At Appalachian State University, a cluster was affiliated with the football team. The University of Iowa said 175 students tested positive for the virus – about 2.2% of the tests – during relocation.
“It’s just extremely difficult to consider yourself to be in a bubble when there’s a whole level of community scattered around you or when people come from all over the country and gather on university campuses,” said Drs. Leana Wen, the former Baltimore Health Commissioner. “You can not keep coronavirus out.”
While older Americans and those with underlying conditions are at greater risk of serious illness, health officials have approached that it is not just the populations that need to be careful.
And younger people who may be able to recover from the virus with minimal symptoms and in many cases do not require hospitalization may still have “residual symptoms for weeks and sometimes months,” said Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases.
“We need to be more careful when we say, ‘Young people who are not coming to the hospital are fine, let them be infected, it’s OK.’ No, it’s not OK,” Fauci said in a statement. for the American Society for Microbiology on Monday.
14 students asked to leave the Drake University campus
Some university leaders made it clear from an early age that there would be zero tolerance when it came to violating safety guidelines.
Fourteen Drake University students were asked to leave campus for two weeks after violating an agreement signed by students who wrote the protocol for health and safety for the year.
Several of the students “now have to deal with consequences through the Code of Student Conduct,” said a letter from Dean of Students Jerry Parker.
“This message is not intended to appeal to the students involved – it is a reminder that we must hold each other accountable,” Parker wrote.
The letter reflects the sentiment of another university president, who sent a deed warning for students who do not follow the safety guidelines.
Universities change class plans
Emerging cases have led some colleges to scrap plans for personal learning to begin the school year.
All undergraduate classes at the University of Notre Dame will be at a distance for the next two weeks as the university tries to get a recent spike in cases of coronavirus under control, the president announced this week. Classes at Michigan State University will begin at a distance for all students, announced President Samuel L. Stanley.
“Just last week (Aug. 10-16), we saw COVID-19 positive rates from 2.8% to 13.6% at Campus Health. Since this morning, we’ve tested 954 students and have 177 in isolation and 349 in quarantine, both on and off campus, “the letter said.
The school said it still has plans to play sports this fall, despite no longer holding classes. The University of Alabama announced that spectators at football games will be allowed at home, and said this week that it will ban the campus, but fans will be able to fill about 20% of the Bryant-Denny Stadium. That venue normally contains about 20,000 fans.
Ithaca College, in New York, which previously returned its fall-in-semesters semester to October, announced this week that it has shifted to distance instruction for the entire semester.
Detection test could be in use within weeks
Meanwhile, SalivaDirect, the test that received the green light from the FDA last week, could be used by approved labs in the next few weeks, says Anne Wyllie, an epidemiologist at Yale School of Public Health who shares was of the team responsible for the protocol.
“It has actually been very inspiring to see how many labs have already reached us – how many are ready and willing to continue with SalivaDirect,” Wyllie told CNN.
This is great news for many Americans who still have to wait several days to receive their results – a wait that some health officials have called counterproductive for the country’s attempt to get the virus under control.
“We’ve simplified the test so that it only costs a few dollars for reagent, and we expect labs to only pay about $ 10 per sample,” he said. Nathan Grubaugh, a Yale assistant professor of epidemiology.
CNN’s Amanda Watts, Naomi Thomas, Annie Grayer, Jamiel Lynch, Giovanna Van Leeuwen and Jennifer Henderson contributed to this report.
.
