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Syracuse University will allow faculty and staff to participate in the university’s on-campus coronavirus testing after restricting the testing largely to students for weeks.

As of Sept. 30, faculty and staff can participate in SU’s pooled saliva surveillance testing. The university said at the beginning of the fall semester that it would not require pre-arrival testing for faculty and staff because 91% live in the central New York region, where the infection rate has been low.

The university still doesn’t require faculty and staff to receive testing. Several SU faculty and staff members told The Daily Orange that they don’t have a problem with the university’s optional COVID-19 testing policy for employees, while others expressed concern at the lack of stricter guidelines.

Meheli Basu, an assistant professor of marketing, doesn’t think the lack of mandatory faculty testing is concerning because fewer people are in academic buildings and faculty have access to protective equipment.

“The classrooms have been amazingly set up so there’s a lot of space between students,” Basu said. “Personally, I don’t feel threatened myself.”

But for some faculty members who have wanted to get tested, they’ve spent the last several weeks resorting to off-campus testing sites.

For weeks, the closest testing site professor Rawiya Kameir could go to was a 45-minute drive away. This made it virtually impossible for her to access the site, which was the nearest one that would accept her insurance.

“I don’t drive. I don’t have access to a car,” said Kameir, an assistant teaching professor of magazine, news and digital journalism.

Jennifer Stromer-Galley, senior associate dean for academic and faculty affairs and a professor at the School of Information Studies, was recently in quarantine after experiencing symptoms consistent with COVID-19. But when she filled out SU’s Daily Health Screening Questionnaire for faculty and staff, the system instructed her not to come to campus because she was feeling ill, leaving Stromer-Galley to seek testing elsewhere.

Stromer-Galley turned to the Syracuse Community Health Center to receive testing, with her results coming back negative almost a week later. The university has not asked Stromer-Galley to provide proof of her negative result as of Wednesday, she said.

“Unlike with students, where I think there’s actually a very clear set of protocols in place, for faculty and staff I think the protocols are much less clear,” Stromer-Galley said.

SU has only confirmed a handful of cases among faculty and staff since the start of the semester, but the university saw a rapid increase in infections among students last week connected to a party held on Walnut Avenue. No new employee cases have been reported since the cluster emerged.

Jasmina Tacheva, an assistant professor in the iSchool, is working on a project to map testing trends at universities across the country. The map aggregates COVID-19 data from 109 private and public universities, including SU.

SU has an average total coronavirus positivity rate of 0.11% as of Oct. 11, according to the COVID-19 University Testing Trends map. This is lower than many other universities in the state, Tacheva said, including Ithaca College and Binghamton University, whose average total positivity rates are 0.15% and 0.83%, respectively.

It would be better if COVID-19 testing was mandatory for faculty, but data shows SU’s response to the virus has been relatively successful compared to other universities, Tacheva said.

“Based on data that I was just looking at, out of these 109 universities, only 17 have consistently maintained positivity rates under 0.15%, and we’re one of them,” Tacheva said.

Ken Harper, associate professor of visual communications and director of the Newhouse Center for Global Engagement, said SU should consider reversing its policy regarding faculty and staff testing if the number of cases on campus continues to rise.

The university is more concerned with testing the student body than its faculty and staff, said David Larsen, an associate professor of public health and environmental epidemiologist who has advised SU’s COVID-19 response.

“The big risk is among the student body for transmissions,” Larsen said.

SU has benefitted from Onondaga County having the virus under control before students returned to campus, Larsen said. In recent days, though, the positive test rate in central New York has jumped to 2.3%.

SU’s decision to open up on-campus pooled saliva testing to faculty and staff comes with an overall shift in its testing strategy. Moving forward, SU has said it will prioritize randomized testing of students under a “freedom from disease” sampling model.

The university still has at least two mandatory rounds of student testing slated for October and November. Faculty and staff have the choice to participate in those testing rounds, said Sarah Scalese, senior associate vice president for university communications. Flu shots will also be mandatory for faculty and staff.

If infections spike in the surrounding areas, SU may have to reassess its approach to faculty and staff testing, Larsen said.

“If the trend continues to go up, which hopefully it won’t, then we’ll have to assess how things are,” Larsen said.

Published on October 14, 2020 at 11:07 pm

asrozas@syr.edu