182 - Provost Dr. Michael Kotlikoff on How Cornell University Has Kept Campus Case Counts Low
Public Health On Call
The Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health
4.6 • 644 Ratings
🗓️ 19 October 2020
⏱️ 15 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
This fall, Cornell University invited all students back to campus. Out of roughly 28,000 people on campus including students, faculty and staff, the school has seen only 100 positive tests. Provost Dr. Michael Kotlikoff talks with Stephanie Desmon about Cornell's success which includes robust testing in an on-site lab, contact tracing, and a strategy called "adaptive testing" where tracers work to identify how people who test positive may have been exposed and then test those people and their contacts to break potential transmission chains before they start.
KEYWORDS: student life; college; testing methods
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Season 2 of Public Health On Call, a podcast from the Johns Hopkins |
| 0:11.6 | Bloomberg School of Public Health. |
| 0:13.6 | I'm Joshua Sharfstein, Vice Dean for Public Health Practice and Community Engagement, |
| 0:18.8 | and a former secretary of Maryland's Health Department. |
| 0:21.9 | Our goal is to bring scientific evidence and experience to the public health news of the day |
| 0:27.3 | through informative interviews with scientists, community leaders, policy experts, public |
| 0:32.5 | health officials, clinicians, and more. If you have ideas or questions for us to cover, |
| 0:38.4 | please email us at public health question at jhhhue.edu. |
| 0:43.1 | That's public health question at jhhhu.edu for future podcast episodes. |
| 0:49.0 | Today, Stephanie Desmond talks to Michael Kotlakov, |
| 0:52.3 | the provost at Cornell University. |
| 0:54.9 | They discuss how Cornell, with its 28,000 students, faculty, and staff back on campus |
| 1:00.6 | this fall, has seen COVID-19 rates below 0.1%, fewer than 100 cases since the semester began. |
| 1:08.9 | Let's listen. |
| 1:10.3 | Michael Kotlakov, thank you so much for joining me. |
| 1:12.9 | Great to be here. |
| 1:13.9 | So you're the provost of Cornell University, and you have invited all your students back to campus. |
| 1:21.7 | Tell me a little bit about how you've been able to do that where others have not. |
| 1:26.7 | Well, that's a complicated answer. |
| 1:29.4 | We've implemented a number of safety programs, including first gateway testing or entrance |
| 1:35.3 | testing, everybody that was to come back. |
| 1:40.0 | And then a very rigorous surveillance testing program that test students twice a week. |
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