COVID-19 Testing Protocols and Expectations – Graduate and Professional Students

This message was sent to Graduate and Professional Students in September 2020. Please note the content on these pages and files is no longer being updated and may be out of date.

Good afternoon Students,

We hope this note finds you healthy and safe. We look forward to welcoming you back to campus.

As has been noted from prior communications and coverage in BU Today, we have put in place a comprehensive testing plan with the goal of decreasing the incidence of the virus in our community. President Brown described elements of it in his letter of June 17 and they are summarized at the end of this document. Frequent testing of students, faculty and staff who are frequently on campus is a critical element in our strategy to control COVID-19 in our community. We are writing to let you know about the details of our testing practices and associated public health protocols – critical aspects for our return to on-campus, residential education. For the fall, we have put in place a comprehensive plan with the goal of decreasing the incidence of the virus within our campus community.

Expectations and Requirement for Coming to the Campus, In-Person

The plans we have put in place to limit the spread of COVID-19 in our community rely on all members of our community complying with the practices we are implementing. We are requiring everyone who returns to campus to follow these protocols.

All students returning to campus will be required, through a digital agreement, to agree to a set of health commitments and expectations including wearing face coverings, daily symptom attestation, routine and frequent testing, and, if necessary, contact tracing, quarantine, and isolation. The agreement makes clear that compliance with these expectations will be a condition of being a member of our on-campus community—going to classes; studying; utilizing campus dining, recreation, and library facilities; working; and participating in activities. Undergraduate students currently living in our student residences will also sign an addendum to their Residence License Agreements that requires them to adhere to all public health and safety requirements. The Dean of Students and his staff will enforce these rules for all students; we will give all faculty and staff information about how to inform us of non-compliant behavior by a student. We also are planning comprehensive public campaigns to inform the community about compliance requirements. And there will be a student-led effort to keep compliance on everyone’s mind as we move through the semester.

Compliance will also be mandatory for all faculty and staff returning to campus.

Your Testing Protocols

The goal of community testing is to detect cases of COVID-19 in our community and quickly move individuals who test positive into environments where they can get needed medical attention and prevent spread of the disease. We also will have prioritized RT-PCR testing available on demand for individuals who exhibit symptoms; this testing is distinct from the community testing discussed below.

RT-PCR testing is the most accurate method currently available for detecting the virus that causes COVID-19. The sensitivity of the test for detecting someone with the virus is between 80 and 90 percent, depending on the method of sample collection and the viral load of the individual. We will use the Anterior Nares (AN) collection method using self-collection under observation. RT-PCR tests also have an extremely low false positive rate. Our testing laboratory will be capable of processing very large numbers of tests daily. Our goal is to return results within 24 hours for every test.

Testing frequencies are based on accepted models of COVID-19 spread and simulations of transmission that take into account specific details of our classroom and residential environment.

Students Returning to Campus:

All graduate and professional students will be tested once immediately on return to campus; subsequent testing is described below in the section below, “Testing Frequency for Undergraduate and Graduate Students.”

Graduate & Professional Students

Students coming from outside of the United States or from states which the Commonwealth of Massachusetts health authorities classify as higher risk are required to self-quarantine for 14 days, observing “stay in place” protocols within our student residences. These include staying in their assigned rooms and leaving only for essential needs such as picking up food, attending medical appointments, and participating in regular testing at the frequency described below.
Students living off-campus must also follow self-quarantine practices at their places of residence.
Based on travel guidance issued on July 24 by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts, students returning to campus from out of state are exempt from the state’s 14-day quarantine if they are coming from a state deemed lower risk by the Commonwealth of Massachusetts
Graduate students returning to campus from outside of the United States or states not exempted from the Massachusetts quarantine mandate are obliged to self-quarantine until they have received a negative result from a test taken after arrival.
However, to limit risk of travel-related exposure, Boston University is strongly advising that all students arriving at the campus from areas for which a travel-related quarantine is in place continue to self-quarantine, and should not attend in-person class, until they have had two consecutive negative test results completed at the BU Testing Lab. The regular testing protocols are outlined below. For students in our residences we recommend the continuation of the use of the “stay-in-place” protocols until the students have had two consecutive negative tests.

