With Cases Surging, Colleges Turn To Students For Help

Shelby Dorsey, a contact tracer and a senior studying theater at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, makes calls at the local public health department. “Were not here to chastise,” she says, “we’re here to help.”

Elissa Nadworny / NPR

Lately, Echo Fridley has had a raspy voice and a sore throat. Not from illness but from many hours on the phone talking with other students about quarantine and isolation, as a contact tracer at Syracuse University.

“I’m definitely super-overwhelmed,” says Fridley, a junior studying public health and biology. “We’ve seen such an explosion of cases.”

The spike in coronavirus cases on campuses nationwide comes at a particularly bad time: the final days before the Thanksgiving break. For many colleges, that will also mark the end of in-person instruction for the fall semester and the return of these students to their home communities.