The science behind COVID-19 isolation

While removing isolation housing for students who test positive for COVID-19 exposes roommates to the disease for a longer period of time, Dionne, a clinical pharmacist in infectious diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, said the risk isn’t much worse than if isolation housing was widely available.

“You can actually transmit COVID before you have symptoms. So if your roommate has COVID, it’s possible that you could get it without them ever even knowing they’re sick if they’re pre-symptomatic and shedding virus or even if they’re totally asymptomatic,” Dionne said. “Just living with other people already kind of puts you at increased risk.”

Because Dionne, an associate professor, doesn’t live on campus, he said he feels more removed from this issue than many students are. Dionne acknowledged that students isolated in their own dorms do expose their roommates for slightly longer, but for the most part, because of the university’s vaccine requirement, the Northeastern community is as well-protected as people can get. 

“If you’re all vaccinated, in theory, that should shorten the amount of time that you’re symptomatic, shorten the length that you’re shedding virus and can transmit and reduce the viral loads,” Dionne said. 

Exposure to COVID-19 follows a dose-effect — the more you are exposed to it, the more likely you are to catch it. Research has shown that Omicron typically leads to slightly lower viral counts, so isolating with someone who has tested positive for Omicron is less risky than it was with past variants.

Dionne had some advice for students whose roommates test positive. COVID-19 doesn’t transmit as much on surfaces, so Dionne said cleaning protocols aren’t the most important thing. What is important, he said, is airflow. Dionne said that any way to bring fresh air in is good, especially if someone needs to go into the room the sick person has been in. He also emphasized that well-fitting masks are important in containing the spread. 

Dionne said, from a scientific standpoint, it appears that Northeastern’s approach now is more about limiting risk, as opposed to completely eliminating COVID-19. 

“They were trying to completely eliminate the risk when things were primarily Delta [variant] and we thought maybe we’ll get through it,” Dionne said. “I think now they’ve shifted from trying to eliminate or greatly reduce risk to now just minimizing it as much as they can without drastically uprooting people.”

As it is still early in the semester, we don’t have a full picture of what COVID-19 on campus looks like for this spring, Dionne said. According to The News’ testing dashboard, on Jan. 28 there were 50 positives, with a seven-day positivity rate of 2.62%.

During the move-in process, it is likely that some students brought COVID-19 with them, possibly leading to elevated case counts.

Dionne said he is happy Northeastern is still requiring weekly testing but said students shouldn’t be afraid to test more often if they are exposed.

“I think we will know better once everyone is back and we know what the community transmission looks like. If there’s a significant amount of community transmission, you probably should be testing every two to three days, just to make sure,” Dionne said. “There’s certainly no harm to doing it a little more frequently, especially once you first moved back onto campus … and if you come in contact with some COVID.”

Though no one can say for certain how the spring semester will go, Dionne is optimistic that students will continue to be careful and abide by mask mandates and other precautions. 

“My hope is that this will actually lead us to being more vigilant about respiratory infections in the future and that people will not come into work or … class when they’re sick and that [we] will respect sick time a lot more than we did previously,” Dionne said.