The Risk Universities Can’t Not Take
Ian Pepper and Charles Gerba have been waiting 30 years for the chance to use sewage to save the world. And in the last week of August, it looked like they might have done just that—or at least saved the sunbaked corner of Tucson that is the University of Arizona campus, at least for a little while.
Pepper, 74, is a microbiologist. Gerba, 75, is a virologist. They have spent a combined 82 years on the faculty at Arizona, and they are world-renowned experts on, among other subjects, the germs found in human waste. Their shared lab isn’t on campus, but on the grounds of a county sewage-treatment plant, where they have “sewage on tap,” as Gerba puts it. They’ve worked for years to find ways to use wastewater testing to get an early warning about the spread of disease. “Sewer mining,” they sometimes call it.
So when the University of Arizona’s president, Robert C. Robbins, announced in April that he was determined to reopen the campus in the fall, with students in dorms and some in-person classes—the first president of a major public university in the country to do so—Pepper and Gerba saw their opportunity. Over the summer, they set up a system to collect sewage at 16 manholes around campus, dropping a scoop 10 feet down into a stream of wastewater from a specific building, or set of buildings, then racing the samples back to their lab to test for the coronavirus. They collect samples three times a week, always in the morning, “around 8:30,” Pepper says. “That’s when people do their business.”
After a spring and summer of intense preparation—and not a little controversy—Arizona started moving students into dorms on Friday, August 14. Returning students were given antigen quick-tests, and could move in only if they tested negative for the coronavirus. Pepper and Gerba started testing the wastewater the following week, looking for early signs of infection. At first, all the dorms tested negative, as did the other buildings on campus.
But on Tuesday, August 25, the day after classes began, the wastewater from Likins Hall, home to 311 students, tested positive. Pepper and Gerba quickly ran verification tests: all positive. On Wednesday, every Likins resident was quick-tested again. Two came up positive for COVID-19. They were asymptomatic, but almost certainly contagious. They were then whisked to one of the two quarantine dorms that Arizona had set aside for just this scenario. A facilities team swooped into Likins Hall and cleaned their rooms.
And Pepper and Gerba? The next morning they were back, sampling the wastewater from Likins Hall. It was once again negative, and the dorm’s remaining 309 residents returned to the coronavirus-campus version of college.
The episode perfectly captured Arizona’s far-reaching effort to bring students back to campus—a multimillion-dollar ballet of precision logistics, campus reengineering, and unpredictable human behavior. In the 16 weeks leading up to reopening, everything at the university bent to accommodate the coronavirus. The food-service staff cut holes in the walls of four of the school’s 29 on-campus restaurants, so students could get their food through a walk-up window, without coming in the building. University faculty teamed up with a Silicon Valley start-up to develop a smartphone-based “virus exposure” app. Facilities staff re-tuned the air-conditioning system of every building on campus to bring in more fresh air, and upgraded the filters to those used in hospital operating rooms. They fabricated and installed 1,755 plexiglass shields and sneeze guards, replaced 3,000 paper-towel dispensers with the touchless, battery-operated variety, and mounted 1,530 hand-sanitizer dispensers in 326 campus buildings.
In six or 12 or 24 months, all of this might look like a triumph of creativity, cutting-edge science, and the willingness to try anything that could matter, including using a 10-foot pole to collect the raw sewage of college students. Or it might look like an ill-conceived attempt to control the transmission of a deadly and highly communicable disease among a group of
