Universities struggle to deal with virus outbreak

Clusters discovered in dorms; weekend parties turn out to be super spreaders

Raleigh (US), August 18

North Carolina’s flagship university cancelled in-person classes for undergraduates just a week into the fall semester Monday as college campuses around the US scramble to deal with Covid clusters linked in some cases to student housing, off-campus parties and packed bars.

The University of North Carolina (UNC) at Chapel Hill said it would switch to remote learning on Wednesday and make arrangements for students who wanted to leave campus housing.

“We have emphasised that if we were faced with the need to change plans — take an off-ramp — we would not hesitate to do so, but we have not taken this decision lightly,” it said in a statement after reporting 130 confirmed infections among students and five among employees over the past week. The UNC said the clusters were discovered in dorms, a fraternity house and other student housing.

Before the decision came down, the student newspaper, The Daily Tar Heel, ran an editorial headlined, “UNC has a clusterf—k on its hands,” though without the dashes.

The paper said that the parties that took place over the weekend were no surprise and that administrators should have begun the semester with online-only instruction at the university, which has 19,000 undergraduates. “We all saw this coming,” the editorial said.

Outbreaks earlier this summer at fraternities in Washington state, California and Mississippi provided a glimpse of the challenges school officials face in keeping the virus from spreading on campuses where young people eat, live, study — and party — in close quarters. The virus has been blamed for over 170,000 deaths and 5.4 million confirmed infections in the US.

In Boone, North Carolina, the faculty senate at Appalachian State University — part of the 17-member UNC system — passed a vote of no-confidence in school chancellor Sheri Everts on Monday, in large part for failing to shut down the campus after a recent Covid-19 outbreak.

Professors have “moved from a concern about people’s livelihoods and the institution’s reputation to, now, a concern for people’s lives,” the declaration read. Officials at another UNC school — East Carolina University — said Monday that they had identified a cluster at a dorm. They didn’t say whether they were considering switching to online classes. At Oklahoma State in Stillwater, where a widely circulated video over the weekend showed maskless students packed into a nightclub, officials confirmed 23 cases at an off-campus sorority house. The university placed the students living there in isolation and prohibited them from leaving. The University of Notre Dame reported 58 confirmed cases since students returned to the South Bend, Indiana, campus in early August. At least two off-campus parties over a week ago have been identified as sources, school officials said. University officials in Tennessee, Georgia and Alabama were likewise frustrated by the lack of social distancing and scenes of crowded bars and other nightspot areas on the first weekend many students returned to school. Among universities moving ahead with in-person fall classes is Bradley University in Peoria, Illinois, where a dozen students tested positive last month after an off-campus gathering. Classes start August 26 and students are moving into dorms this weekend. — AP