Living with Omicron on campus from December 2021 through January 2022

Last update: Thursday 2/3/22

This note is the second in a series of blog entries that use word clouds to provide overviews of the impact of the coronavirus on the day-to-day operations of U.S. colleges and universities. The first entry covered the brief "Age of Delta" from August 2021 through November 2021. This one covers the "Rise of Omicron" from December 2021 through January 2022. Both are based on virus-related notes posted on the continuously updated "Live Update" page of Inside Higher Ed (IHE), one of the nation's leading academic news publications.

The nation's major media don't devote much coverage to Covid on campuses except where cancellations or postponements of important athletic events are involved. Nor do government agencies provide convenient tabulations of collegiate infections, hospitalizations, and deaths at the state or national levels. Fortunately, useful insights can be gained from the "Live updates" page of IHE. Here's a link to a copy of an extensive excerpt from IHE's cumulative update page as it appeared on February 1st ==> Live Update on 2/1/22 

As the reader will see, the excerpt includes brief summaries of news reports about Covid events that occurred at various U.S. colleges and universities from December 1, 2021 through January 31, 2022. This isn't a random sample of all collegiate Covid events, just those events that the IHE editors thought were worth their readers' attention. Reading one short summary after another is like listening to a well-informed reporter giving his or her opinions as to what you really need to know in order to keep up with the latest developments. 

Background immunity

The word cloud that headlined the previous edition of this report suggested that U.S. colleges and universities were more or less following the same strategies as the world's highly vaccinated nations with regards to living with the virus. By contrast, the word cloud that headlines this edition suggests that their behavior might be better understood as de facto implementations of a framework called "background immunity" that was recently articulated by Dr. Fauci in an interview with the NY Times. (Other experts have called this notion "baseline immunity".)

• The podcast audio for Dr. Fauci's interview with the NY Times, "We need to talk about Covid, Part 2", 1/31/22, can be found ==> Here ... Note: This page contains a link to a transcript of the interview.

The rationale for Dr. Fauci's suggestion that we replace the unattainable herd immunity with background immunity is elaborated in another note on this blog:

• "Background immunity -- A new pandemic management goal suggested by Dr. Fauci", Last update: 2/2/22

Background immunity is the sum of all of the immunities that members of a community acquire through infections, vaccinations, and boosters. If the level of a community's background immunity matches the level of its mitigations, testing, and antiviral drug treatments, then the community's severe illness and resultant hospitalizations will be kept at a manageable level, i.e., a level comparable to the illness and hospitalization that results from a seasonal flu, a level that does not overwhelm the community's health care resources.

Communities that achieve this match could resume many normal activities, e.g., employees could return to work in their workplaces without masks; they could attend indoor restaurants and indoor entertainments without masks; and students at all levels could have shorter isolation periods if they became infected in face-to-face classes whereas others could "test to stay" in face-to-face classes if they were exposed to infected students. 

In his interview Dr. Fauci made repeated efforts to underline his sense that "we're not there yet" at a national level. He specifically noted that we haven't vaccinated a high enough percentage of our population. He did not need to mention our well known deficiencies in the availability of high quality masks, testing resources, and antiviral drugs. Nevertheless, he felt that we were moving in the right direction.

Background immunity on campus

Now let's apply the good doctor's framework to the nation's colleges and universities, whose 18 to 30 year old students make up more than 80 percent of the campus populations:

• Many colleges and universities have already mandated and achieved vaccination levels greater than 90 percent for their faculty, staff, and administrators, as well as for their students
  
  
• As for immunities, Dr. Fauci's enumeration leaves out a powerful immunity that is singularly pervasive among our nation's college and university population ==> their youth. Even without vaccines and boosters, only a very small percentage of 18 to 30 year olds will get sick enough to require hospitalization if infected by Omicron.
  
  
• As for an adequate supply of high quality masks, testing resources, and antiviral drugs, our students' vaccinations, boosters, and youth should provide more than enough protection from the milder Omicron variant to prevent severe illness and hospitalizations from exceeding the limits of the health care facilities on campus and in the surrounding communities even if high quality masks, testing, and antiviral drugs are in short supply.
  
