Bob Caslen, confident USC can contain COVID 19 cases, plans to keep university open

University of South Carolina President Robert Caslen has no intention of closing campus anytime soon, he said during a Wednesday virtual town hall.

“We do not have any plans to close,” Caslen said.

“The last thing I want to do is take this university, shut it down and dump the problem on the city of Columbia,” Caslen said. “I prefer to work through this if I can.”

The high number of cases, which recently exceeded 1,000, did not appear to panic Caslen nor other USC officials who spoke at the town hall or in past press conferences. That’s because USC has been so aggressive with testing, Caslen said.

Instead of waiting for symptomatic students to show up and take a COVID 19 test, USC has been seeking out potentially exposed students and testing them.

“It’s out intent to continue high testing because we want to find more positives...we want to find them we want to take care of them and we want to get them back into the classroom.”

One way USC is doing this is by measuring sewage leaving campus buildings to check for coronavirus. In cases where they find high indicators of coronavirus, the school tests those who live in the dorm, officials said.

“We’re actually finding the people who are sick,” Provost William Tate said during the town hall. “If someone tells you they have a low student positive rate, they’re not going out and finding them.”

However, when students, faculty and Columbia residents see high case numbers — the number of active cases on campus increased tenfold in seven days — it paints a picture of a campus that is not containing coronavirus cases, Caslen said.

“Sometimes I feel our aggressive testing is going against our ability to build public confidence,” Caslen said.

One of the key reasons officials want to keep campus open is because despite the high number of cases, there does not appear to be spread from students to faculty, staff or other Columbia residents.

“It is very evident by our contact tracing...that basically that these are within our campus community,” USC’s vice president of health and wellness said during the town hall. “There is no evidence of community spread outside campus.”

USC’s coronavirus data describe a campus that is seeing a high number of cases, but also one that has the ability to take on more cases.

While a three-day trend of cases shows the number of active cases leveling out and the campus alert level — a composite score of several coronavirus factors — remains low, some indicators are a cause for concern.

For example, between Friday, Aug. 28 and Monday, Aug. 31, USC’s 2,318 tests had a 26% positivity rate, according to its online dashboard. The average positivity rate since Aug. 1 is 10%. The “campus case burden” is listed as “high.”

In contrast, the university still has plenty of testing capacity, PPE and capacity in its medical centers, according to USC data.

This story was originally published September 2, 2020 at 7:39 PM.