, like many other research institutions, has committed to helping increase the country’s nucleic acid testing capacity.
But, she added, there was no substitute for increased testing. Although she praised Penn State by saying its messaging helped make students aware of the importance of behavioral changes, and that the community has held itself accountable, she also emphasized the importance of stopping community spread before it reaches the most vulnerable.
“As you know, I’m very proactive about the importance of testing because of the level of silence spread in this age group,” she said, referring to students. “And the only way you’re going to find the majority of cases is through testing.
“So we talked about how to really ramp up and expand testing.”
