wednesday, march 11 , 2020. the washington post eZ su A
the coronavirus outbreak
BY LAUREN LUMPKIN
AND SUSAN SVRLUGAStudents clad in shorts and
sunglasses spilled into George
Washington University’s concrete
quad this week: an annual ritual
welcoming the arrival of warm
weather. But beneath the sun-
shine loomed uncertainty.
Demetra Vernet, a biological
anthropology major, said she’s
anticipating a situation akin to
the one unfolding at Columbia
University, where officials this
week canceled classes and an-
nounced plans to temporarily mi-
grate coursework online.
“I have a one-way ticket,” Ver-
net, a senior, said. She plans to
spend spring break in Boston but
is unsure when — or if — she will
return to the District.
The spread of coronavirus has
unsettled campuses throughout
the country. Communal gather-
ings are being rescheduled in an
effort to prevent infections. The
Ivy League canceled its men’s and
women’s postseason basketball
tournaments, becoming the first
Division I conference to take that
step.
And, on the cusp of spring
break, campuses are urging stu-
dents to rethink travel plans. For
some, the arrival of one of the
most anticipated weeks of the
school year will mean saying
goodbye to friends and profes-
sors. As universities make swift
and consequential decisions in
the name of safety, many rites of
college life are under threat.
“I’d be lying if I said I think
things would just resume back on
course,” s aid Lanier Holt, an assis-
tant professor in Ohio State Uni-
versity’s School of Communica-
tion. The university announced
Monday it would suspend face-to-
face instruction through the end
of the month.
Amherst College, the Universi-
ty of Washington and Princeton,
Stanford and New York universi-
ties have announced dramatic
changes in recent days. Indiana
University announced face-to-
face teaching will be temporarily
suspended after spring break. At
Harvard University, students
have been instructed to return to
their homes away from campus
after spring break and complete
coursework remotely.
LaShyra Nolen, a first-year stu-
dent and class president at Har-
vard Medical School, said her
classes are going online as soon as
Monday. Students will continue
to go to clinical sites, she said,
because without those hours,
they can’t move to their second
year.
But “this could change in the
next week,” s he said. “There’s this
angst and nervousness I feel in
the air.”
Students at GWU are in a state
of limbo as they await further
guidance from university leaders.
“There’s a lot of stuff up in the
air,” said Jessica Baskerville, a
sophomore studying journalism.
“If we had to self-quarantine,
would we have to go h ome? Could
we stay on campus? Can I leave
my r oom at a ll? We’re getting a lot
of notifications, but it’s a lot of
nothing.”
More challenges lay ahead: Se-
niors, on track to graduate, worry
their ceremonies will be called off
in the same way other large-scale
events have been canceled. Stu-
dents who have paid thousands of
dollars in housing fees wonder
what will happen if they are sent
home before the semester ends.
“I’m just trying to remain calm
and take things as they come,”
said Kaelyn Sanders, a senior at
Ohio State.
For many students, a week that
typically offers a respite from
stress and responsibility is now
fraught with unknown risks.
Memes have been spreading on
social media, with students antic-
ipating spring break spent lying
on the sand or floating in pools
encased in protective medical
suits.
Some campus leaders have
strongly advised students not to
travel internationally — includ-
ing, for the University of South-
ern California, popular destina-
tions such as Cabo San Lucas and
Cancun in Mexico — and to con-
sider avoiding travel all together.
“If you travel internationally,
be prepared for mandatory health
screenings, flight cancellations,
or isolation measures — includ-
ing the possibility of a required
14-day self-isolation,” before re-
turning to campus, the university
warned in a message to campus.
The most challenging element
is how to advise students about
travel within the United States,
said Sarah Van Orman, chief
health officer with USC Student
Health.
“It’s very complicated,” Van Or-
man said. T here are no public
health guidelines about domestic
travel, with the situation chang-ing so rapidly. USC officials sent a
message to students recently ad-
vising them to look at the local
situation and carefully consider
any domestic travel.
Colleges are in an unusual posi-
tion, said Van Orman. There’s
clearly a higher risk of infections
spreading in a communal living
situation and in classrooms. But
unlike K-12 schools that might
shut down to minimize the
chance of transmission of infec-
tions, “for a university, the idea of
everyone leaving campus and
coming back is, unfortunately, a
risky situation.”
More than 60,000 students are
enrolled at O SU’s main campus in
Columbus, Ohio.
“These students come from ev-
ery nook and cranny on the planet
Earth,” Holt said. “Even if a hand-
ful of people contracted the virus,
we’ve basically made a petri dish
for the virus. And then we spread
it when the semester ends in
about six weeks, all over the
world.”
Sweeping changes to campus
life will hit the most vulnerable
students the hardest. Those who
rely on meal plans, cannot access
the Internet at home or can’t
afford to travel have a few days to
prepare for a future that seemed
far-fetched a mere month ago.
Morgan McDonald, an OSU
student who relies on academic
assistance, said she does not
know how she will access those
services from home. She has an
anxiety disorder and needs extra
time for quizzes and tests.
“If that can’t happen, then that
causes me more anxiety,” McDon-
ald said.
Schools are responding in a
variety of ways, said Brad Farns-
worth, vice president for global
engagement with the American
Council on Education. One way:
Some residential campuses are
ensuring that students who don’t
feel safe traveling, particularly
international students, can re-
main on campus with food and
housing.
For now, a routine part of the
academic calendar suddenly pos-
es a multitude of challenges.
Some schools have updated their
advice multiple times in recent
weeks.
The rapidly changing situation
has sent schools scrambling.
