Will the College Kids Give Us All COVID-19?

Government COVID-19 tracking statistics seem to show that the United States suffered from a 35% increase in its usual death rate for about four weeks in the spring, and an increase of close to 20% for four weeks in July.

The hot new COVID-19 pandemic question is whether the start of the school year will lead to big new spikes in cases, hospitalizations, long-term disability, and death this fall.

Many colleges, universities and K-12 are keeping all or most activities virtual, for at least the first few weeks of the academic year.

News headlines suggest that some universities, including the University of Missouri at Columbia, have sky-high COVID-19 case counts: Boone County, the home to that school, recently reported that 60% of the people ages 18 to 22 who were tested for the virus that causes COVID-19 during the week ending Aug. 20 had COVID-19, and that positive cases among people in that age group accounted for about 60% of all of the positive results recorded in Boone County that week.

Resources

• The Dynata COVID-19 symptom maps and charts are available here.
• The COVID Tracking Project at The Atlantic is available here.
• The CDC’s weekly COVID-19 report is available here.
• The HHS hospital capacity data is available here.
• An earlier overview article about COVID-19 data is available here.

But it could be that schools with especially high case counts are the ones getting most of the attention from reporters, and that schools with low infection rates are less likely to end up in new articles.

In theory, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) should have data that insurers and agents could use to track COVID-19, but the CDC’s new case activity map, which is based on the map the CDC uses to track influenza outbreaks, seems to have been broken since May. The map has shown very low levels of activity for most of the country all summer, even during weeks when COVID-19 was flooding hospitals in parts of Arizona, California and Texas with patients.

The Dynata Numbers

Dynata, a data and data analysis firm, offers an independent tracking window. The firm collects huge volumes of data on COVID-19- like symptoms by giving website visitors short surveys, then feeds the data into detailed public reports.

The narrowest collection of COVID-19-like illness symptoms presented consists of “dry cough and loss of taste or small.”

The percentage of Dynata survey participants ages 18 to 24 who said they had those symptoms was 3.3% for the two-week period ending Sept. 13, That’s the highest rate for any age group, and it’s up from 2.9% for the two-week period ending Aug. 16.

For Dynata survey takers of all ages, the COVID-19 symptom package rate was 1.2% for the two-week period ending Sept. 13, and 1% for the two-week period ending Aug. 16.

University COVID-19 Dashboards

Another way to get at the student COVID-19 rate question is to look at schools’ own COVID-19 testing data.