Most campuses see COVID-19 spike in first weeks of spring semester

This story was updated Sunday afternoon with corrected numbers for Skidmore College.

At Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, students are once again confined to their rooms just one month after being released from a two-week mandatory quarantine at the start of the spring semester.

The Troy campus is seeing a record number of coronavirus infections — more than 60 since the end of January — triggering the suspension of in-person classes, ramped up surveillance testing, and a campus-wide quarantine that began on Thursday.

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"We are using every tool at our disposal to mitigate the spread of COVID-19 within the Rensselaer community," RPI spokesman Reeve Hamilton said.

RPI until now has been largely successful at keeping infection rates flat, its leaders touting aggressive testing and social distancing protocols that are guided by an algorithm that models how the virus will spread based on different practices.

The university has more students on campus this semester, which began Jan. 22, because of the way it has staggered in-person learning for its undergraduate population. RPI has ramped up its testing and quarantine capacity accordingly.

But RPI is not an anomaly. Just days into the semester, a number of colleges and universities in the Capital Region have had to grapple with at least one COVID-19 outbreak.

Despite the availability of a coronavirus vaccine for faculty and some students, the University at Albany, Skidmore College in Saratoga Springs, and Loudonville's Siena College all saw infections early in their semesters.

Campuses kicked off the spring term with rigid protocols. Depending on the institution, students were either required to quarantine in their dorm rooms for two weeks before the semester began or they were expected to self-quarantine before arriving at campus. In most cases, students were required to provide a negative COVID-19 test result within 10 days of arrival and then were tested again upon entry.

Given the timing of the outbreaks, school officials say they believe pre-semester practices were effective and that the exposures happened post-arrival. Contact tracers have linked most cases to students socializing in dorms and off-campus, and lapses in virus prevention practices like mask-wearing.

"Our experience was what you would expect to see if the pre-arrival and arrival testing worked – otherwise the uptick would have begun almost immediately after arrival," UAlbany spokesman Jordan Carleo-Evangelist said. "In other words, the pre-arrival and arrival testing help us clear a lot of the virus out of our community, but given its increased prevalence in the region and state, it began to creep back in about 10 days after arrival."

The on-campus spread was also likely fueled by the cold weather when people are more likely to congregate indoors, college leaders said. Capital Region COVID-19 rates were notably higher in February than they were in November of last year

Colleges and universities adjusted their calendars to avoid the pandemic's winter peak. The fall semester wrapped up before Thanksgiving, and students returned to campus for the spring term between late January and late February, depending on the school.

At Siena College, where students returned to campus on Feb. 22, the jump in infections became apparent Thursday, exactly 10 days into the spring semester.

Siena has tallied at least 55 cases, with more than half of the infections identified Thursday and Friday, according to data posted on the college's COVID-19 dashboard on March 5.

On Friday, Siena President Chris Gibson announced new measures to combat the spread including a "light quarantine" and ramped up testing of 100 percent of the on-campus population.

"We are taking this action now to protect our community," Gibson said.

At Skidmore, leaders hypothesized that higher coronavirus rates in the community contributed to the outbreak on the Saratoga Springs campus.

In the fall, Skidmore College counted about a dozen cases the entire semester and only shifted to remote classes for the final week. Skidmore’s spring semester officially began on Feb. 2 and there have been 18 positive cases since then.

Like RPI, Skidmore required students to spend the first two weeks of the term quarantined in their rooms.

To frustrated students and parents, Skidmore President Marc Conner wrote, "there is hope on the horizon as vaccines become more available, and in fact, many in our own campus community are becoming vaccinated. But — and I know we all keep hearing this, but it is so true — the virus remains prevalent and indeed is more than twice as prevalent as it was in the fall. "

The college issued a "level three" safety alert on Feb. 26, triggering limitations on gatherings outside of class.

UAlbany and Skidmore are largely over the hump and officials say their mitigation strategies have been effective at bringing down the number of active cases.

"Our on-campus testing program and practice of quickly quarantining close contacts based on the results of surveillance testing has so far helped us enormously, but much like the fall it will require constant vigilance and analysis of the testing data," Carleo-Evangelist said.