Testing Frequency for Undergraduate and Graduate Students

All undergraduate students — living on- or off-campus — will be tested twice weekly. This testing frequency will commence on return to campus.
All graduate students — living on- or off-campus — who come to campus frequently, will be tested weekly. This testing frequency will commence on return to campus but will be reevaluated as we learn more about how often cohorts of graduate students are on-campus.

Testing Stations

Stations for submitting a testing sample are being installed at three sites on the Charles River Campus and one site on the Medical Campus:

Kilachand Center , 610 Commonwealth Avenue
808 Gallery, 808 Commonwealth Avenue
Agganis Arena Lobby, 925 Commonwealth Avenue
BU Medical Campus, 72 East Concord Street

We are working to design the process so that it is safe and takes only a few minutes. There will be more detail forthcoming about how testing will be administered.

Before August 15, BU will launch a new website — Healthway — that will be your portal into our COVID-19 community health services. Everyone in the community will use this site to securely access health systems for the following tasks:

Completing daily self-attestation symptom reports
Scheduling testing
Checking test results
Displaying health compliance status

The health information from BU health systems will be available only to you and to medical professionals in Student Health Services. It will be used for no other purposes than monitoring your health relative to COVID-19.

The information described in this letter is an important step in finalizing our plans for repopulating our campuses. There is no doubt that the environment will be different from that of any previous fall, but we have every indication that we will be able to effectively return to the work of teaching, research, and scholarship with COVID-19 in our midst.

We look forward to seeing you on campus,

Kenneth Elmore
Associate Provost and Dean of Students

Daniel Kleinman
Associate Provost for Graduate Affairs

Appendix: Public Health Interventions

The plan for public health interventions on campus includes the following steps.

Face covering by everyone inside and outside our facilities
Application of the six-foot distancing rule in all our classrooms, dining halls, offices, and other spaces
Enhanced sanitation all across campus
Increased ventilation and air-filtering in buildings with central air systems
Symptom attestation by everyone — students, staff, and faculty — coupled with prioritized testing for individuals reporting symptoms
RT-PCR testing by everyone on campus
Contact tracing of close contacts of individuals identified with the virus
For students living in our on-campus student residences, quarantine of close contacts and isolation of infected individuals on campus. For non-residential off-campus students, staff, and faculty, quarantine and isolation at the place where they live.

We are requiring everyone who returns to campus to comply with the guidelines for face covering, physical distancing, symptom-attestation, and testing.

Appendix: Testing Categories

We have grouped all students, faculty, and staff into one of the following four categories.

Testing Category 1

Residential undergraduate students and RA staff
Commuting students, staff, and faculty who interact with residential students for significant periods of time either in classes or other activities or who otherwise spend many hours on campus in close contact activities like athletics, performing arts, or in some research and off-campus educational environments
Students who live off-campus and employees who, due to age or medical condition, have disclosed (through a confidential process) that they fall within a CDC high-risk category (or who have disclosed that they have household members in these categories)
Students and employees who use public transportation to travel to or from campus
Clinical service employees (including, for example, faculty and students providing services to members of the community, but excluding Boston University Medical Group faculty who do not have classroom or laboratory contact with students and other BU faculty and staff members) and first responders like the BUPD who have high contact hours with each other or must interact frequently with individuals outside the University who may not have taken basic CDC protective measures (face covering, distancing, self-diagnosis)

Testing Category 2

Commuting students residing off-campus attending in-person classes, but with little contact with residential students
Commuting employees, including certain faculty, who are student-facing, but have little contact with residential students and have limited contact hours in venues such as classrooms. Although at risk for infections from outside the Boston University community, individuals in this category will work within protocols established for entry into the BU work environment

Testing Category 3

Commuting employees whose job duties require very limited contact with students and who can control their contact with other employees so as to limit interactions to small groups of individuals with appropriate work environment protocols in place and minimal contact hours

Testing Category 4

Students, faculty, and staff who engage only in virtual learning, working, and other activities and events and who do not commute to campus