Opinion: Penn State failed to rise to the occasion with COVID-19 response
Colleges and universities across the U.S. have spent the fall balancing their educational missions and financial survival with an unchecked pandemic. Most large institutions have responded with comprehensive COVID testing, coupled to fundamental changes in their day-to-day functions. As Penn State faculty who wish to steer our university toward just, ethical and transparent decisions, we feel it is necessary to objectively hold our institution’s response to account. With this in mind: How does Penn State’s COVID response compare to other institutions, as well as its own objectives?
Because each campus faces its own unique challenges, an obvious and reasonable comparison to Penn State is with other Big Ten schools of similar size and geography. Any objective look shows that Penn State’s COVID response is worse than every other comparable institution. Not only does University Park have more positive COVID tests than any Big Ten flagship campus (3,646 as of Saturday), but this is true even for the relative case rate (corrected for campus population differences), and despite the fact that Penn State has performed fewer tests than most other schools. These comparisons are not perfect, but the numbers tell a clear, factual story: Other institutions have uniformly kept their students healthier than ours.
These COVID rates wildly exceed the university’s own modeling. (Earlier this semester, when CJU presented an alternative model conservatively estimating approximately 2,500 University Park student cases — compared to the current total of 3,337 symptomatic cases — the university deemed the model “flawed” without addressing its substance.) A major problem is that Penn State’s testing strategy was (and is) inadequate to the task. In their Health Resources Task Group Executive Summary from July, the university clearly identified the risks of returning students to campus: “…returning students are unlikely to fully comply with masks, social distancing, and refraining from high-risk activities… this environment poses a particular risk for epidemic spread.”
In other words, as Dr. Deborah Birx noted, the university knew that students would need time to adjust to the pandemic – and thus recognized that the campus-related impact of the pandemic would be guided by the number of cases at the start of the semester: “The initial number of positives… dramatically impacts the number of hospitalizations.” Yet rather than spend an estimated $5 million on 100% pre-arrival testing, the university bluntly dismissed the idea, calling it an “inviable strategy” and ignoring other similar institutions (Purdue, Illinois, etc.) that implemented it.
Likewise, Penn State’s random testing is too sparse (1%/day) to be meaningful – neither capturing the true asymptomatic prevalence, nor sequestering enough asymptomatic carriers from the population. For example, compare the number of random tests performed at University Park (27,353 with 295 positives) with Indiana University Bloomington (64,784 with 1,921 positives), even though Indiana performed approximately 150% more pre-arrival tests than Penn State and therefore had fewer starting infections. Indiana is of course not Pennsylvania, and it is not possible to protect everyone from harm – but there are basic, common-sense solutions that could have greatly lessened COVID’s effect on our system. In essence, the university saved $5-10 million, but passed on a greater toll to their students, employees and community members.
The effects of Penn State’s choices are not limited to their campuses. It is heartening to see the slowing rate of new COVID cases among students, and that the university will provide optional pre-Thanksgiving testing. However, we think these tests should be mandatory and urge all students to take advantage of them. We also have a chance to start fresh next year – but that requires 100% pre-arrival testing, especially if the pandemic worsens over the winter. The data are unequivocal: the fewer tests, the fewer infections caught prior to arrival, and the more needlessly severe the pandemic will hit us again next year. With the promise of a widely distributed vaccine unlikely until after the spring semester, the university should step up to protect students and their families, now.
We need an honest accounting of Penn State’s COVID response at all campuses. The data demonstrate that Penn State did not rise to the occasion. We wholeheartedly agree on weighing the financial toll of the response, but the results show that there are costs to inaction too. As faculty dedicated to our students and our communities, we ask that Penn State put forth a just and ethical pandemic response – one commensurate to our students’ needs and worthy of our pride as Penn Staters.