Schools are asking: Should there still be mass testing? Does there need to be contact tracing? What about tracking the number of cases — and posting them on campus dashboards? And when there is a spike in cases, do classes need to go remote?

Universities from Northeastern in Boston to the University of California-Davis have begun to discuss Covid in “endemic” terms — a shift from reacting to each spike of cases as a crisis to the reality of living with it daily. And in some cases, there has been backlash…

Some universities are even loosening what were once strict rules for quarantining and isolation. Harvard is instituting what it calls an “isolate-in-place policy,” meaning that students who test positive would, with some exceptions, stay in their dorm rooms, even with roommates. A school email suggests having “a conversation” about how to handle things if a roommate got sick.