Whether universities should open depends on testing capacity

The argument

Every college that has reopened for the fall semester hopes to perform COVID-19 testing regularly, and that near-universal aspiration is itself the answer to the question of whether campuses should open. Institutions have not claimed that in-person teaching is safe in itself; they have claimed it is safe given testing. The condition is doing all the work, which means the honest form of the decision is conditional too. The people running the reopenings say as much. The president of Purdue University, Mitch Daniels, says there will be a "robust testing system during the school year." The president of Brown University, Christina Paxson, says: "All campuses must be able to conduct rapid testing for the coronavirus for all students when they first arrive on campus and at regular intervals throughout the year." Note what Paxson's formulation rules out. Testing on arrival alone establishes only the state of a campus on its first day; without repetition at intervals, an institution learns about an outbreak from its symptoms rather than from its data, by which point it has already spread. The professional guidance points the same way. The American College Health Association states in its guidelines that colleges may resume in-person activities if there is rigorous testing, contact tracing, and isolation or quarantine of infected and symptomatic individuals on campus and in the larger community. Each element depends on the one before it: contact tracing has nothing to trace without testing, and isolation has no one to isolate without tracing, so a campus lacking the first cannot perform any of them. Every college that has reopened should therefore have the capacity to run diagnostic testing on students, staff, and faculty regularly. If the university can do this, then it should remain open for in-person activities. If it cannot, then it should close until it can test everyone regularly again. Whether universities should open is not a question with one answer for all of them; it depends on this outside data.

Premises

Counter-arguments

Even if colleges have adequate testing capacities, there are still going to be issues that come with reopening colleges. Firstly, the cost of testing is very high. For example, the University of Wisconsin expects to pay $20 million for each round of college-wide testing.The chancellor of California State University, Timothy White, says that testing half of the college's student population will cost $25 million per week. This high cost is too much to handle for many institutions, so remaining closed and moving everything online, for now, seems like the better option.

Rejecting the premises

[Rejecting P2] Capacity is not the only constraint that matters: the counter points to the cost of running it, with the University of Wisconsin expecting to pay $20 million for each round of college-wide testing and California State University's chancellor Timothy White putting the cost of testing half the student population at $25 million per week. [Rejecting C] On that reading a test-capacity criterion misdescribes the decision facing most institutions, since a college able to test in principle may still be unable to afford it, which makes remaining closed and moving online the better option regardless of capacity.