After only one week of students, faculty and staff on campus, UNC-Chapel Hill has made the decision to move all-online. With over 300 positive COVID-19 cases, four clusters within its university housing and students placed in isolation dorms, UNC-CH students have been notified and informed of developments throughout the entire process through mass Alert! Carolina notifications and their comprehensive tracking dashboard.
While the great number of positive cases being released by UNC-CH are causing panic, at least Carolina students know students in their buildings and community spaces are testing positive. NC State students aren’t as informed of the positive cases around campus, causing students to possibly walk into COVID-19 hot zones and infected areas because of lackluster guidance from the university. We cannot believe NC State is a safe and unaffected environment without the proper information to back it up.
It is hard to believe NC State has only recorded 20 positive COVID-19 cases since March 2020. NC State’s Protect the Pack website is the main and only source for NC State COVID-19 data, and the site reports four positive cases at the University from Aug. 8-14. However, this is not reflective of the full story at hand.
The total four positive cases only reflect testing done at Student Health Services and through the Wolfpack Surveillance Program. It does not account for the amount of students who have been tested at off-campus sites.
According to Mick Kulikowsi, assistant director for news and national media coordinator at NC State, the university continues to rely on students, faculty and staff to self-report COVID-19 results. And more than that, the self-reported positive results were not, and still aren’t, available to the public.
This morning, Aug. 18, Kulikowsi told Technician the University is planning to release all of the self-reported COVID-19 data on the Protect the Pack website.
Why did it take the University administration so long to release the information? Why did they feel the need to hide it from their students, faculty, staff and concerned parents?
Even without the self-reported numbers, the website also doesn’t offer a very full picture— total new positive cases for the week that separate students and employees, campus housing occupancy and academic operations are all missing. It pales in comparison to UNC’s dashboard. Moreover, the website is updated once a week. With a virus that spreads at an alarming rate, weekly website updates are not enough.
We know how quickly this virus spreads. It is critical that NC State students, faculty and staff are aware of every COVID-19 case on or near campus in order to mitigate the unknown spread of the virus. The university cannot expect us to remain fully safe with minimal information on how the virus is spreading across campus.
NC State administrators must also define and report clusters at our university. The Centers for Disease Control defines a cluster as more than five cases with primary exposure in one venue, but does NC State follow that definition? While NC State may not currently have many reported COVID-19 cases in residence halls, the entire campus community should know how NC State defines a cluster and should be notified immediately if there is one on or near campus, similar to how UNC notified their students.
While NC State has been taking considerable steps to help prevent the spread of the virus on campus through new dining procedures, putting participant limits on University events and mandating mask wearing, one thing we can all agree on is NC State students, faculty and staff need to be quickly notified and or informed daily of positive COVID-19 cases, once the University makes the self-reporting data more transparent. Students deserve the right to know where clusters are forming, how many new cases are popping up per day, how many students are already in quarantine and if the university has the capacity to safely house more infected students in the future.
We also urge NC State to take it a step further and continuously update students of clusters in off campus housing buildings such as University Towers, Valentine Commons, Stanhope, etc. While these buildings are technically not considered a part of university housing, they are geographically on or very close to campus, with most of their residents commuting to campus facilities frequently.
According to NC State’s COVID-19 FAQ page, if there is a “larger public health threat,” the university will send notifications to students, faculty and staff. What remains unclear is what a threat that warrants a notification looks like. Isn’t going to school during a pandemic a “larger public health threat?”
Students, faculty and staff all deserve daily WolfAlerts. You can not expect every member of the NC State community to check the Protect the Pack website everyday in order to know critical information about the inevitable COVID-19 spread. It should be sent directly to our phones and emails to make people look at it. Give us no choice but to be informed.
Lastly, if you test positive for COVID-19, please self-report to the university. These individuals bear a responsibility in protecting their fellow community members and they can do that by continuing to inform the university of positive cases.
Ignorance is not bliss, especially when this ignorance can put the entire campus at risk of contracting this deadly virus. Sending detailed, daily COVID-19 updates to the students’ emails and phones will definitely allow a significant fraction of them to take this more seriously and take even more necessary precautions. This way, people can make informed decisions about attending an in-person class, eating or studying in a campus facility or even visiting a friend in an off campus apartment.
Students have created a petition demanding the University to be more transparent with their reporting. We encourage our readers who agree to sign, support and share the petition to the Raleigh and NC State community.
