‘Water under the bridge’: White House recommends for students to stay on campus

Top White House officials said in a call to governors on Monday that college students should remain living at their campuses to avoid spreading COVID-19 to their home communities — a recommendation that comes almost two weeks after Carolina Housing advised UNC students to cancel their housing contracts and move home.

Sending home college students who are positive for COVID-19 yet asymptomatic could spread the virus to their home communities and vulnerable households, Dr. Deborah Birx, the coronavirus response coordinator for the White House Coronavirus Task Force, said in a statement reported by The Daily Beast.

In that same call, Vice President Mike Pence said remaining on or near campuses is the best option for college students to avoid bringing the virus back to their hometowns, The Daily Beast reported.

“In general, we want to encourage, even when you have test positivity on campuses, we want to encourage universities to have students remain on or near campus and minimize the potential exposure to the larger community,” Pence said, The Daily Beast reported.

These White House recommendations come too late for UNC, where the last day for students to move out was Aug. 30 — one day before Birx and Pence's statements that said students should stay on campus. 

“I don’t know how much you can do with this advice — it’s just a sign of how little coordinated and strong advice is coming from the top to colleges,”  Francie Diep, a staff reporter for the Chronicle for Higher Education, told The Daily Tar Heel. 

Jim Thomas, ethicist and professor of epidemiology at the UNC Gillings School of Global Public Health, said UNC’s decision to send students home seemed like dissemination of COVID-19 rather than control of the disease. 

But, Thomas said, reducing the density of people on campus was a logical thing to do.

The recommendations from the White House still came too late, Thomas said.

“It’s kind of water under the bridge, isn’t it?” Thomas said. “Most of the students have already gone home, at least if I understand it.”

UNC Media Relations said in a statement Thursday that the University has followed federal guidelines in its plan to reopen since the beginning of the pandemic.

“Since August 18 and throughout the move-out process, the University has been using email, social media and other communication methods to recommend students complete a 14-day, self-imposed quarantine – even if asymptomatic – upon departing campus,” the statement said.

Though UNC students cannot follow the recommendation by Vice President Pence to not move home if they have already done so, the University recommends they self-quarantine to prevent the spread of the virus in their home communities.

Thomas said that moving forward, the University should focus on building trust and safety to better handle the COVID-19 pandemic moving forward. 

“And let’s do it right in the way that we communicate about it so that there’s more transparency and more of an understanding of the dilemmas that people are facing and the measures they are taking,” he said. “And less of a feeling that things are happening behind a closed door that we don’t understand.”

university@dailytarheel.com