Infectious Disease
From Hallways to Hotspots: Exploring Residence Hall Risk During COVID-19 Christopher Pierson* Christopher Pierson Pierson Pierson UNMC
NC State is a large public university where approximately 21% of more than 35,000 students live on campus in residence halls of four types: hall, suite, hotel, and apartment. Between August 2020 and December 2022, campus officials collected demographic and clinical data to monitor and track students isolated and quarantined on campus as part of the campus’s response to COVID-19. Using this data, we examined whether residence hall type influenced community transmission of COVID-19 in dorms. This is vital for managing future outbreaks, including influenza and meningococcal disease.
We constructed epidemic curves, examined geographic case density, and calculated the number of days without positive cases for the campus overall and within each residence style. We conducted multilevel mixed-effects logistic regression to estimate odds ratios of individual residents’ infection by hall type, adjusting for semester and accounting for clustering by residence hall. Multilevel mixed-effects Weibull AFT survival analysis for individual students (allowing for multiple events), adjusting for semester and accounting for clustering by residence hall was used to examine dorm style’s effect on time to infection. These analyses were also repeated stratifying by semester.
No statistically significant differences among hall types were observed, although semester was associated with infection risk. For example, Spring 2022, which coincided with the Omicron variant, had an OR of 4.27 (CI: 3.74, 4.87) and a time ratio (TR) of 0.06 (CI: 0.05, 0.08) compared with Fall 2020. When stratified by semester, the relationship between hall type and time to infection varied. For example, apartment-style had a TR of 0.20 in Spring 2021, compared to suites, but a TR of 2.53 in Fall 2021. The lack of differences between hall types may be due to robust campus isolation and quarantine procedures, which limited the likelihood of roommate transmission.