On colleges and universities, I think it's pretty simple.

This is a disease that spreads when asymptomatic people gather in crowded indoor settings. We can't stop college kids from gathering, because ... well, they're 20. 1/6

So to stop the spread, you've got to find those asymptomatic students with COVID-19 and isolate them from the rest of the population. You can't do that unless you're testing asymptomatic students. 2/6

Most universities aren't, at least not at scale. So the disease is going to spread like wildfire among undergraduates. 3/6

A few institutions get it. They're rolling out low-sensitivity surveillance strategies using cheap and plentiful saliva tests at massive scale. They're actively looking for the virus. Maybe it won't work, but they've at least got a shot. 4/6

But most universities are wedded to gold-standard PCR testing for which there are too few reagents and too many delays. @UMich, for example, has only an anemic surveillance strategy -- what the administration is calling, without apparent irony, a "random opt-in" approach. 5/6

There's no plan to reliably find asymptomatic transmitters. There's just an ill-founded hope that college students won't behave like college students. That's not a public health strategy. It's a pipe dream. /fin