By Hellen Zaboulani
On Sunday, the State University of New York announced more protocols moving forward to the Spring semester, as Covid-19 remains a risk. As reported by the NY Post, the school system will be canceling spring break and requiring all students to be tested for COVID-19 and quarantine for a week before they will be permitted onto campus for in-person learning in February. SUNY, which has 64 colleges, released the statement, which containing other precautions, including the pushback of the spring semester’s start date to Feb. 1 and mask-wearing at all times in addition to social-distancing. Since there will be more time in between the Fall and Spring semesters, Spring break will be canceled.
“With COVID-19 surging nationwide, and with increased cases in New York, SUNY has devised a comprehensive plan to keep this virus at bay throughout the flu season and through the spring semester,” SUNY Chancellor Jim Malatras said in the statement. “This aggressive strategy gives us the best chance to return our students once again to classrooms in early 2021.”
“We’ve demonstrated this past fall that by implementing an aggressive strategy to manage COVID, students can safely return to campus. These additional efforts—testing all students upon return, ongoing testing throughout the semester, pushing out the start of the spring semester, and mandatory masks at all times, coupled with uniform enforcement and compliance—illustrates that SUNY is setting a nationwide standard for controlling COVID-19 in the weeks and months to come,” Malatras added.
The SUNY school system already announced that the current semester will be exclusively online, shuttering in-person learning, after Thanksgiving, due to widespread concern that another uptick will be inevitable during the winter months.
SUNY said it has conducted more than 370,000 coronavirus tests since August, with a positive rate of only .48 percent. Still the announced measures will be taken as precautions to slow the spread. In addition to the rules stated above, SUNY added that in February, any school that hits either 100 “active’’ cases or a positive-test rate of more than 5 percent for two weeks will move to remote learning for two weeks.
In the end of August, SUNY’s campus in upstate Oneonta had such an occurrence. Just after the first week of classes at Oneonta it was shut after over 100 students and teachers there tested positive for coronavirus, following a series of large back-to-school parties. Roughly 3 percent of the campus’s 3000 students and teachers tested positive, leading the school to close for two weeks and to suspend five party-starting students.
