Duke vs UNC - Covid-19 Responses

Just over a week ago, we wrote about the University of North Carolina's main campus in Chapel Hill being forced to move from in person to virtual classes as Covid-19 infections exploded at the school just days after in person classes began.  And, infections continue to rise at the school despite the move to remote learning.  

Just 10 miles up Tobacco Road from UNC, Duke University has successfully implemented in person education without the generation of massive clusters of Covid-19 infections.  The two universities took very different approaches to managing their school's openings.  

Duke administrators assumed the virus was everywhere and that college students would behave the way college students tend to behave.

Anyone who returned to campus including staff and students was tested on re-entry. This identified non-symptomatic individuals who otherwise could have been infectious and broke future infection chains. It also makes the primary source of any on-campus infections to be from off-campus interactions. More importantly, Duke is also conducting massive weekly surveillance testing using non-CLIA labs and pooled testing strategies... Duke is assuming students will be infected. Their goal is predicated upon enough surveillance testing that singular infections don’t become campus wide outbreaks.

UNC's  strategy was rather Trumpian.  Pretend that the virus didn't exist and hope that college students wouldn't behave like college students.

UNC had no pro-active testing strategy. UNC would only test symptomatic individuals and close contacts of symptomatic individuals. This means that the university had no awareness of any community spread risk much less actualities until students started to go to campus health centers with symptoms. And by that time, there had been several days of potential high density contact in dorms, in classes, in stores, in parties and elsewhere on and near campus.

Duke used what has proved to be relatively successful around the world - rigorous testing and contact tracing.  UNC followed the Trump playbook - limit testing to the symptomatic and hope things don't get out of control.  Guess which approach works?