Thread by @cfishman

You know who has crushed the coronavirus?

The University of Arizona (@uarizona).

Exactly 1 month ago, the campus was recording 10 cases of covid-19 *an hour.*

Friday: 0 positive tests

Last 10 days: 44 positives on 6,867 tests
—> positivity rate of 0.6%

2/ At one point, UArizona had 400 students in its quarantine dorm at once — each in individual rooms, receiving food deliveries & Zoom check-ins from student health services.

Today: 0 students in quarantine

3/ Perhaps most revealing, UArizona is one of the places in the US pioneering wastewater coronavirus testing — collecting raw sewage from its students, testing for coronavirus, to track & anticipate outbreaks.

They test 20 on-campus manholes 3x a week.

Today: All negative.

4/ From 10 cases of covid an hour to very close to no coronavirus at all on campus.

How'd they do that? Read about the 117-day race to make the campus covid-ready.

theatlantic.com/health/archive…

5/ University of Arizona is sending kids home at Thanksgiving, as many universities are.

Mounting a testing 'blitz' for students in the weeks before T'giving — UArizona wants everyone to test before heading home.

Adding 30% more daily test capacity to help make it possible.

6/ The University of Arizona has also cancelled spring break for the coming term, in 2021.

Will spread those 5 days throughout the term as days off — 'reading days' the provost calls them, to give everyone some 4-day weeks.

7/ Actually, UArizona is a little late to doing away with spring break 2021.

Duke did it in August. In the last month, these schools have cancelled spring break — to prevent students from spreading covid:

UMichigan
UWisconsin / Madison
UMiami
UFlorida
UAlabama
Carnegie Mellon

8/ UArizona has 5 weeks left in fall term.

Next Monday — with 4 weeks left — Arizona is *expanding* in-person classes on campus to those with 50 or fewer students (up from 30 or fewer), if the instructor & the students want to meet in person, and class is previously cleared.

9/ Arizona literally pulled success out of potential disaster.

They not only had 400 students in quarantine at one point, the on-campus outbreak was extraordinary.

Total on-campus students: 5,000
On campus students positive for covid: 947

19% of students in dorm were infected.

10/ With cases rising, UArizona public health faculty told me, 'It's possible that every student who returned to campus will be infected before the term is over.'

Wow. Imagine sending your kid to college with the guarantee he or she would get covid.

That didn't happen.

11/ If this had unravelled — at UArizona, at other schools that dug in & tried to make this work — there would have been a lot of clucking & mockery of administrators who tried to make it happen.

But worth pausing to say:

Some universities did this right. It worked pretty well.

12/ Yes: Money mattered.

Universities had to save themselves this fall — because Congress & the President & the state legislatures shrugged and decided not to try to backstop universities.

Universities needed students. I tried to explain why.

theatlantic.com/health/archive…

13/ The best way to get the economy going again, to get restaurants and businesses, high schools and hair salons, and, yes, universities, going again:

Crush the virus.

You can't rest on it — because the coronavirus isn't resting. But we can crush it.

Just ask @uarizona.

14/ The story of how UArizona got ready — it's a great yarn for this moment, as we head to fall.

—40,000 new on-campus signs
—400,000 UArizona logo masks
—a salad-making robot
…and a president who is a heart-transplant surgeon (Robbins, below)
#longread
theatlantic.com/health/archive…