Boston University has deployed a high-tech weapon in its fight to keep the COVID-19 pandemic from spreading on campus – robots.
Eight of them now process about 6,000 coronavirus tests a day from a laboratory built and operated by BU researchers – and they deliver results the next day, NBC Boston reported.
“When they get to us 24 hours later for a negative test, it gives us the opportunity to train as much as possible, so it’s great,” said freshman Brian Garrity, who plays lacrosse for the school.
Other campuses also use robots to keep their students safe.
At the University of Texas at Austin, three “modern” robots process hundreds of tests a day, at no cost to students. Nephron Pharmaceuticals donated a robot to the University of South Carolina to assist in school-based detection tests to detect COVID-19. And the University of Maryland has been using robots since April to process tests not only for campus but also for the state.
A month earlier, researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, made robots an important element in COVID-19’s diagnostic lab that made them “from creation” process more than 1,000 tests a day.
At BU, there are four collection centers on campus that are open seven days a week, 12 hours a day, where students change themselves, a process they say takes about five minutes.
To ensure students do the test correctly, BU posted a how-to video on You Tube and sent observers to the collection centers, said university spokeswoman Rachel Lapal.
So far, more than 8000 tests have been performed since July 27 and just 16 have been shown to be positive. The tally is posted daily by BU on a data dashboard launched Monday.
Students say the robots have helped the experience on campus.
“I feel really grateful that I was able to maintain this experience for college colleges for which I pay,” said Tahliyah Tabron, a sophomore.
Many other students did not have such luck. Dozens of universities have sent students home for the semester or switched to virtual classes after new clusters of coronavirus infections began to explode on campuses across the country when students began to retire last week.
The University of West Virginia reported 11 new positive cases on its Morgantown campus Friday, bringing the total number since classes back to 114 students and four faculty members as staff.
And the University of Notre Dame, which is offering two weeks of personal classroom education this week, has reported 337 COVID-19 cases since Aug. 3. Among those infected were several players on the Fighting Irish football team.
“Do not make us write insults” read the headline of the editorial staff of the Notre Dame student newspaper on Friday, which instructed students to party during the pandemic and to open the school’s leaders from campus too soon.
“The university administration has largely blamed the COVID-19 outbreak on students attending off-campus parties,” the Observer editorial team read. “While this has not been completely misplaced, it has been used to reflect responsibility on the part of the entire administrations who agreed that they were ready for us to return to campus.”
The Daily Tar Heel, the student newspaper at the University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill, also took these school officials to task in a biting editorial board for not expecting students to be “reckless” but use even more colorful language in his header. UNC on Monday became the first university in the country to switch to virtual learning and send its students home for the rest of the semester.
Nationally, the number of confirmed cases of coronavirus was more than 5.6 million and the death toll as of Friday morning was more than 175,000, NBC News figures showed.
The United States, which leads the world in both categories, has accounted for about a quarter of the nearly 22.7 million cases and more than a fifth of the nearly 800,000 deaths worldwide. But in recent days, countries such as Brazil and India have also reported even more deaths than the US And countries that have appeared to have a grip on the pandemic such as Poland have set Friday records with 903 new cases.
In other developments:
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The unexpected jump in initial unemployment claims came to more than a million on Thursday after the Paycheck Protection Program stopped approving applications and showed the need for renewed incentives for small businesses and consumers, lawyers and business owners told NBC News. “The PPP lending program has been very helpful to most small businesses in supporting business operations,” said Holly Wade of the National Federation of Independent Business Research Centers. “However, many small business owners are still far from pre-COVID sales levels.” And because those relief funds are piled up, both jobs and the companies themselves are at risk, she said. More than 23 million jobs were lost when the pandemic hit.
- Two days after Florida reported its 10,000th coronavirus death, the state reported that a 6-year-old girl from Hillsborough County died of COVID-19. She is the eighth – and youngest – child to die from the Florida virus since the pandemic began, The Tampa Bay Times reported. Her death was recorded because state teachers opposed the Gov.’s plan. Ron DeSantis to restore staff education at the end of the month. Most of Florida’s new cases and deaths have occurred since DeSantis, at the urging of President Trump, began reopening the state in May.
- Texas has reported more than 11,000 coronavirus deaths. As of Friday afternoon, it had reported 11,247 Covid deaths and 587,491 confirmed cases, according to figures from NBC News. New York still leads the nation with 33,688 deaths, followed by New Jersey with 15,933. New York and New Jersey killed thousands dead in the early days of the pandemic when health officials were still trying to come up with a strategy to stop the spread. Texas began to see a dramatic increase in new cases and deaths after it, like Florida, reopened before the coronavirus began to crawl.
- Sister Jean Dolores-Schmidt, who became America’s most famous nun four years ago when the Loyola University Chicago Ramblers basketball team made an unexpected but ultimately futile run for an NCAA Championship, celebrated her 101st on Thursday. birthday. She gave some advice on pandemics to “wear those masks, wash hands, keep this distance.” Schmidt, who remains the chaplain of her favorite team, said something good will come out of all the suffering the US has suffered because of the pandemic. “I believe we will respect each other in a different way and take care of each other in a different way,” she said. ‘You see people in one neighborhood collecting food for another neighborhood that really needs it. They have never thought of it before. They give generously. Some people rarely know their neighbors, but this brings them together. The racism problem we have, we will get better at social justice and equality. ”
Nigel Chiwaya contributed.
