UW abandons plan to contain omicron

The university cancelled the mandatory testing it was going to require of returning students and employees. A UW public health expert said the administration’s decision is ‘palpably ridiculous.’

University of Wyoming President Ed Seidel said in a statement to campus this morning that the institution was shifting from a containment strategy to one of management, admitting the spring semester “will start with a lot of COVID.”

The university had planned to require COVID-19 tests for all returning faculty, staff and students. That plan is now scrapped, and no mass testing event will take place.

“There’s already good reason to believe that the virus, particularly the omicron variant, is widespread in our community,” Seidel says in a news release. “Positivity rates are now growing rapidly, and the risk of creating an environment for further transmission at a mass testing event likely would offset information we would gain from it.”

Ahead of the fall semester, UW did require tests for all employees and students returning to campus. The university was criticized for the long lines and close contact involved with testing the entire campus in the same location across three days.

But Christine Porter, a public health expert and instructor at UW, said the administration’s new plan is “so backwards, it’s excruciating” and that high case counts are no reason to abandon mandatory testing.

“So instead we’re going to have a mass event in every classroom, with everyone there not knowing if they're positive or not?” she said. “That is palpably ridiculous. I’m horrified.”

Porter said a more responsible solution would have been designing a mandatory testing program that does not require large groups of people to be in the same place.

The university administration says it can no longer contain the spread of COVID-19 on campus.

“Based upon what we’re seeing around the country and the state, it is no longer practical to think that we’re going to contain the Omicron variant in our community,” Seidel says in the release. “What we can do is encourage people to take actions to protect their personal health, and that of their families and friends, by mitigating the spread to the extent possible — and reducing the chance of severe illness, hospitalization and death.”

Voluntary testing will still be available for asymptomatic individuals, and the university will continue its weekly random-sample testing of 3 percent of the campus community.

“While it appears the semester will start with a lot of COVID — with a shift toward milder symptoms or even asymptomatic infections — experts say there’s reason for optimism that we will emerge from pandemic conditions sooner than later,” Seidel says.

The omicron variant does appear to be less deadly than earlier variants, such as delta. But it’s far more transmissible. For any given individual, catching omicron would probably be less detrimental to their personal health than catching delta.

But a percentage of those who catch omicron will become seriously ill, need hospitalization or die. Given how easily and rapidly omicron spreads, the overall societal-level effect could be more devastating than in previous waves.

“Omicron seems to prove to have been much less dangerous than previous variants to our health in terms of hospitalization,” Porter said. “However, because it spreads so much more virulently, when you have that many more cases — even if a smaller percentage is going to be seriously harmed or hospitalized or even killed — your total numbers going to the hospital are still going to (go up), and are already overwhelming our Healthcare systems.”

Indeed, the United States is setting daily case count records, as omicron surges throughout the U.S. and across the world.

“But that's not a reason to give up. If anything, it’s all the more reason to test,” Porter said. “It's easy to be asymptomatic. And because you're asymptomatic, it's all the more important to have this testing — so that people know that they have it and know that they need to quarantine. The idea that because it's spread so far, we should just let it go, is almost insane. I really can't believe it.”

UW will continue to require masks in classrooms until at least February, but talk of required vaccination has been a non-starter.

Vaccines are the number one method for staving off the worst effects of COVID-19, public health experts and officials have repeatedly stressed. Being vaccinated reduces one’s chances of being hospitalized or dying from COVID-19.

Universities across the country have mandated vaccines for their employees and students, although most of the universities taking this action are located in Democratic-leaning states.

President Seidel has, at previous Board of Trustees meetings, shared that institutions requiring vaccination see high rates of compliance and lower transmission levels. ASUW President Hunter Swilling has also voiced support for required vaccination.

But in Wyoming — where the state itself is suing the Biden Administration over vaccine mandates for large employers — the possibility has not been seriously discussed by the board.