Surely some mistake

Think I heard a suggestion on the news this morning that students will be tested en masse on their return to university in January 2021 to mitigate Covid outbreak risk in and around the universities and their towns and cities. Sounds sensible? Hold that thought. There are over 2 million students in the UK - that’s a lot of tests in a limited number of locations. It’s also a lot of travel with plenty of it on public transport.

Photo by Ben Garratt on Unsplash

Students are already returning home imminently from their halls and homes where for the most part they have been extremely reserved in their mixing, have isolated when (self)-diagnosed and generally not hugely impacted the NHS. Of course there are risks of them dispersing Covid unknowingly in the journey home and once home as so many are asymptomatic.

Will students pick up Covid over Christmas and New Year at home, mixing with family and socialising with friends? They will socialise, they’ll stick to small groups but self-evidently the risk of catching and passing on Covid will increase.

Does it not make more sense, impact testing resources less intensively, mitigate travel-induced spread and limit self-isolation (or return home again spread) if diagnosed positively if the return-to-university testing is distributed across the UK prior to travel?

That comparative scenario analysis is location-sensitive at multiple levels. Location of NHS resources vs location of universities vs location of student family homes vs transport networks. Universities know their students university address and their home address. Estimates of journey routing and scheduling based on public transport timetables would identify potential hotspots at transport interchanges and service stations. The NHS knows where their testing resources are located.

Instinctively, a distributed testing regime makes more sense doesn’t it? Maybe there is a rationale or model that disproves that hypothesis. Putting a geospatial lens and visualisation to the data would provide a powerful mechanism for communicating the policy choice. Use it!