Campuses open and COVID-19 infections spread
Posted on August 19, 2020 by Bryan Alexander
Fall semester is upon us. For roughly one quarter to one third of American higher education their students, faculty, and staff are heading to campus, even as COVID-19 infections and deaths keep rising.
As a result, some number of people spending time at those colleges and universities are getting sick.
What follows is a list of such events. It’s not exhaustive. It’s also a snapshot in time, what I’ve found by the night of August 18, 2020. Tomorrow will doubtless add more.
- Bethel College: 50 people have been infected, “including 43 students and seven faculty members.” 22 are athletes. That’s almost 10% of the student body.
- Boston University: 8 positive cases over the past three weeks. Well, 12 now.
- East Carolina University: 108 positive tests.
- Emerson College: 1 person tested positive.
- North Carolina State University admitted to some number of infections, either 8, 42, or 50, among fraternity and sorority houses.
- Northeast Mississippi Community College: “‘around 300′” students are currently in quarantine… [T]he university has six or seven positive cases since school started last week and that ’25 to 28 employees’ are also under quarantine.” That CNN article adds: “Northeast Mississippi Community College has around 3,200 students, which means around 10% of the student body is being quarantined.”
- Oklahoma State University: 23 infections at a sorority.
- University of Kentucky: 189 infections.
- The University of Tennessee at Knoxville: an infection cluster created by “an off-campus party” yielded numbers something like “at least five connected cases or 20 people in self-isolation.”
- University of Wyoming: 38 cases “among… students and employees.”
- Western Kentucky University: 19 infections for student and staff.
This is unsurprising, given events like this and this and this.
Villanova University:
(Before I get jumped on, I’m not sharing those stories to blame students nor to exculpate administrators, residence life, municipal authorities, parents, society, or anyone else. That’s not the purpose of this post. Instead I’m trying to understand what’s happening right now, and to use that understanding to better model what comes next. Blame isn’t the theme here.)
This Washington Post article has a good roundup of such stories, as does the Chronicle. This CNN piece is actually the most informative.
Another, related post to come tomorrow as time permits.
(thanks to Rob Gibson, Eric Stoller, Futurexhighered, Lisa Durff, Jan Potvin, and others for links; cross-posted to my blog)
