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1) Deaths attributable to coronavirus rose faster in college towns than the rest of the U.S. this fall, new analysis finds, though it’s often difficult to prove the link between campus and community spread. W/ @danielle_ivory, @smervosh and @monicadavey1 https://www.nytimes.com/2020/12/12/us/covid-colleges-nursing-homes.html
2) This story follows our September report on how the return of students to campus + robust testing drove national numbers. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/06/us/colleges-coronavirus-students.html
3) At the time, there was some hope that these spikes would have limited impact since young people are less likely to suffer the worst from the virus.
4) But, in this story, we find that many of the college counties we identified (students >= 10% of total pop) saw virus death increases in the weeks following the case numbers shooting up.
5) What was striking -- many of these counties had few if any deaths before late August and September.
6) From the prism of this moment, the finding is a bit more muddled because cases and deaths in November began to surge throughout the U.S., in college towns and elsewhere.
7) But back in September and October, despite hotspots throughout the U.S., overall figures for those months were down vs death totals in July and August.
8) College counties bucked this trend -- the death toll began to climb in those months
9) It’s impossible to prove a cause and effect here -- there is no national contact tracing that shows whether a college town fatality ties back to a student, though in the story, some researchers are looking at genetic info to get at this question.
10) Instead, what the figures show is that these college counties were mostly immune from the worst impacts of the pandemic through August, but that changed this fall.
11) Also of note: Through August, nearly a third of the deaths in our 203 college communities occurred in just three counties -- Boston, D.C. and Baton Rouge. Since then, virus deaths in those counties comprise just 6 percent of total -- the rest are spread far and wide.
