College towns upset over student outbreaks
RALEIGH, N.C. — As waves of schools and businesses around the country are cleared to reopen, college towns are moving toward renewed shutdowns because of too many parties and too many COVID-19 infections among students.
With more than 300 students at the University of Missouri testing positive for the coronavirus and an alarming 44% positivity rate for the surrounding county, the local health director Friday ordered bars to stop serving alcohol at 9 p.m. and close by 10 p.m.
Iowa’s governor has ordered all bars shut down around The University of Iowa and Iowa State, while the mayor of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, did the same in the hometown of the state’s flagship university.
“What we’re seeing in our violations is they’re coming late at night,” said Stephanie Browning, head of the health department for Columbia, Missouri. “Big groups gathering. They’re not wearing their masks, they’re not social distancing.”
In Utah, the City Council in Provo overrode a mayoral veto to pass a mask mandate, which includes a $500 fine for organizing large maskless gatherings, days before students return to Brigham Young University from around the country.
But the council was nevertheless worried that college students sharing dorms, bathrooms and showers could become “superspreaders” and bring the virus off campus, council chair George Handley said.
“We’re already seeing what’s happened across the country at other universities,” he said.
But a warehouse party organized by a BYU student’s promotional company called Young/Dumb also raised concern earlier this month when pictures of hundreds of revelers without masks surfaced online.
BYU, which is owned by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, has its own rules requiring students to wear masks on campus. Requirements for indoor public spaces in town will help people stay healthy and businesses stay open, Handley said.
“This is actually about preserving our way of life, it’s not about destroying it — contrary to what some people say,” Handley said.
The outbreaks since students began returning to campus in the past few weeks have heightened tensions between colleges and their towns and led to recriminations between local politicians and university officials.
The U.S. has recorded over 182,000 deaths from the coronavirus and nearly 6 million confirmed infections. Worldwide, the death toll is more than 838,000, with at almost 25 million cases.
Surging infection numbers around the U.S. have been blamed in part on young people ignoring mask and social distancing requirements.
In Iowa’s Story County, home to Iowa State, 74% of new cases over the past seven days were among people ages 19 to 24, Gov. Kim Reynolds said Thursday. In the same time period, 69% of new cases in Johnson County, the home of the University of Iowa, were in that age group.
“It is increasing the virus activity in the community, and it’s spilling over to other segments of the population,” Reynolds said.
Fueled in part by clusters where college students are returning to classes, Kansas has had its highest sevenday increase in coronavirus cases.
Gov. Laura Kelly said her administration is looking into why the surge has occurred but said outbreaks on college campuses and fraternities and sororities are a factor.
“We cannot continue to go down this path,” she told reporters Friday.
The University of Alabama has recorded over 500 cases on campus since the fall semester began more than a week ago. In closing the town’s bars Monday for the next two weeks, Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox said that an unchecked spread of the virus threatens both the health care system and the local economy if students have to be sent home for the semester for remote learning.
Three of North Carolina’s largest public universities have abruptly halted inperson undergraduate instruction and directed students to move out of the dorms after hundreds tested positive following their return to campus. More than 800 have been confirmed infected at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, over 670 at North Carolina State and around 300 at East Carolina University.
Leaders at UNC-Chapel Hill, which has shifted to online classes, wrote an open letter Thursday to the mayor outlining steps the university is taking to curb off-campus parties.
“We recognize the very real problems with the behaviors of some of our fraternities and sororities,” the university’s chancellor and provost assured the mayor.
Oyeronke Popoola, a 17year-old freshman at UNCChapel Hill who moved out of her dorm, said administrators, not students, deserve most of the blame for the virus-related problems after they ushered students back to campus.
“They should’ve put everything online from the beginning, but they wanted the money,” she said. And she said fraternities and sororities weren’t the only ones at fault among the students: “I feel like Greek life gets a lot of blame, which is understandable, but there are other students who were meeting without masks.”