  
• But if it looked like surges in severe infections might exceed health care limits, colleges and universities could blunt the surges by moving infected students and/or entire classes from on-campus into isolation, quarantine, and online instruction with shorter isolation periods under Omicron than under Delta

At this point our discussion is incomplete because of its omission of any consideration of the other 20 percent of a campus population: its older, more vulnerable members, i.e., its faculty, support staff, and administrators. So the answer to Dr. Fauci's implied question -- "Are we there yet?" -- will ultimately be determined by the background immunity of these groups, an immunity that will vary from college to college.

Given the powerful immunity possessed by 80 percent of the campus population, most institutions might have an overall background immunity that is strong enough for them to lift most of their mandates after the huge initial surges in Omicron subside. If so, they should thereafter do whatever is possible to accommodate the members of their communities who are most vulnerable and/or whose households contain highly vulnerable members.

The Omicron cloud

The rest of this discussion will argue that the most prominent words in the Omicron word are the same words that one would expect to be most prominent if colleges and universities were moving towards normality by leveraging their background immunity in the context of Omicron's high transmissibility:

• "Omicron will infect ‘just about everybody,’ Fauci says", Andrew Jeong and Ellen Francis, Washington Post, 1/12/22 

Word clouds provide concise summaries of narratives like the IHE updates found on Live Update on 2/1/22. 

The word cloud in the upper left hand corner of this page contains the words that occurred at least 10 times in the summaries included in the excerpt that covered the early months of the Omicron phase. Notes that describe which words were included, which were modified, and the odd truncations of some words appear on this page ==> IHE Word Cloud Notes

The nine words that occurred most frequently in the Omicron cloud were:
     1. Online (124) ... black
     2. Campus (94) ... brown

     3. Student (89) ... orange

     4. Omicron (63) ... dark green

     5. Class (62) ... red

     6. Semester (60) ... red
     7. Faculty (54) ... red
     8. Week (47) ... red
     9. Start (47) ... red

The three words that occurred most frequently in the Delta cloud were:
     1. Student (196) ...black  
     2. Vaccine (156) ... red
     3. Mandate (119) ... blue

Twenty-twenty hindsight now suggests that the top three words in the Delta cloud indicated that colleges and universities were building up their background immunity during the fall semester by mandating that all students became vaccinated as a prerequisite for attending classes on campus. 

By contrast, the top nine words in the Omicron cloud suggest that colleges and universities were now shifting students (and faculty) from on-campus to online classes during the first few weeks of the Spring 2022 semester as a way of blunting the on-campus surge of Omicron, thereby limiting the on-campus demand for the services of hospitals and other local health care facilities.

But if students returned to campus after the winter break and some were tested positive for Omicron, it would make sense to shift the entire class to online immediately.  Given Omicron's high transmissibility, if one student tested positive others were already infected. Allowing other students to stay in a face-to-face class on a test-to-stay basis would give the infection more time to infect all of the remaining students.

So where did students who tested positive self-isolate? An IHE post on 1/22/22 suggests that isolation space in some colleges was quickly overwhelmed. 

• "Gone are the days when students who test positive for COVID-19 moved to designated isolation housing on college campuses. As colleges prepare for projected surges in cases fueled by the highly transmissible Omicron variant, many are adjusting their isolation procedures to allow students to isolate in their dorm rooms, even if they have roommates." 

Given the high level of background immunity among the students, testing positive leads to severe illness so rarely that some colleges stopped posting the number of new infections on dashboards, as in the following IHR 1/26/22 update

• "The University of Florida no longer publishes data about COVID-19 case counts on campus. As of Jan. 1, the university stopped updating its COVID-19 dashboard and began directing requests for data to the Florida Department of Health. Other major research universities have not followed suit. But Florida’s decision to discontinue its COVID-19 dashboard raises questions about whether and for how much longer other colleges will maintain public-facing websites with data about COVID on campus and what purposes those dashboards are serving at this point in the pandemic."

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Links to related notes on this blog:

• "Background immunity" -- A new pandemic management goal suggested by Dr. Fauci", Last update: 2/1/22
  
  
• "Living with Delta on campus from August 2021 to November 2021", Last update: 12/28/21
  
  
• "Omicron Defense", Updated frequently