A huge COVID outbreak has shut down Cornell University's campus — and could be a sign of what’s to come
Photo: Jay Yuan/Shutterstock When Emmah Bashir heard on Tuesday that Cornell University would be shutting down campus due to an explosion in COVID-19 cases including Omicron, she started to retrace her steps over the last week. Bashir, a junior, hadn’t gone out much, but she had sat for an in-person exam. Still, she’d tested negative as recently as Sunday.
After taking the at-home test, Bashir walked 20 minutes to the campus health center where she took another COVID-19 test. Though Bashir hasn’t gotten the results yet, she assumes she is going to be among the hundreds of positive cases identified on Cornell’s campus in recent days. After a quiet semester with few positive cases between about 40,000 students, faculty, and staff, the university recorded nearly 1,200 cases in the past week, according to the school’s COVID-19 dashboard.
Cornell isn’t the only school to take action in the face of Omicron. Princeton University, Middlebury College, DePaul University, and Southern New Hampshire University have all switched to remote learning for at least the rest of the winter semester. But Cornell stands out for doing so after identifying rapid transmission of the virus on its campus. This is the first time the school has been on alert level red since students moved back to campus in the fall of 2020.
Senior Anuli Ononye’s parents flew her and her brother, who is also a student at Cornell, home to California as soon as they heard about the recent rise in cases. “I think a lot of it has to do with students going home for Thanksgiving because cases were a lot lower before,” said Ononye.
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