College openings in the United States increase mobility and COVID-19 incidence

Abstract

School and college reopening-closure policies are considered one of the most promising non-pharmaceutical interventions for mitigating infectious diseases. Nonetheless, the effectiveness of these policies is still debated, largely due to the lack of empirical evidence on behavior during implementation. We examined U.S. college reopenings’ association with changes in human mobility within campuses and in COVID-19 incidence in the counties of the campuses over a twenty-week period around college reopenings in the Fall of 2020. We used an integrative framework, with a difference-in-differences design comparing areas with a college campus, before and after reopening, to areas without a campus and a Bayesian approach to estimate the daily reproductive number ( R _t ). We found that college reopenings were associated with increased campus mobility, and increased COVID-19 incidence by 4.9 cases per 100,000 (95% confidence interval [CI]: 2.9–6.9), or a 37% increase relative to the pre-period mean. This reflected our estimate of increased transmission locally after reopening. A greater increase in county COVID-19 incidence resulted from campuses that drew students from counties with high COVID-19 incidence in the weeks before reopening ( χ ² (2) = 8.9, p = 0.012) and those with a greater share of college students, relative to population ( χ ² (2) = 98.83, p < 0.001). Even by Fall of 2022, large shares of populations remained unvaccinated, increasing the relevance of understanding non-pharmaceutical decisions over an extended period of a pandemic. Our study sheds light on movement and social mixing patterns during the closure-reopening of colleges during a public health threat, and offers strategic instruments for benefit-cost analyses of school reopening/closure policies.

SciScore for 10.1101/2020.09.22.20196048: (What is this?)

Please note, not all rigor criteria are appropriate for all manuscripts.

Table 1: Rigor

Institutional Review Board Statement	not detected.
Randomization	not detected.
Blinding	not detected.
Power Analysis	not detected.
Sex as a biological variable	not detected.

Table 2: Resources

No key resources detected.

Results from OddPub: Thank you for sharing your code.

Results from LimitationRecognizer: We detected the following sentences addressing limitations in the study:

Several other limitations of our analysis arising primarily out of lack of data are discussed in the SI. We submit, our findings are critical in the context of public health adaptive management strategies and in particular for colleges, as they consider additional strategies to mitigate disease burden and decrease transmission. Institutional leaders should think carefully as they plan their Spring 2020 semesters – examining not only the “situation on the ground” in their own institutions’ communities, but also in those from which they draw a substantial number of students.

Results from TrialIdentifier: No clinical trial numbers were referenced.

Results from Barzooka: We did not find any issues relating to the usage of bar graphs.

Results from JetFighter: We did not find any issues relating to colormaps.

Results from rtransparent:

Thank you for including a conflict of interest statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
Thank you for including a funding statement. Authors are encouraged to include this statement when submitting to a journal.
No protocol registration statement was detected.

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College openings in the United States increase mobility and COVID-19 incidence

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Noemi Kreif