Over the course of September, Brandeis students have continued to test positive for COVID-19. Due to COVID-19 being declared endemic this past June, Brandeis’ approach to the virus has changed.

The University is no longer conducting regular testing of all students like they did in the 2021-2022 school year, nor are they close contact tracing like in the 2022-2023 year, Colleen Collins, medical director of the Brandeis Health Center, told the Justice in a Sept. 20 interview. Instead, the health center is encouraging students to test themselves when necessary. These tests are often conducted through home antigen tests or taking PCR tests off-campus. If students test positive, they should report to the school through the student patient portal. Students seeking antigen testing can find tests through delivery platforms such as Uber Eats or Capsule, a delivery app targeted at pharmaceutical needs. Additionally, the U.S. Postal Service has once again started offering four free tests per household. However, if students are feeling unwell but are consistently testing negative, the Health Center may conduct confirmatory testing, which is when a PCR test is used to help identify the cause of the symptoms rather than conduct a test on an asymptomatic student to confirm they don’t have COVID-19.

Previously, the University was able to conduct contact tracing through a contract with the Broad Institute, a company that processed COVID-19 tests, but as COVID-19 became less dangerous due to increased vaccinations, the Broad Institute “winded down” their COVID-19 testing program in June. 

In part due to the end of trace testing, the University is no longer creating dashboards that summarize COVID-19 data. Instead, students can find information related to the number of positive COVID-19 cases in Waltham through the Massachusetts government website. Waltham is included in wastewater testing, a national program where COVID-19 trends can be tracked by examining levels found in community waste. At the time of publication, the levels were not available when viewing COVID-19 trends. Collins declined to provide exact numbers for the number of students who had tested positive this month, but did clarify that the small uptick was not prevalent and was in the 1-2% range for all students. She explained that other academic institutions such as Boston College are no longer collecting data because it can be misleading. This data can be misleading because some students may be ending their two-week period of infection while others may be starting their infection periods, which can misconstrue the actual number of infected students at any given time.

Some students have already started to notice the differences in the way Brandeis has reacted towards COVID-19, including Izzy Andrus ’24. In September, Andrus tested positive for COVID-19 while on a trip with her family to New York. Upon returning to campus, she isolated herself in her single dorm in Ziv Quad for one day before her other roommates began testing positive for COVID-19 as well. 

Andrus had previously tested positive twice during her sophomore year, the first time through results from Brandeis’ trace testing program. Despite living in a single dorm in Rosenthal Quad at the time, she was required to temporarily move into COVID-19 housing at 567 South Street. “It was just so much more of a big deal.” Andrus said in a Sept. 28 interview with the Justice. “It was Brandeis who contacted my professors, and Brandeis had a much bigger role in my COVID process.” After her most recent positive case of COVID-19, she did not contact the Health Center, in part because she didn’t know she was supposed to.

One of the ways that Collins encourages students to stay safe is by continuing to get vaccinated. Currently, more than 98% of the Brandeis community is vaccinated, according to Collins. “I think people have to understand that institutes of higher education are congregate living situations. And it's like sending your child to daycare, they're going to come home with a whole host of viruses because that's the setting that we're in,” Collins said. She explained that the more students are vaccinated for all diseases, the better the community can stay protected.