Penn State plans to test all students for COVID-19 before spring semester arrival, and other changes
Penn State plans to require pre-arrival COVID-19 testing for all students in the spring, along with retesting the entire student body within two weeks of the semester’s start, based upon a presentation recently given by a university official.
Executive Vice President and Provost Nick Jones addressed the Faculty Senate last week, where he shared the university’s preliminary plans for the spring semester. No definitive or finalized plans have yet been announced but, according to a university spokesperson Thursday, an update is expected next week.
Both faculty and students have expressed concern throughout the fall over spring reopening, mainly revolving around testing. Although the university’s preliminary plans fall short of the demands made by Coalition for a Just University, a faculty-based group that advocated for improvements such as 10% daily surveillance testing, Penn State has directly addressed several of the key issues to spring reopening.
Among them, outside of universal pre-arrival testing and subsequent retesting:
- CLIA certification: Penn State’s Testing and Surveillance Center received Clinical Laboratory Improvement Amendments provisional certification earlier this month, which means the university can provide individual diagnoses out of the TASC facility and now has the capacity to increase daily surveillance testing up to 2%. (It was about 1% during the fall.)
- Rapid-testing at all campuses: Jones said the university is making it a “major priority” to have rapid-test capabilities across all campus locations. The university was in negotiations with a vendor earlier this month about the rapid tests, which could quickly determine results but would still need positives confirmed by a separate PCR test.
- Maintaining remote/face-to-face flexibility: With the changing health guidelines of the pandemic, Jones intimated it’s possible the university might be forced to shift to remote learning at some point. The key, he said, is to be prepared for that possibility. “We know the situation in the country and the region and the commonwealth is just not great right now,” Jones added. “We are keeping a careful eye on the trajectory, and we need to be prepared to be responsive as appropriate to make sure we’re doing the right thing and, of course, following the guidance that comes out of Harrisburg.”
“Again, I’m keeping this deliberately generic because there are a lot of t’s to cross and i’s to dot, and we plan to make a formal announcement in a few weeks,” Jones said Dec. 1.
The question of pre-arrival testing was one of the most pressing issues for the spring semester. During the fall, Penn State opted to test fewer than one-third of the student population prior to arrival — and cases skyrocketed shortly after students arrived, with 285 cases the week after class started with more than 450-plus weekly cases for the next month after that.
Several groups, along with the university’s Faculty Senate, have made repeated calls for testing all students prior to arrival, also referred to as universal pre-arrival testing. Experts in the field made similar recommendations, in addition to testing all students again within a week or two of arrival, with Dr. David Rubin — director of PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia — and Dr. Robert Redfield, director of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, promoting those steps.
And with both the commonwealth and the country facing a worsening pandemic, Jones told the Faculty Senate last week that the university is going to “do it better” in the spring.
“Given everything we learned through the fall, we really want to place a premium on minimizing the number of positive returning and initial student cases through pre-arrival and immediate post-arrival testing,” he said. “We learned in the fall that the pre-arrival testing strategy was really, really important for us to get off on a good vector.
“We’re going to do it better. It’s going to be more comprehensive and we think more effective. So this, again, is a key objective for us.”
Penn State shifted to remote instruction for Thanksgiving break, as it initially planned over the summer, and the fall semester is set to end Dec. 18.
Spring semester classes are scheduled to begin Jan. 19, with the university currently on pace to reopen.
