No move to remote learning, as Penn State adds 272 COVID-19 cases since last update
A week after Penn State President Eric Barron said he would consider moving the university to remote learning, he announced Friday that such a move was not yet necessary.
The announcement came on the heels of Friday’s updated COVID-19 dashboard, which showed 272 new cases of the coronavirus at University Park since Tuesday’s update. That brings the total number of cases involving students and employees at Penn State’s main campus to 688.
“At this time, we do not need to change our current modality and hybrid on-campus approach,” Barron said in a written statement. “The university is monitoring the number of positive and negative cases — and other variables critical to our decision-making — including isolation and quarantine capacity, hospitalizations, locational data, transmission from student cases to employees and community prevalence, to name a few.
“Mitigations in our armamentarium include pausing in-person instruction and quarantining a specific program or unit, as we have done with nursing, for example.”
According to data from the dashboard, from last Friday to Thursday, 260 students were positive from 1,571 on-demand tests with results, and another 28 students were positive from 1,764 random-screened tests. Results are pending for 428 on-demand tests since Aug. 28 and 1,135 total random-screened tests.
A University Park employee also became the first to test positive this week.
There are currently 132 students in on-campus isolation and another 77 in on-campus quarantine, numbers that have decreased overall from Tuesday. (The numbers from the last update were 149 and 76, respectively.)
The capacity for quarantine and isolation spaces remains around 50%. If capacity is approached, the university has some auxiliary spaces available and told the University Park Undergraduate Association that it would explore additional spaces in downtown State College hotels, if necessary.
But that hasn’t calmed many faculty members at the university.
“If the administration wants to salvage even a shred of its credibility, it needs to immediately suspend in-person classes and dramatically increase testing so that we can get a sense of the outbreak’s true scope,” said Sarah Townsend, an associate professor at Penn State and an organizer of the faculty-based group Coalition for a Just University. “It also needs to give faculty a central role in planning for next semester and abandon its reckless intention of doing this all over again in the spring.”
According to the state’s early warning monitoring system, Centre County does have some cause for concern. Based on the data, which is updated every Friday, the county now has the highest incidence rate in the state — by far — with 255.5 cases per 100,000 residents from Sept. 4-10. (Columbia County has the second-highest incidence rate with 82.5.) Centre County’s testing positivity rate is also at 9.2%, which the state Department of Health would like to see below 5%.
That’s the fourth-highest testing positivity rate in the commonwealth, and both numbers increased considerably since last week — when they stood at an incidence rate of 105 and a positivity rate of 5%.
“The borough continues to be concerned with these increased numbers of positive cases,” State College borough spokesperson Douglas Shontz said in a written statement. “The systems, including testing, contact tracing, quarantining/isolation, enforcement of local ordinances and messaging/communications that are in place and will be constantly reviewed to ensure the public is informed and protected.”
At the heart of Centre County’s issues are hospital capacity and community spread. If the infections simply stayed among the college-aged crowd, which typically handles COVID-19 better than the older population, the county would largely be OK, according to Dr. David Rubin, director of PolicyLab at the Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia.
The problem, he said, is that data suggests community spread is already starting to happen.
Although it’s not yet evident in the case data in neighboring ZIP codes, Rubin — who helped develop a sophisticated COVID-19 projection model — explained Thursday that one of the key indicators of spread is the testing positivity rate of surrounding counties. And nearly all those surrounding Centre County have seen notable increases.
“You just have to be really careful right now; this is a really tenuous time,” Rubin told the Centre Daily Times. “And I would not ignore these trends in these areas around University Park and State College because I do think there’s clear, consistent information here in multiple counties that the center of the state has heated up a bit.”
According to the state’s hospital preparedness dashboard, only two patients are locally hospitalized with COVID-19. But Rubin said hospitalizations typically lag about three weeks behind a rise in cases; Centre County saw its previous single-day record-high more than double Sept. 2.
“To me, what matters is where the hospital’s going to be in three weeks, not where they are today,” Rubin said Thursday. “When hospitalizations are climbing, you’re too late.”
Cases around Penn State’s other campuses have been relatively minimal, at least when compared to University Park. Six nursing undergraduate students in Hershey tested positive last week, leading to the entire 144-nurse cohort there being put under mandatory 10-day quarantine as a precautionary measure. (Penn State Hershey is now up to eight positive cases.) Commonwealth campuses with cases include Behrend (6), Abington (1), Brandywine (1), Harrisburg (1), Schuylkill (1) and Shenango (1).
Penn State’s next update to its COVID-19 dashboard will come Tuesday.
This story was originally published September 11, 2020 at 12:20 PM.
