Quinnipiac University is facing an outbreak of Covid-19 — and moved all classes temporarily online as a result.
As of Wednesday, 108 students are in isolation after being diagnosed with Covid-19. That’s 55 more cases detected since Monday.
According to the university, 34 of those newly-diagnosed students are residential, while 21 live off-campus.
In response to rising cases, Quinnipiac has moved all classes online for the rest of the week, with the exception of medical school courses.
The school has also moved dining hall operations to a takeout-only format; placed in-person events on hold; encouraged all faculty and staff who are able to work from home to do so.
“Essential staff should come to work as scheduled,” Senior Medical Advisor David Hill wrote in an announcement to the university.
The school is continuing to test a weekly sample of students, while additionally testing students identified as peers of the Anthony’s Ocean View party attendees. Between October 28 and November 3, 2,410 university community members have been testing with a 3.4 percent positivity rate. This week, Quinnipiac is separating residential student testing from off-campus student testing times and locations.
The school raised its official Covid-19 alert level to Orange, indicating “moderate risk” and a “heightened campus alert status.”
The rising cases at Quinnipiac comes at the heels of an outbreak at the University of New Haven, which has now died down. The University of New Haven also temporarily moved courses online when case levels were similar to Quinnipiac’s current numbers. That shift didn’t appear to be enough to immediately contain the outbreak; the university ultimately urged students to “study in place.”
QU has 3,800 students living on campus.
The spike in new cases comes in the aftermath of a massive party at Anthony’s Ocean View last Thursday, which led New Haven health officials to shut down the business for violating Covid-19 public health restrictions.
The party drew students from Quinnipiac and SCSU, according to WTNH, which published an email reporting that 20 students from Quinnipiac have been sent home after being tied to the Thursday event.
The university is asking students to self-report attendance at the party, or to report their peers, so that public health measures can be taken.
There is no indication whether or not the party has been tied to the outbreak.
The outbreak additionally comes four days after Halloween. Covid-19 cases that might have spread among students over the Halloween weekend may not yet be detectable by a PCR test; experts recommend getting tested for the virus between 5 and 7 days after a possible exposure.
Contributed photo
Nursing student Julia Orlofski: University needed to crack down.
Now that classes are online for the week, nursing student Julia Orlofski isn’t sure what her lab and clinical courses will look like.
She’s not optimistic. Learning to be a nurse online isn’t the same, she said. She’s just crossing her fingers that her clinical course won’t involve the online simulation she used last spring, when classes moved online the first time. That online clinical class had felt “almost like the Sims” a video game, she said. She recalled having to perform tasks and watch for response from a virtual “patient.”
“It wasn’t great, because there’s none of that randomness to real people, where they talk about anything and everything — that in-person, bedside therapeutic communication,” she said.
Orlofski, who lives on her own in a campus-affiliated apartment building, said she’s overall pleased with the way that Quinnipiac has handled Covid-19, although she expressed shock at the 55 new cases in the past two days.
She said university officials have been appropriately harsh in their response to students who defy public health rules. All nursing students received an email, she said, saying that if they attended the Anthony’s Ocean View party last week and the university discovered that they did not self-report their attendance, they would face “serious disciplinary action.”
Orlofski said her peers don’t always follow social distancing rules. In the hallways and parking lot of her apartment building, she said, she’s often the only one wearing a mask.
“I don’t think there’s as much following of the rules as there should be,” she said.
This story was produced with financial support from Solutions Journalism Network.
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