Norovirus survives cleansing efforts

Tara Ellwood ‘19 only recently moved back into her dorm. She moved out on February 8, when her roommate came down with the much-dreaded norovirus.

“She was taking care of her sick boyfriend all day,” Ellwood says of how her roommate got the highly contagious stomach bug. “She said I was probably going to get it if I stayed.” So, Ellwood packed her belongings in a tote bag and moved into a friend’s room in Benfer for the week.

“It was the most lit time of my life, but it was horrible,” Ellwood told me. “I just wanted to be back in my dorm.”

Over the past two weeks, numerous Muhlenberg students have come down with norovirus, also known as the stomach bug or stomach flu. It’s a common virus that causes diarrhea, vomiting, stomach pain, and dehydration, and lasts between 24 hours and several days. According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), norovirus is highly contagious before, during, and after you have episodes of diarrhea or vomiting. It spreads quickly in places where people live in close quarters—such as college dorms—especially if you have contact with someone who is already sick, which is exactly what happened to Ellwood’s roommate.

Dehydration from norovirus may require hospitalization. In severe cases, people can’t rehydrate sufficiently after vomiting or diarrhea, and need IV rehydration. Several people Ellwood knows had to go to the hospital—one even had to go twice. “I heard it was really bad in ML,” Ellwood said. “A lot of people got sick there.”

Rumors are circulating around campus that as many as 20-30 people have been hospitalized over the course of the outbreak. Gabby Khalifa ‘19, and Priya Tyagaraj ‘19, aren’t surprised, and said it seemed like their entire floor got sick. “We saw ambulances or Campus Safety outside our dorm at least three or four times over the past couple weeks,” Khalifa said.

“We were scared to use the bathroom on our floor because so many people were sick,” Tyagaraj added.

Many students are concerned about how to stay healthy when faced with an outbreak like this. For some, a roommate getting sick means moving out until their roommate stops showing symptoms. For others, it’s cleaning and disinfecting as often as possible. For some, like Ellwood and her roommate, it’s both. “My roommate washed all her sheets and clothes before I got back,” Ellwood said, “And I did some cleaning too.” For Khalifa and Tyagaraj, it’s using a bathroom on a floor of their dorm where fewer people are sick.

Ellwood is skeptical of some of the college’s efforts to combat the norovirus. On Feb. 7, Dean Gulati’s office emailed students about the college’s response plan, which included using a hospital- grade disinfectant in residence halls and public areas on campus, providing more hand sanitizer dispensers, and using Health Services and Campus Safety to monitor the spread of the virus and assist sick students.

“The hospital-grade stuff can’t hurt, but I don’t see how it’s any better than regular disinfectant,” Ellwood told me.

This poses the question of ‘how we prevent disease outbreaks like this in the future?’ To get a better idea of how diseases like norovirus are spread, we talked to Dr. Jason Kelsey, a professor of chemistry and environmental science here at Muhlenberg. He explained that part of the problem is how few virus particles are needed to cause illness.

“It only requires a very small number of particles. One gram of feces has millions of virus particles...you can start to appreciate the scope of the problem,” Dr. Kelsey said. “I doubt people are deliberately handling others’ waste, but accidental contact with a few drops of excrement is likely all it takes to get sick.”

In Khalifa and Tyagaraj’s hall, accidental contact was easy. “The bathrooms were disgusting,” Tyagaraj told me. “We heard the housekeeping staff say they had to clean constantly because so many people threw up.”

Dr. Kelsey pointed out that norovirus can linger on contaminated surfaces for 12-24 hours, and you don’t develop immunity to the virus after your body has fought off the infection. “The same virus can re-infect a person who had it previously,” he said.

Dr. Kelsey also mentioned it’s resistant to many conventional cleaners and disinfectants, which makes it much harder for students to clean their living spaces on their own.

So what can students do to stay healthy? According to the CDC, the first line of defense is regular hand-washing with soap and water, after using the bathroom and before and after eating. If students need to clean, rubber gloves can protect them from accidental contact with viruses and cleaning solutions. Clothing and sheets should be machine- washed and dried immediately if they’re soiled. Norovirus may be resistant to conventional cleaners, but diluted bleach (5-25 tablespoons bleach per gallon of water, or a premade bleach- based cleaning spray) is a good, readily available option.

There was discussion of shutting down the college for up to a week, but Dr. Kelsey is skeptical of how effective that would actually be. He said that in situations like this, we have to make a serious cost-benefit analysis. “How long is really necessary to make a difference?” he said. “Would one week be effective enough to justify the disruption?”

When I mentioned this to Elwood, she laughed. “You know, we did get a shutdown,” she said of the recent snow day. “It was like the universe telling us to just stop.”

Photo courtesy of Ian Adler