Over the roughly week and a half that Ian Katsnelson has been back at his college, the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, the junior has developed a “mini competition” with his friends to see who can finish the process of taking their COVID-19 tests the fastest.
These were just some of the rituals that marked an unusual first week of classes at the University of Illinois, which is requiring students, faculty and staff accessing campus to get tested for COVID-19 twice a week as part of its reopening plan. “We don’t know whether it’s going to succeed,” he added. “What we do know is that the likelihood of succeeding without testing is very small.”
The school began working to prepare for the fall semester shortly after classes went remote in the spring, said Martin Burke, a chemistry professor at the University of Illinois and chair of the SHIELD committee, the team that is guiding the university’s approach to reopening. They realized relatively quickly that in order to bring students back to campus, they would need to test frequently and get results back rapidly, something that wasn’t going to be possible with a nasal swab test.
All of these are costly and administratively challenging undertakings. Jones said his best “guesstimate” is that the school’s testing component alone will cost $7 to $10 million per semester. But a major obstacle to any successful reopening, is just the status of the spread of the virus itself, Salomon said.
Anyone who pays $25,000+ and puts up with this is an IDIOT.