In the past month, there has been a loud chorus of criticism and skepticism over Cornell’s reopening. Although the university has put in place a system to test and trace any and all COVID-19 cases that have arisen since the academic year began, it still faces the disapproval of many students, faculty, and even major newspapers such as the New York Times. One repeated criticism was that the early outbreak of cases reflected Cornell’s inability to control student behavior and the spread of the virus on campus. If it weren’t enough for the university to be dealing with the castigation of an established newspaper, Cornell is also facing pressure from Governor Cuomo’s new edict, which limits the number of positive cases a university may have before shutting down.
A common criticism that Cornell has dealt with is that the university reopened because of the financial implications of students not returning to campus. This idea casts Cornell in a negative light, but according to President Martha E. Pollack, it is not why the university returned to in-person teaching and learning. Cornell determined that students were going to come back to Ithaca regardless of whether or not they were taking courses in person. Many students, especially graduate students and upperclassmen undergrads, had already made commitments to leases and had to return. Dorms only make up a portion of the living accommodations at Cornell, so there were inevitably going to be students who would return to the Ithaca community and live off campus.
Cornell was aware of this complication in the beginning of the summer, and during June, a team of faculty and PhD students created a mathematical model of all the possible plans for Cornell’s Fall Semester. The group found that reopening the school would be the safest option for Ithaca as a whole. Importantly, it would allow Cornell to keep track of all of its students―some of whom would have otherwise arrived in Ithaca without any supervision or testing. There would be no way for Cornell to hold students accountable for their behavior, and Ithaca would be at greater risk.
Throughout the summer, Cornell has worked extensively to implement testing facilities and procedures that will dramatically help the efforts to contain the campus’s cases of COVID-19. Through valuable resources, time, and energy, Cornell was able to create a state-of-the-art lab built from scratch, located in the Cornell Vet School. This massive undertaking was completed in less than two months, with the guidance of the Cayuga Health System’s medical and laboratory leadership team. The on-campus lab allows tests to be processed quickly―within 24 hours―and safely, as robots are used to handle samples in the lab. Cornell’s testing capacity far surpasses other New York universities of similar size. For example, Binghamton State University (another upstate SUNY college) has on average only tested about 127 people per day since September 2nd. Cornell, by contrast, is consistently testing between 2,500 and 6,000 students, faculty, and staff per day. Cornell’s ability to test thousands of people every single day allows it to find isolated cases of COVID-19 before clusters of the virus are formed that have the potential to threaten the university and all of Ithaca.
Unfortunately, with all this testing, Cornell is at a disadvantage when it comes to abiding by Governor Cuomo’s new edict, announced on August 27. This edict declared New York State’s new threshold for (temporarily) closing down universities with COVID-19 outbreaks. If a school reaches 100 positive cases within a two-week period, it must go remote until the state has reviewed the status of the pandemic on campus. A flaw of the edict is that it targets big schools, as it doesn’t take into account the total population of the university. Cornell is a large school―almost 22,000 students―and 100 positive cases is barely half a percent of the entire student population.
Further, this edict penalizes universities that have vigorous testing procedures, such as Cornell. The bottom line is that universities will be late at finding positive test cases if they do not test for them―the cases will only be found when they are already spreading too fast to be managed. The majority of COVID-19 cases contracted by college students are asymptomatic and go unnoticed without screening many students. Schools without the ability to test a large number of people every day inevitably test those with symptoms first, and many asymptomatic cases will not be found and have the potential to spread very quickly. Even if a school may seem to be doing well according to the numbers of positive cases it has recorded, it doesn’t mean that the school is free of COVID-19, but simply that the cases are going unnoticed because of a lack of testing. The students who do have untested cases of the virus may not even be discovered until a large, uncontrollable outbreak occurs on campus.
Cornell was heavily criticized during the beginning of its reopening when there was a spike in positive cases, but the university was set up to address this challenge well. Because of its testing capability, it was able to identify and trace all asymptomatic cases, which constitute the bulk of student COVID-19 cases. Cornell is doing the right thing by testing everyone as often as possible and finding positive asymptomatic cases to control and trace. Doing the right thing, though, puts it at risk of finding the 100 cases that the Governor has declared would require a move to remote classes. Other schools in New York that don’t record all their positive cases may not reach these numbers, even though their campuses may have more cases and be at greater risk of a dangerous outbreak.
Overall, Cornell’s success in its reopening plan is being discredited by individuals who are not aware of the capability the university has in facing COVID-19. Since the spike of positive cases in early September, the number of active cases in Ithaca has gone down considerably. It is possible that Cornell will face more outbreaks on campus, but the university has set up facilities and procedures that will help keep Ithaca safe. Instead of criticising the temporary growth of COVID-19 cases in Ithaca, we should focus on how Cornell will be able to protect our community in the future. Of course, nothing is certain during this difficult time, but right now Cornell is doing very well at containing COVID-19, and it seems possible that this positive trajectory will continue. Good luck, Cornell!