The University of Notre Dame is shifting all of its courses to online remote instruction for two weeks after positive COVID tests rose during the first week of classes.
The university is also restricting student gatherings to 10 people or fewer and telling off-campus students not to visit campus and on-campus students not to leave campus. Varsity athletic teams are still able to gather for sanctioned activities, though, as long as safety protocols are followed.
“The virus is a formidable foe,” said University President John I. Jenkins. “For the past week, it has been winning. Let us as the Fighting Irish join together to contain it.”
Notre Dame resumed in-person classes on August 10, but the school’s news release says that positive coronavirus tests began to rise – mostly among students living off-campus and being linked to off-campus gatherings where “neither masks were worn nor physical distancing observed.”
Notre Dame is not the only ACC school hitting snags in its plans to resume classes in person. The move online echoes that of the University of North Carolina, which also moved classes online after an explosion of positive tests in the first week of classes. Colleges across the nation have struggled to keep positive test numbers down as college students struggle to avoid large gatherings. One example: a party among student-athletes at Louisville that caused three soccer players to be dismissed from the team and caused multiple sports teams to pause workouts.
Stanford has also moved all of its classes online amid the pandemic.
Notre Dame’s release says that of 927 coronavirus tests given since August 3, 147 people have tested positive. That’s a positivity rate of 15.9%.
Notre Dame is located in South Bend, Indiana, which is on the north end of the state, very close to the Michigan border. The state of Indiana has seen positive cases jump in August, including 850 newly-reported positive cases yesterday.
What going on here?? College kids aint gonna die from it.
Until they test everyone on campus, (teachers, students, other workers), they will not have a chance in the world of reining this in. Even then, it will be a huge undertaking.
They actually did test everyone before school opened. With a small number of cases you can then contact trace, and quarantine. If it suddenly blows up like happened here it becomes impossible to manage.
Notre Dame tested all 12000 students (undergraduates and graduates) before school started. There were only 32 active cases (a postivity rate of less than 0.3%). The school is relatively isolated in that it isn’t really a college town and there isn’t much student interaction with the local community. There was the notion that this was possibly one of the safest universities to re-open. There is much worse to come. All schools may have problems.
Is there any information regarding the severity of these cases? None of these reports ever goes beyond reporting positive cases. Have any of the kids at ND or UNC been hospitalized (sincerely hope not). I know it’s early, but I’d love to see some breakdown on the severity of the cases. 177 positive tests at UNC is a fairly significant sample size. How many have serious complications? How many are asymptomatic? How many are riding out flu-like symptoms on their own in a quarantined dorm?
There’s no data on severity of cases that I know of. On the other hand, it doesn’t make much of a difference in the really big picture. The concern about opening schools is not just that students could be hospitalized or die. It’s that schools (colleges, high schools, and elementary schools) are large gatherings where the virus can potentially spread. If 15% of the student population is testing positive, whether they have severe cases or not, they are still spreading the virus to professors, university staff, or other students. Not to mention that colleges typically house a student body with family from across the country, allowing an outbreak at one school to allow the virus to spread to multiple states… Read more »
Thanks Jared. For those that are interested, I did find a mention of hospitalizations in a Wall Street Journal article from the 18th – they report none of the 147 students at Notre Dame had been hospitalized as of Monday when this story broke. So that’s good news and hopefully remains the case.
Hope they didn’t use these tests:
https://www.fda.gov/medical-devices/letters-health-care-providers/risk-inaccurate-results-thermo-fisher-scientific-taqpath-covid-19-combo-kit-letter-clinical
Can’t wait for this to be exposed. Much like the fake surgisphere HCQ study.
https://mobile.twitter.com/IAmTheActualET/status/1295745239878119427
Not a problem. Your Mr. Pillow guy has the cure.
Such a troll.
Simply testing positive is much different than it being a medical case of CV19. Most are asymptomatic. And the rest have a 99.997% chance of survival. A lot of this seems like BAIT AND SWITCH by the colleges to get the room & board money and then at the last minute switch over to online.
Almost every school has said up front that if kids are sent home, they won’t be charged room & board. And there is not a college in the US that wants to send kids home risking their whole institution’s future.
@Inclusive Parent: good points. Nonetheless, life is full if risks — some small, and others larger. Prudence is one thing; seems like hysteria is governing a lot of the decision-making. The worst offenders are our media who are pushing CV19 fear-p0rn. Or take that lady who spoke at the DNC virtual convention last night: she blamed Trump for her 65yo father’s CV19-related death even though the guy was nearly 70 pounds overweight.
I feel sorry to r the nuts i n g staff .
Every time I visit this site the right wing deniers are making fools of themselves. It’s like a 180-day unblemished streak. Quite impressive. Even the rabbits in track win once in a while. You guys are sub-rabbit. Why don’t you link to the clip directly and let others decide? “My dad was a healthy 65 year old. His only preexisting condition was trusting Donald Trump, and for that, he paid with his life.”
https://twitter.com/ABC/status/1295779248410632194
https://mobile.twitter.com/andrewbostom/status/1296083479839506433
This should be a larger concern than COVID for college students.
Not a “right winger”. Although your TDS does make me laugh.
I think what he meant is colleges got them on campus and charged tuition, so now by going online they keep expensive tuition at ND. It is sad for students, especially for freshmen, as they waiting long time for this day. Now, they might go home after just a week or two of college life. They can experience college life again soon, but try talking to them about that. Waiting is not what they do the best. Our daughter was supposed to be on a campus today to study and swim. Took me ALL SUMMER talking to her trying to persuade her to take a gap year, take 6-7 classes (in 3 semesters) at a local community college (online) and… Read more »
Many have off campus accom where they paid down bonds & signed leases.
I love this screen name!
Why in the world would it save them money to do so?
A recent study from Korea concluded that asymptomatic individuals diagnosed with covid have similar viral loads when compared to symptomatic individuals. The study was published in JAMA Internal Medicine about 2 weeks ago.
I think this will happen to like pretty much every school
No doubt! Maybe Harvard, Princeton, Stanford, etc are smarter and knew what would happen and realized going all virtual was safer?!?
Safer and, also, easier to provide consistency.