Dear Students, Colleagues and Families,
I write with our an update on campus public health, which continues to be good. Last week, as I shared with you on Friday, we saw a small increase in positive COVID tests. Ultimately, last week’s testing revealed five student positive tests and four employee positive tests, out of a total of 1276 tests. While still a low overall rate, we wanted to exercise caution as this increase came as cases were increasing in our local community as well.
Thanks to students’ efforts to test early this week, we can share some good preliminary news. As of this morning, we have 532 test results in from Monday’s testing, and none of them are positive for COVID. We will review the campus operational level on Friday, but wanted to share this initial update with you now.
Vaccines are a critical part of our strengthening the safety and health of our community. Unfortunately, our campus vaccination clinics, which were set to start yesterday with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine, were cancelled this week due to the FDA and CDC pausing use of that vaccine for review of possible, extremely rare, side effects. We are working closely with Wooster Community Hospital and do expect to be able to provide a vaccine clinic on campus soon – either with the Johnson & Johnson vaccine if it is cleared again for use, or with Moderna or Pfizer vaccines. For students leaving campus at the end of the term, there won’t be time to start and complete the two-shot series required for Moderna or Pfizer vaccine while on campus. However, students living on campus this summer are required to be vaccinated, and will have time to complete the sequence, and we also want to make an on-campus clinic available for employees. We will update you as soon as we have additional information on campus vaccine availability. Vaccine appointments are also widely available in the local community. You can sign up at https://gettheshot.coronavirus.ohio.gov .
My deepest thanks to everyone in our community who has worked with such dedication, ingenuity and care to bring us to this point in the semester with such good results. I wish you all a wonderful last few weeks of the term.
Go Scots!
Sarah