01-31-2021, 08:04 PM
mrbigstuff wrote:
Are you saying that hundreds of students tested positive or that the cumulative testing of students accounted for 25% of positives? That's a huge difference that isn't clear from your post.
Hundreds of students tested positive, a bit over 500 from off campus and about 2 dozen on campus as I recall from watching the campus's page reporting on this. This reports cases since early August when UMass started asymptomatic testing. This would be a period ending the weekend before Thanksgiving when classes ended.
During that period from other sources the daily rate of positives for Hampshire County could be seen. Typically Umass was reporting a number that was a quarter to a third of the number for the whole county from about the middle of September to that point in mid-November when most students went home.
The county wide reports might be low from persons with mild cases who did not get themselves tested or go to a doctor. But basically for about a 2 month period UMass students were about a quarter of all reported cases during that period.
That mid-September time is when cases among off campus students started rising, they had been low for a few weeks in the beginning. Part of that came from a single student coming up to visit friends for a weekend, and then they went out to party. Social media posts from others familiar with the group involved indicated after the weekend the student went home and was diagnosed as positive that Monday. About 50 student cases could be traced back to that single person. Other parties during that same period accounted for another 50. Cases did get back to near zero by mid-October, but started climbing again.
To get up to date, for the last week the rate of infected in Hampshire County has averaged just over 40 cases a day. The average at UMass for positives for the 7 day period ending the 27th is 12. Students started moving in on the 21st. There have been 67 cases, mostly students, since the 21st, ad about 20 of those were from the on campus students. They do have isolation housing for those who test positive, but it may not be clear how many others were exposed in each case.
Edit: I found the total case count for Hampshire County since the pandemic started last January, about 5600. The total for UMass Amherst is about 830, but for much of that time it did not have students present on or off campus. That is still about 14% of all cases in the county, just over 700 of those cases were students.
