Some American universities that have reopened their campuses to students have already reported clusters of coronavirus cases, while others have seen flagrant violations of their public health plans.
Taken together, the clusters and the party neatly illustrate the difficulties of bringing young people into proximity during the pandemic and comes as students are starting to return to campuses for in-person classes, remote learning, or both. The spread of the virus can be limited if people follow public health guidelines like social distancing, mask-wearing and hand-washing. But getting people to follow that advice has proven to be tricky — particularly so for college-aged students, who led the summer surge in coronavirus cases. « It is just not paying attention to human psychology if you think you’re going to be able to put those kids back together and not have them go and party, » said Dr. Megan Ranney, an emergency physician and associate professor of Emergency Medicine at Brown University. « Any of us who were young adults know what it’s like to be in your late teens and early 20s. It’s up to those colleges to make it easy for those kids to do the right thing, to do regular testing, have mask mandates, have masks easily available, and if needed, to shut down those campuses, » she told CNN. Young people generally have less severe outcomes from Covid-19 infection.
