No move to remote learning, as Penn State adds 272 covid cases since last update

A week after Penn State President Eric Barron said he would consider moving the university to remote learning, he announced Friday that such a move was not yet necessary.

The announcement came on the heels of Friday’s updated COVID-19 dashboard, which showed 272 new cases of the coronavirus at University Park since Tuesday’s update. That brings the total number of cases involving students and employees at Penn State’s main campus to 688.

“At this time, we do not need to change our current modality and hybrid on-campus approach,” Barron said in a written statement. “The university is monitoring the number of positive and negative cases — and other variables critical to our decision-making — including isolation and quarantine capacity, hospitalizations, locational data, transmission from student cases to employees and community prevalence, to name a few.

“Mitigations in our armamentarium include pausing in-person instruction and quarantining a specific program or unit, as we have done with nursing, for example.”

According to data from the dashboard, from last Friday to Thursday, 260 students were positive from 1,571 on-demand tests with results, and another 28 students were positive from 1,764 random-screened tests. Results are pending for 428 on-demand tests since Aug. 28 and 1,135 total random-screened tests.

A University Park employee also became the first to test positive, out of 58 random-screened tests with results this week.

There are currently 132 students in on-campus isolation and another 77 in on-campus quarantine, numbers that have decreased overall from Tuesday. (The numbers for the last update were 149 and 76, respectively.)