US universities scramble to deal with virus outbreak
CALIFORNIA, United States (AP) — North Carolina’s flagship university cancelled in-person classes for undergraduates just a week into the fall semester yesterday as college campuses around the US scramble to deal with novel coronavirus 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 will switch to remote learning on Wednesday and make arrangements for students who want 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.
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.
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 more than 170,000 deaths and 5.4 million confirmed infections in the US.
Many schools already have flipped from in-person classes to mainly online in recent weeks, and more are expected to do so, said David Long of Tuscany Strategy Consulting, which teamed up with the Johns Hopkins Center for Health Security and the Council for Higher Education Accreditation to develop reopening recommendations for colleges and universities.
At Oklahoma State (OSU) in Stillwater, where a widely circulated video over the weekend showed maskless students packed into a nightclub, officials confirmed 23 novel coronavirus cases at an off-campus sorority house. The university placed the students living there in isolation and prohibited them from leaving.
“As a student, I’m frustrated as hell,” said Ryan Novozinsky, a junior from Allentown, New Jersey, and editor of the student newspaper. “These are people I have to interact with.” And, he added, “There will be professors they interact with, starting today, that won’t be able to fight this off.”
OSU has a combination of in-person and online courses. Students, staff and faculty are required to wear masks indoors and outdoors where social distancing isn’t possible.
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, meanwhile, expressed frustration with the lack of social distancing and scenes of crowded bars and other nightspot areas on the first weekend many students returned to school.