Several UConn students searched for new graves on Wednesday after the dangers of opening universities were exposed during a pandemic in a video showing undergrads living at a packed ballroom party, where almost no one wears a mask dry and there was zero social distance.
While the worst offenders were charged with eviction notices, University of Connecticut officials showed no sign of intending to follow the lead of other universities such as Notre Dame and the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill instructing in the class canceled and sent students home for the semester after coronavirus outbreaks on their campuses.
“These actions do not represent or speak for the 5,000 residents that currently make up our residential neighborhood,” UConn Dean of Students Eleanor Daugherty and Residential Life Director Pamela Schipani of the video said in a letter to students late Tuesday. “The vast majority of our students do the right thing.”
But so far, five students living on campus have tested positive and were placed in the UConn isolation room and 25 others who came in contact with them were quarantined, the university said. Two other students living off-campus also tested positive.
“There will no doubt be more positive cases, as more test results return in the coming days, and we will each approach them in the same way we work to protect the health of individual students and our community,” Daugherty said in a statement. statement.
Public health experts such as Drs. Howard Koh, a Harvard professor who served as assistant secretary of health for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services under President Barack Obama, said it should come as no surprise that American universities are currently struggling.
“At every step of the pandemic, society has underestimated the linguistics of the virus and underestimated our ability to contain it,” Koh said in an email to NBC News. “The eruptions of the colleges still represent an example of this theme.”
But if they want to save the fall semester, the universities of America will have to adapt to the current reality.
“Universities represent highly dynamic communities with thousands of young people – from all over the country and the world – living and learning in close quarters,” Koh wrote. “These clusters in the opening days of renewal make any ongoing personal learning much less likely for the coming fall.”
In North Carolina, frustrated UNC-Chapel Hill students told NBC News that school administrators do not heed the warnings of students, parents and public health experts.
“Everyone told me not to reopen the university, and it was only a matter of time,” said Nikhil Rao, a senior student board adviser who has attended online meetings with Provost Bob Blouin and other student leaders since April each month. “I would be shocked if I did not know this was going to happen.”
In South Bend, Indiana, the president of the University of Notre Dame, the Rev. John Jenkins, instructed that all classes for students go online for the next two weeks after an off-campus party resulted in dozens of students becoming infected. He also issued a warning: “If these steps are not successful, we should send students home as we did last spring.”
Earlier, Oklahoma State University quarantined the Pi Beta Phi sorority after 23 members tested positive.
In recent months, the average age of people who have been given COVID-19 has been down, the World Health Organization has said.
In severe Florida, which became the fifth state to log more than 10,000 COVID-19 deaths on Wednesday, the median age of hospitalizations is currently 42, the state health department reported. The other states that have hit that depressing milestone are New York (33,685), New Jersey (15,926), California (11,531) and Texas (10,551), according to the latest NBC News report.
While New York and New Jersey claimed thousands of lives in the early days of the pandemic when health officials were still trying to come up with a strategy to slow the spread of COVID-19, the number of new cases and deaths exploded in Florida and Texas after reopening at the instigation of President Donald Trump while COVID-19 is still crossing in these states.
California, which now has the most confirmed cases with more than 640,000, was the first to introduce shelter rules. But Govin Newsom began, under pressure from company and other group, to lift restrictions in May and June, after which the number of new cases and deaths skyrocketed.
Nationwide, the number of confirmed COVID-19 cases has dropped to 5.5 million, and the death toll was close to 173,000 Wednesday morning, according to NBC News numbers. The US, which leads the world in both categories, is responsible for about a quarter of the more than 22 million cases and more than 782,000 deaths around the world.
In other developments:
- If you find that you do not have a mask in Hoboken, New Jersey, you could be fined $ 250 or more. The city council in the crowded small town across the Hudson River from Manhattan was expected on Wednesday to vote on a measure that would put teeth into the city’s mask mandate. It comes to more than half of the 3,000 residents who take part in a mask survey
said they beat mask-deniers with hefty fines. Mayor Ravi Bhalla said it has been visited in communities on Cape Cod such as Chatham. “If you do not wear a face mask, you will automatically be fined $ 300, and from what I hear they meet about 100 percent, everyone wears a mask,” Bhalla said. While most public health experts and the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention recommend wearing masks to slow the spread of the virus, the issue was politicized by President Trump’s initial refusal to wear one and has been opposed by some members. of the public.
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Speaking of masks, the 17-year-old Sesame Place worker in Pennsylvania got his jaw brushed after telling a couple that face mask can easily rest. The U.S. Marshals on Wednesday arrested 39-year-old Troy McCoy after authorities said he tried to barricade himself at his home in the Bronx, New York. Shakerra Bonds, 31, who lives with McCoy, was expected to surrender to authorities later. Both are struggling with assault, simple assault, unlawful intimidation, collusion, harassment behavior and drawing costs resulting from the proven Aug. 9 incident near Captain Cookie’s Adventure Ride.
- When New York City Mayor Bill de Blasio went ahead with plans to reopen classes in the nation’s largest public school system, the powerful city readers’ union said it was ready to take legal action and even in strike if conditions are not safe. “The moment we feel the mayor is trying to force people into a situation that is unsafe, we go to court; we go to job fairs,” warned United States Teachers Federation (UFT) president Michael Mulgrew. . If teachers left their jobs, they would pass the so-called “Taylor Law”, which teachers would find and even fight the prison sentence. Earlier this month, New York Governor Andrew Cuomo Gov gave public schools in the state the green light to open classes in the fall.
