The spring break chaos in Miami Beach and the resurgence in Covid-19 cases is leading many to wag their fingers at college students who flooded relatively open Florida and likely brought Covid-19 with them. Instead, we should be wagging our fingers at policymakers.
First, we should admonish them for not having had the foresight to recognize that young people fed up with social distancing and public health restrictions for more than a year might decide to let loose. Second, they have erred by not having placed college students higher on the vaccination distribution list. It is time to rethink that policy, and fast.
This may seem like an equity problem: Why should state and federal policies privilege the young, healthy and occasionally reckless? Indeed, compared with 18- to 29-year-olds, the rate of hospitalizations for the 40- to 49-year-old population is at least twice as high, and the rate of death is at least eight times higher. Why not give priority to older people who are more likely to get seriously ill?
Such well-meaning equity concerns assume, however, that the young party animals we see in news video from the Sunshine State represent the college-going population. Real college students are much more diverse. For starters, only 56 percent of college students are under age 24. About a third are ages 24 to 39, and 1 in 9 are over age 40.
Moreover, the broader principle in administering vaccine shots equitably is to diminish the risk for those who are most at danger to spread the virus. Vaccinating college students is an effective way to lower that danger, for two major reasons: College students are mobile and spread Covid-19 with them whenever they travel, and they live in congregate living facilities where infection rates are much higher than in other housing setups.
These realities pose a threat to the wider population, with its older and more at-risk groups. The students who went on spring break trips last year often contracted the disease and spread it across the country.
And spring break travel isn't the only type of student movement. Bringing students back to college towns for the reopening of campuses last fall was responsible for thousands of additional Covid-19 cases across the country. In Wisconsin, researchers found that the same strain of Covid-19 that infected college students also infected people in a nursing home. It's estimated that 100 deaths per day in late summer and early fall — nearly all in the 70-plus-age population — were directly related to colleges reopening.
Even when they stay put, college students lead lives that make them risks to one another and the broader community. They often live in congregate facilities like dormitories and fraternity and sorority houses, which are higher-risk environments, just as nursing homes and correctional facilities are. Early work from the University of Colorado shows that roommates from whom students contracted Covid-19 had 6.5 times the viral load of other people.
Colleges can do only so much to reduce transmission. The best tools are to shut down travel, enforce mask-wearing protocols and build out high-quality testing regimes that identify infected students. Around 60 percent of colleges and universities canceled or modified spring break this year to limit student travel, and the University of California, Davis, even paid students $75 to stay on campus, but that did only so much.