Dutch students work hard to keep virus out of shared houses

LEIDEN, Netherlands (AP) — This is not the student life Iris Raats had hoped for when she was accepted at Leiden University to study law.

With the coronavirus pandemic casting its long shadow over education in the Netherlands and around the world, most of her lectures are online and the vibrant social life in the country's oldest university city has been reined in to contain the spread of the pandemic.

Instead, socializing happens predominantly within the four walls of the house that the 19-year-old shares with 13 other students close to the city's central railway station.

“I’m very glad that I found ... a room in Leiden and that I can experience living with students and have parties here in the kitchen,” she said. “But it’s not like real student life.”

Houses packed with students in Dutch university cities are seen as a worrying source of infections as the Netherlands has been hit by a strong resurgence of coronavirus in recent weeks. Infections have soared among people aged 20-30.

“It’s very complicated for students if there are 14 of you living in a house with shared kitchen, shared bathroom,” Dutch Education Minister Ingrid van Engelshoven told The Associated Press. “What we see now is that students are working with one another to work out how to make those houses safe.”

That is happening at the house in Leiden, where students are packed into communal spaces almost as tightly as their bicycles in racks in the front yard. The residents have made up their own rules to keep the virus out, largely sealing themselves off from the outside world by strictly limiting the number of visitors.

Students with a cough or runny nose are supposed to self-isolate in their rooms, although the housemates concede it’s hard to rigidly enforce that rule. At...