Liberty Univ. students showing COVID-19 symptoms, self-isolate

LYNCHBURG, Va. — As Liberty University’s spring break was drawing to a close this month, Jerry Falwell, its president, spoke with the physician who runs Liberty’s student health service about the rampaging coronavirus.

“We’ve lost the ability to corral this thing,” Dr. Thomas Eppes said he told Mr. Falwell.

But he did not urge him to close the school.

“I just am not going to be so presumptuous as to say, ‘This is what you should do, and this is what you shouldn’t do,’” Dr. Eppes said in an interview.

So Mr. Falwell — a staunch ally of President Donald Trump and an influential voice in the evangelical world — reopened the university last week, igniting a firestorm.

And as of Friday, Dr. Eppes said, nearly a dozen Liberty students were sick with symptoms that suggest COVID-19, the disease caused by the virus. Three were referred to hospitals for testing; another eight were told to self-isolate.

“Liberty will be notifying the community as deemed appropriate and required by law,” Mr. Falwell said in an interview Sunday when confronted with the numbers. He added that any student returning now to campus would be required to selfquarantine for 14 days.

“I can’t be sure what’s going on with individuals who are not being tested but who are advised to selfisolate,” said Kerry Gateley, health director of the Central Virginia Health District, which covers Lynchburg. “I would assume that if clinicians were concerned enough about the possibility of COVID-19 disease to urge self-isolation that appropriate screening and testing would be arranged.”

Of the 1,900 students who initially returned last week to campus, Mr. Falwell said more than 800 had left. But he said he had “no idea” how many students had returned to offcampus housing.

“If I were them, I’d be more nervous,” he added, because they live in more crowded conditions.

For critical weeks in January and February, the nation’s far-right dismissed the seriousness of the pandemic. Mr. Falwell derided it as an “overreaction” driven by liberal desires to damage Mr. Trump.

The city of Lynchburg, Va., is furious.

“We had a firestorm of our own citizens who said, ‘What’s going on?’” Mayor Treney Tweedy said.

Some Liberty officials accuse alarmed outsiders of playing politics. Mr. Tweedy has called Falwell “reckless.” But within the school, there are signs of panic.

“I’m not allowed to talk to you because I’m an employee here,” one student living on campus wrote in an email. But, he pleaded, “we need help to go home.”

Former Lynchburg Mayor Michael Gillette, now a bioethicist working with hospitals on rationing scarce but vital ventilators, agrees.

“To argue that criticism of Liberty is based on political bias is unfounded and unreasonable,” he said. “Liberty just did not take this threat as seriously as others have.”