“I thought, at some point, I’d
teach a class online,” Holt said. “I
just didn’t think it would be next
week.”
[email protected]karen Weintraub in Boston
contributed to this report.For many, university life is upended
Colleges move classes
online and urge students
to rethink spring breakBY WILLIAM WAN
AND JOEL ACHENBACHOne of the few mercies of the
spreading coronavirus is that it
leaves young children virtually
untouched — a mystery virolo-
gists say may hold vital clues as to
how the virus works.
In China, only 2.4 percent of
reported cases were children and
only 0.2 percent of reported cases
were children who got critically
ill, according to the World Health
Organization. China has reported
no case of a young child dying of
the disease covid-19.
Meanwhile, the new coronavi-
rus has proved especially deadly
on the other end of the age spec-
trum. The fatality rate in China
for those over 80 is an estimated
21.9 percent, per the WHO. For
ages 10 to 39, however, the fatality
rate is roughly 0.2 percent, ac-
cording to a separate study draw-
ing on patient records of 44,
confirmed cases. And fatalities
and severe symptoms are almost
nonexistent at e ven younger ages.
That means the new coronavi-
rus is behaving very differently
from other viruses, like seasonal
influenza, which are usually espe-
cially dangerous for both the very
young and very old.
“With respiratory infections
li ke this, we usually see a U-
shaped curve on who gets hits
hardest. Young children at one
end of the U because their im-
mune systems aren’t yet devel-
oped and old people at the other
end because their immune sys-
tems grow weaker,” said Vineet
Menachery, a virologist at the
University of Te xas Medical
Branch. “With this virus, one side
of the U is just completely miss-
ing.”
Figuring out why children are
so unaffected could lead to break-
throughs in understanding how
and why the virus sickens and
kills other age groups, said Frank
Esper, a pediatric infectious dis-
ease specialist at C leveland Clinic
Children’s. Among the questions
Esper and others are exploring: Is
the severity of infection related to
what patients were exposed to
previously? Does it have to do
with how our immune systems
change with age? Or could it be
due to pollution damage in the
lungs that people accumulate
over years?
“Or maybe it has nothing to do
with the virus and has to do with
host, like underlying conditions
in the lungs, diabetes or hyper-
tension. After all, few 7-year-olds
or newborns have hypertension,”
said Esper, who studies viral re-
spiratory infections and new dis-
eases. “Figuring out what’s at p lay
here could be helpful in so many
ways.”Previous coronavirus out-
breaks have also mysteriously
spared the young. No children
died during the SARS outbreak in
2002, which killed 774 people.
And few children developed
symptoms from the deadly MERS
coronavirus, which has killed 858
since 2012.
To f ind out why, M enachery has
been giving mice at his Te xas lab
SARS — which is a very close
cousin to the new coronavirus.
Baby mice at his lab have shaken
off the infection, while the older
mice have had their lungs and
bodies ravaged by the disease.
Menachery found that the old-
er mice’s fatalities were stronglyrelated to not just weakness in
their immune systems but also a
“disregulation” t hat caused their
immune systems to overreact to
the SARS coronavirus. That is
similar to how humans die of
infections from the new coronavi-
rus, called SARS-CoV-2.
“It’s the aggressive response
from their immune system that is
damaging them, even more than
the infection itself,” Menachery
said. “It’s like police responding
to a misdemeanor with a SWAT
team crashing through the door.”
The question he and others
have still struggled to answer,
however, is why the baby mice
escape unscathed.Some experts have floated a
theory that because children are
so heavily exposed to four other
mild coronaviruses, which circu-
late every year and cause the
common cold, kids may possess
some kind of strengthened immu-
nity. But many have doubts about
that argument because adults
catch the common cold coronavi-
ruses too, and the immune sys-
tems of children — especially un-
der the age of 5 — are underdevel-
oped, which should make them
more vulnerable, not less.
“If it bears out that kids are less
prone to infection, then I suspect
there’s something more mechani-
cal than immunological goingon,” said Esper, the pediatric in-
fection expert. “Something about
the receptors in children’s bodies
or their lungs is interfering with
the virus’ ability to attach itself.”
“It just shows you how much
we don’t know about this virus,”
said Stuart Weston, a virologist at
the University of Maryland
School of Medicine who has been
testing anti-viral drugs that could
help treat the new coronavirus.
“The focus now is on vaccines and
treatment, but there are all these
big questions we’re going to want
to answer in the long-term if we
want to really understand how
these coronaviruses work.”
So given all that, does it make
sense to close schools?
Because so few cases have been
found in children, there has been
speculation children are simply
less likely to get infected.
But many epidemiologists sus-
pect mild symptoms may be
masking that children are getting
infected at the same rate as
adults. Data published last week
by Chinese researchers showed
that authorities searching for cor-
onavirus cases based on symp-
toms found lower rates in kids.
But when they relied on contact
tracing — testing people who
come in contact with a confirmed
case — children seemed to be
getting infected at the same rate
as adults.
“We know from pandemic re-
search that closing schools can be
effective in slowing down trans-
mission because children are of-
ten a driver of infection. They
spread it to parents, relatives and
the wider community,” said Cait-
lin Rivers, an epidemiologist at
the Johns Hopkins Center for
Health Security.
Some districts may find them-
selves closing schools because it
will be tough to stay open as
teachers, principals and janitors
get infected, said Rivers, who has
children herself. “We may end up
closing schools in part to protect
the adults and staff.”
[email protected]
[email protected]Understanding children’s resistance may be key to illness
Jaipal singh/epa-eFe/shutterstock
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