A Cornell University study says students who traveled outside the Ithaca area during the fall semester were eight times more likely to contract COVID-19 than their peers who did not travel.

Peter Frazier, an associate professor at Cornell, leads the team that looks into the school's coronavirus case data. He says travel was at the root of 10% of the cases in the campus community last semester. That statistic has caused the university to make some changes to their testing schedule. All students are tested twice a week. Now, one of those tests will be scheduled on a Friday, Saturday, or Sunday to discourage travel. Testing frequency is now at three times a week for student athletes, those living in group housing, and students involved in Greek Life. 

"Then the review process for exemptions from testing for travel has been made a little bit more rigorous, and that’s just designed so we can keep people safe because it is such a risk," says Frazier. 

Frazier says that the study found no evidence of students spreading COVID-19 to the broader Ithaca community, or of the spread happening the other way around. He says they also have yet to find a situation where a student gave the virus to a non-student employee of the university. 

However, the study did find that spread from the Ithaca community did play a role in the majority of the positive test results in university staff. Frazier says 75% of COVID cases in staff came from exposures to family members, social gatherings, and travel outside of Ithaca. As a result, Cornell now offers the same testing and contact tracing to staff as has been available to students. 

Frazier says protocols on campus are always changing as they find new ways the virus is spreading or ways they can improve their current regulations. 

“We review all the cases, we talk about what kinds of transmission we’re seeing. We ask whether there are opportunities to improve what we’re doing and, you know, to keep people safer while also allowing people to do the things that we enjoy doing as much as possible. So, that’s a regular process I do three times a week and then in the time in between we’re reviewing the data and running analysis in order to keep people safe," says Frazier. 

The university's most current COVID-19 updates can be found on their website.