Dear Bereans,

This is the update for Monday, August 16, 2021.   We are delighted to have welcomed 385 new students to Berea College, 345 incoming first-year students and 40 transfers.  We are so pleased to have you here and are hoping that your first weeks at Berea go very well.

Quarantine, testing and vaccination update

As of today, we have four on-campus students in precautionary quarantine, but no positive tests.  As to on-campus employees, we do have some positive cases quarantining, one on the faculty (Draper Hall), one in PFE (Corbin, so not actually on campus), one in Forestry, and one in Marketing and Communication.  None of those cases seems serious, but quarantines will currently run through this week and into the next.  All cases likely result from off-campus exposure; we also have four close contacts, but only one of those four was due to a campus contact.

We continue to make good progress on vaccination and are at about 86% among employees (up by 1%) who have documented their fully vaccinated status.   For non-PFE employees, our percentage is now 90%, also up by 1%.  Well done, Bereans!

[Repeating this thought from last week because it is so important…]  Because of the heightened contagiousness of the delta variant, epidemiologists believe that we will need to be in the 85% – 95% range of vaccination percentage to limit the likelihood of an outbreak on campus.  We are getting there!  Unfortunately, in our county and state, the percentages are much lower, so outbreaks off campus will almost certainly continue.

Kentucky and Madison County update

The Madison County Health Department reported a total of 336 new cases for the week ending on Sunday.  The 7-day average of new cases per day has increased significantly again to 48, which puts us further into the Red Zone at 51 new cases per day per 100,000 residents.  The department also reports that at this point 43.9% of county residents have been fully vaccinated, an increase of 0.8% over last week.  The total number of deaths in the county attributable to COVID-19 as reported by the State remains at 113.  The local positivity rate has increased to 11.6%.  A significant outbreak is occurring in neighboring Rockcastle County, where the hospital capacity has been exceeded with 28 new cases.

Kentucky reported 18,720 new cases for the 7 days ending today for a 7-day average of 2,674 cases/day, an increase by about 30% over last week’s number.  The Commonwealth has reported 64 deaths over the last seven days for an average number of deaths/day of 9, a 50% increase over last week.  The latest test positivity rate is 12.4%, and that also keeps going up.

Vaccination policy at other colleges and universities

As of this morning, the Chronicle of Higher Education lists 730 schools that will require vaccination in the fall. This is another large increase from last week, by over 60 schools.

A Berea College alumna discusses giving care to dying COVID-19 patients

Kaitlyn Reasoner graduated from Berea College in 2016 and went on to medical school at Vanderbilt University.  She graduated last year and is now completing her second year of residency in internal medicine at the Vanderbilt Medical Center.  This means that she is working in the hospital with patients, in her case in the ICU with patients dying of COVID-19.  Kaitlyn wrote a short piece about this experience in The Pharos, the publication of Alpha Omega Alpha, the honor society for medical students.  The piece is entitled “Call History,” and it is attached in the form of a .pdf.  It is a haunting account that makes VERY real the trauma experienced by COVID-19 patients, by their families, and by the medical staff caring for them.  This one was a very tough read for me; it makes me sad to think of such a nice person having to take on such heartbreaking challenges.  Even though it will be a tough read for you, too, I recommend that you take it on.

Stay safe, get vaccinated, stay in touch,
Lyle Roelofs, President
Berea College