One spring break vacation led to over 60 coronavirus infections after the Texas college students returned from Mexico, says CDC report

Days before the United States started initiating lockdowns and numerous travel bans, 211 University of Texas students went to Cabo for Spring break.

Within two weeks, 44 of them tested positive for the novel coronavirus .

Today, a CDC report has determined that the controversial trip had broader ramifications, causing 64 infections total. 28% of the college-age students and the people they came into contact with got the novel coronavirus, the report found.

In the investigation, 231 people were tested, including 183 of the people who had been on the trip, and their household or community contacts.

One-fifth of the 64 people who tested positive were asymptomatic, and none needed hospitalization. Those who did show symptoms typically had a cough, sore throat, and a headache.

spring break Flickr/Gerardo Lucio

About 70 of these students traveled to Mexico on a plane chartered by college trip planner JusCollege. The company told students not to worry about getting coronavirus, writing in an email to them that "we're currently in our 2nd week of Cabo and have had almost 5,000 travelers, all with no issues." As of May 29, the company has cancelled all of their scheduled trips.

Some students flew back on commercial flights, and contact tracers worked to find the other people who were on those flights to inform them of their possible exposure to COVID-19. Everyone on the flights was urged to self-quarantine for 14 days from the time of exposure.

Lockdowns started during spring break

These University of Texas students were part of a wave of young adults that have been heavily critiqued for ignoring social distancing rules and celebrating spring break in places like Florida, Texas, and the Bahamas.

"The first couple days here were fricken wild but let me tell you, as the week has gone on, we have lost so many party people due to restaurants and bars closing, police restrictions, and fear in general," Josie Asleson, a 20-year-old college sophomore who was in South Padre, Texas, for spring break, previously told Business Insider. "I just don't want to get anyone sick because we've all been doing everything we shouldn't."

The CDC has asked colleges to re-evaluate the safety of their dorms

Through the interview process, contact tracers learned that many of these travelers shared housing, and this close proximity may have helped further spread the virus. The CDC had similar concerns about nursing homes and long-term care facilities, where immunocompromised people all live in close quarters.

The study authors noted that this "highlights the importance of universities and schools considering how to align students' living arrangements with CDC recommendations for living in shared housing as they plan to reopen."

They requested that schools contemplating reopening make decisions for isolating and testing people who may have COVID-19 and creating spaces to quarantine them and their contacts.

The American College Health Association released a 20 page document with guidelines for reopening, which suggested that the ideal would be giving each student their own room and bathroom.

Schools are already contemplating safe ways to reopen. Some epidemiologists have suggested mentioned turning dorms into quarantine centers for people who have COVID-19, or having professors come to dorms to teach to mitigate infection spread. Other universities, like UT Austin, are planning to reopen dorms but with limited capacity.

"Traditional dormitories with shared bedrooms and bathrooms are not adequate," Christina Paxson, president of Brown University, wrote in an op-ed. "Setting aside appropriate spaces for isolation and quarantine may be costly, but necessary."

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