Providence College responds to rise in cases

(AP) — Providence College is temporarily restricting student movement in response to a recent increase in confirmed COVID-19 cases on campus.

Students who live both on and off campus are required to limit their activities to essential travel, including going to class, picking up food or groceries, medical appointments, outdoor recreation, and work, President the Rev. Kenneth Sicard said in a message to the campus community Thursday.

In addition, visitors are not allowed in dormitories and on-campus students are not allowed to visit off-campus student residences, he said.

The college has had nearly 100 positive cases this week, according to the school’s dashboard.

“We are experiencing more positive COVID-19 cases than we would like,” Sicard said. “While increased testing is a factor, these additional steps are necessary to ensure that the overall positivity rate stays below the approximately 2% we are currently seeing.”

In-person classes will continue and libraries will remain open.

The private Roman Catholic school has about 4,800 students.

The numbers

An additional 440 Rhode Island residents have confirmed cases of the coronavirus, the state Department of Health reported Friday.

The department also reported 16 more COVID-19-related deaths and a daily positivity rate of 2%.

Of the new cases, 366 were people who tested positive for the first time Thursday, and the rest tested positive on previous days.

There have now been nearly 121,000 known cases in the state and 2,290 fatalities.

The number of patients in the hospital with COVID-19 had dropped to 222 as of Tuesday, the latest day for which the information was available, down from 238 the previous day.

The latest seven-day average positivity rate in Rhode Island is 2.47%. State health departments are calculating positivity rate differently across the country, but for Rhode Island the AP calculates the rate by dividing new cases by test encounters using data from The COVID Tracking Project.

The seven-day rolling average of daily new cases in Rhode Island has declined from almost 710 on Jan. 28 to about 441 on Thursday, according to The COVID Tracking Project.

Almost 96,000 people have received a vaccine first dose in Rhode Island, and more than 42,000 have been fully vaccinated.