VPSL Column | November 20, 2020

Happy Friday, Students!

With Thanksgiving next week, I want to start this week’s message off by sincerely thanking you for your patience, conscientiousness, kindness and focus this semester. As most of you return home for the holiday and complete your studies remotely, I hope you’ll maintain your regimens of health, safety, and self-care that have served you while on Palatine Hill.

• COVID-19 cases: As of yesterday, we have had six positive COVID-19 tests out of the 2,665 tests we’ve conducted on campus, a positivity percentage of 0.23%.

• Effluent testing results: As we expected given last week’s positive cases on campus, effluent testing results returned on November 17 from wastewater samples pulled on Nov. 13 showed low-level positive results in the wastewater leaving Holmes/Hartzfeld and Roberts/East Halls (the Halls where we house students in isolation and quarantine). Follow-up testing results are expected this afternoon.

• Notifications: With the recent increase in COVID cases statewide, we have reassessed the method of communication and amount of detail used when sharing information about positive COVID-19 cases with the campus community. As we started doing this week, we will send an email notification to students and employees on a particular campus (CAS, Graduate School, or Law School) when we learn that a person who has tested positive for COVID-19 was on that campus while likely to have been contagious.The COVID-19 Confirmed Cases Status Report on our webpage will continue to be updated within one business day of receiving new information about a positive case. We will continue to assess these protocols. Remember, if you were a close contact of an infected person, you will be notified by our contact tracer. Make sure now and in the future, that you are responsive to calls from the contact tracer and other College officials. Remember, it is possible that you may have been in a building that an infectious person frequented, but not be at risk for infection because you were not in close enough contact with the infected person. If you were not a close contact, we will not reach out to you for contact tracing purposes.

In closing, to echo President Wiewel’s words from his letter earlier this week, “I am proud and heartened at what we have accomplished together so far in 2020. We have been tested this year, no doubt. Thank you for the trust you have put in us and each other.”

Happy Thanksgiving. Stay well and stay safe. And as always, WeB4Me@LC.

Sincerely,

Robin H. Holmes-Sullivan
Vice President of Student Life and Dean of Students