Summer McGee presents breakdown of Covid-hit dorms and floors.
University of New Haven officials came under fire Monday night for failure to contain a Covid-19 outbreak that spread to 100 cases — and caused an abrupt shift to online classes and a ban on all gatherings.
Students and parents expressed their frustration at a university-wide virtual town hall, which followed an announcement earlier that day that the university would pivot to one week of online-only classes as the number of detected Covid-19 cases shot up.
The incident came as campuses across the state are taking varying degrees of action to mitigate the spread of Covid-19. In Hartford, Trinity College chose to move all classes online after 47 students tested positive for the virus, according to the Hartford Courant. Meanwhile, in Bridgeport, Sacred Heart University has threatened to pivot to an online-only semester as the number of cases climbed to 107. Sacred Heart has implored off-campus students to stay away from campus and suspended over 100 students for violating social distancing regulations.
The number of active cases at the University of New Haven is higher than at Trinity or Sacred Heart. Over this past weekend alone, 55 new Covid-19 cases were detected across UNH, bringing the number of active Covid cases to 113. Of those 113 cases, 105 were detected in the past 7 days, according to the school’s Covid-19 Dashboard. (UNH has a total of 6,793 students, according to its website.)
As a result, University President Steven Kaplan announced in an email to students on Monday that from Tuesday, Oct. 13, to Saturday, Oct. 17, classes — which had previously been conducted both online and in person — would move to an online-only format.
During this period, commuter students will not be allowed on campus.
“Students residing in on-campus housing are strongly encouraged to remain on campus, at least until they are tested for COVID-19,” Kaplan wrote.
The latest developments on Connecticut campuses reflect the challenge of containing the spread of the virus at colleges and universities. The sudden outbreaks ushered in a new chapter following a period in which early successes convinced New Haven-area schools to announce plans to operate the same way in the spring semester.
New Steps At UNH
At Monday’s town hall, University of New Haven Covid-19 Coordinator Summer McGee (pictured) explained the stay-in-place recommendation further.
“It would not be a sound public health decision to send our students home, back to their communities, back to their parents and families,” she said.
Students who test positive for Covid-19 have the option of self-isolating at an off-campus location. Right now, 67 have elected to isolate on campus — leaving 47 on-campus isolation beds available. Students in isolation at home do not need to re-test for Covid-19 before returning to campus, according to McGee.
Meanwhile, 391 students who may have been exposed to Covid are quarantining on campus, and 152 are quarantining off-campus. That number includes around 200 students in a dorm known as Winchester Hall; the entire dorm was placed under quarantine last week.
For students who are ill, a team of Yale New Haven Health medical professionals is following up virtually. According to McGee, the students’ cases are all mild, with the exception of one student who has “moderate” symptoms.
While classes have moved temporarily online, common spaces such as libraries and dorm lounges remain open.
UNH is taking other steps to mitigate the outbreak, including:
- Prohibiting gatherings of any size.
- Requiring all residential students who have not been tested since October 5 to obtain a Covid-19 test.
- Encouraging employees to work remotely if possible.
- Making dining hall meals takeout-only.
- Suspending some university-based transit services.
- Bolstering virtual and outdoor community events to keep students engaged.
- Increasing testing resources for students over the course of the next few weeks, and making saliva-based tests available starting next week.
During the town hall, which took place over Zoom and streamed live to Facebook, students and families flooded social media with angry questions, such as:
Can students who feel unsafe or unsatisfied choose to return home to the semester?
What about commuter students with campus jobs?
Will tuition be refunded?
How many cases would it take for UNH to shut down completely?
Officials answered some questions: Students can choose to go home, but it’s not recommended. Commuter students won’t be able to work. There’s no specific number of cases that would prompt the university to shut down.
Town Hall Tensions
On Facebook, commenters responded with outrage.
Many Facebook commenters continued to express frustration with policies. The Town Hall garnered over 600 comments on the social media platform.
“You need to implement a full stop to prevent non UNH people from getting on campus. Likewise, there needs to be police enforcing lockdown so no people exit (which is how this began),” wrote one commenter, Marc Conrad.
“I have spoke to multiple students who have been reporting [social distancing violations] and nothing has happened,” wrote one student, Alexis Robert. “That has been a personal experience for myself as well.”
“So who’s gonna have to die for the university to take responsibility and shut down?” wrote Chris Valentine.
Administrators defended UNH’s decision to keep students on campus while moving classes online.
“It was clear that we needed to take some action to try to stem the spread of the virus and to ensure that everyone on our campus is being kept healthy and safe,” McGee told students and parents. But “there isn’t a need at this time to quarantine dorms,” she said.
“The spread that we have seen in the last two weeks does not have anything to do with our on-campus operations,” McGee added. “We have traced these cases to social gatherings, mostly off-campus.” The virus has also been spreading within suites moreso than within dorms, she said.
She stressed that despite the move to online-only learning, in the University of New Haven’s view, classrooms and other on-campus spaces are safe.
UNH is open to the possibility of placing other dorms in quarantine if necessary, according to McGee. In the meantime, in response to student feedback amid the outbreak, the university has inserted a “re-charge day” on Wednesday on which classes and assignments are canceled so that students can process.
According to Dean Ophelie Rowe-Allen, the university has received 307 reports of social distancing violations, 236 of which have been addressed.
Life In Quarantine
Shaylee Bean: Quarantine is porous.
Shaylee Bean, a pre-med sophomore at the University of New Haven who lives in Winchester Hall, said that quarantine has been “not horrible” so far.
For the past week inside her dorm room, she’s been waking up at around 11 a.m., feeding her cat, eating the food that’s been delivered to her dorm (it “isn’t good at all”), and watching “a lot” of TV. (She’s a big fan of the Blacklist, but to pass the time, she said she’s also been watching a lot of movies: “That’ll take out two hours.”)
Taking classes online while in quarantine has been difficult, Bean said. “If the teacher’s writing on a whiteboard, it’s hard for them to show that on a Zoom call and for you to copy the notes.”
Bean said that, overall, she thinks that UNH is doing a good job of responding to the outbreak. She expressed doubt that partying was the main cause of the spread, even though contact tracers have found that many students testing positive attended off-campus gatherings. “Everyone’s really blaming the partying — yeah, it could be from that, but people go to work, people go to the store, people go to the grocery store, people go everywhere,” she said.
The main thing she thinks that the university should do differently is bolster security at the dorms, since it’s easy for people to sneak in to dormitories that they don’t live in, she said.
She added that she’s concerned that some of her peers are leaving campus, even when they are supposed to be quarantining. “I’ve literally had people texting me saying they’re going home because they want to hang out with their friends,” she said.
This story was produced with financial support from Solutions Journalism Network.
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