With Cases Surging, Colleges Turn To Students For Help

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Shelby Dorsey, a student contact tracer at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, tries to calm anxious people and give them health-related guidance.

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Throughout this unusual fall semester, as campuses have seen caseloads rise, contact tracers have been an essential tool in the fight to stop that spread. But at times, that task has proved to be overwhelming: An outbreak at a big party can mean hundreds of phone calls. So for help, colleges across the U.S. have turned to their own students.

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Olive Panumpabi, a senior studying integrative physiology and nursing, makes calls at Champaign-Urbana’s public health department.

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Morales makes her calls from a large room at the local health department alongside more than a dozen other callers. In many ways, it feels like the epicenter for the coronavirus in her college town: Posters on the wall list known outbreaks (back in September it was mostly sororities and fraternities), and there are rows of desks surrounded by plexiglass, giving off a tech-startup vibe.

On the day NPR visited, we heard snippets of conversations from ongoing calls: Are you able to quarantine? Do you have any of the following symptoms? Can you think of anyone you’ve had close contact with that’s tested positive?

In a call with a student living in a sorority who tested positive, a contact tracer tries to figure out how the student on the line caught the virus. There’s about a minute of silence and then: Oh, the boyfriend! Looks like we found the culprit. He owes you one.

Often, a contact tracer is the first human a student talks to after the student tests positive.

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Sarah Bellatti is a student contact tracer at the University of Colorado Boulder. One of the biggest challenges for Bellatti — as well as contact tracers throughout the U.S. — is compliance.

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For her contact-tracing calls, Bellatti set up a desk in her living room, with curtains for privacy.

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Enforcement is a big challenge, and student contact tracers said that while they hope students are truthful with them, they don’t have many options if a student is lying.

Echo Fridley, at Syracuse, has talked with students who try concealing whom they’ve been hanging with and for how long. «Sometimes they’ll change their stories while we’re on the phone.»

Other students will say they’re quarantining, «but I can hear people hanging out in the background,» Fridley says. With the recent spike on campus, she’s had a particularly hard time tracking people down and confirming they are following the rules.

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Emily Williams, a senior at the University of Illinois who’s studying community health, confers with a supervisor on a case.

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Emily Williams, a senior at the University of Illinois who’s studying community health, confers with a supervisor on a case.

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With Thanksgiving break approaching and classes now online, many students have been heading home early. «People are scared they’re gonna get trapped,» she says, «so they’re jumping on planes and going all over the country.»

It has made her job especially challenging: «I feel like I’m the bad guy,» she says. «Telling [students] they have to go into quarantine, that’s one of the hardest jobs. And I get it — like just being alone in a hotel room for two weeks just does not sound appealing for most people.»

Max Onderdonk, another contact tracer at Syracuse, had to quarantine himself earlier this semester. When he’s making his calls, he offers his own experience as advice: «Fourteen days of underwear, that’s really the biggest thing.»

He also reminds them to bring some entertainment. For Onderdonk, that meant «a lot of ’90s hip-hop albums and a lot of Sopranos.» By the end of his quarantine, he’d made it to season four.