YPSILANTI, MI — As some colleges struggled with COVID-19 outbreaks during the fall semester, Eastern Michigan University was able to keep cases on campus relatively low thanks to telehealth, teamwork and different kinds of testing, university officials said.
Many Michigan college campuses drew heavy criticism for their reopening plans and others, including Central Michigan University and the University of Michigan, experienced COVID-19 outbreaks on campus, but EMU never had a major issue, President James Smith said.
Due to things like telehealth, wastewater testing, mask-wearing and COVID-19 testing, COVID-19 numbers remained low at EMU in the fall, university officials said. The most cases in the EMU population for a given week was 55 from Nov. 4-10 — around the same time Washtenaw County experienced a surge in cases from about 500 new cases to more than 1,000.
Planning for a COVID-19 semester started last March for Smith and his team. Sherry Bumpus, EMU director of nursing operations, said planning for her team started even before then. She and a few other nurses kept an eye on the initial outbreak in Wuhan, China in January and asked themselves if they had a pandemic policy in place.
“Nursing was really sort of on the forefront of thinking about what’s going on and paying attention to this,” Bumpus said.
EMU’s campus eventually closed in mid-March and the university moved to remote learning, but things were picking up in the nursing program, as Bumpus contacted EMU’s IHA Health Center about what it might need help with. The IHA call centers were being overloaded, Bumpus said, adding that more than 250 EMU nursing community volunteers signed up to help with them and with testing sites.
Although there was only space or a few volunteers at the call center, the nursing team ran with the idea of opening more call centers for the EMU community. They asked to create a nurse-practitioner-run telehealth center, which has now morphed into two branches — one for COVID-19 cases and one not specifically for COVID-19, Bumpus said.
The nursing team also worked with members of EMU’s IT department to create a COVID-19 screening tool, which was used across campus throughout the semester to confirm those on campus were COVID-free. After answering questions about their health, those wanting to go to campus would receive an email confirming or denying their entry, and people would have to show their confirmation to volunteers before entering any campus building.
EMU allowed the nursing team to have an aggressive stance with its telehealth that did not allow on campus for 72 hours those who have COVID-19-like symptoms, Bumpus said.
“I think that simple step to allow nurse practitioners to step up, to evaluate, put people on hold has helped a lot,” Bumpus said. “I really believe that’s helped with our numbers because we’re not letting potential stuff come on campus. But it’s also helping keep other infectious agents off campus as well.”
Along with the COVID-19 screening tool, EMU made significant improvements to make classrooms and campus spaces safer, including socially-distanced desks that were six feet apart, plexiglass and hand sanitizing stations in classrooms, and even knocking down walls to create larger classrooms. Signage was posted on walls and floors indicating where people should stand in certain spaces, and seating was removed from residence hall common areas.
As other schools in the state and country saw COVID-19 outbreaks in mid-August, EMU decided to push student move-in back three weeks. Shortly after students returned, the university announced it had partnered with Michigan-based Aquasight to track the presence of COVID-19 in wastewater from residence halls and apartment complexes.
EMU also is sampling wastewater twice a week, except for academic buildings because they do not have a high enough occupancy or a stable population, Chris Gellasch, associate professor of geography and geology, said. The hard part with analyzing the sampling, Gellasch said, is that it’s hard to identify how many cases there might be from the sample.
“Instead, it is important to look for trends like rapid spikes in concentrations,” Gellasch said. “As we collected more data, we learned what constituted a major increase, especially when we knew there were a certain number of positive cases in a building and could relate that to the wastewater concentrations.”
The wastewater did identify some people that were COVID-positive, Smith said, and that allowed the university to be proactive and move them to their isolation area.
Throughout the semester, Smith said mask-wearing compliance was extremely high on campus, which added to people taking the pandemic seriously. EMU also has a testing plan in place that has been an efficient and effective process, Walter Kraft, EMU vice president of communications, said, adding that officials will notify students in residence hall buildings of test dates and times for their building throughout the semester.
All the pieces that made the fall semester work are intertwined with one another, Smith said. The winter 2021 semester will look very similar, Smith and Kraft both said.
“I keep saying to people, it’s like a big jigsaw puzzle, and we’re trying to put each piece together as we get more information, and I think that’s an apt description,” Smith said.
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