Dear Bereans,

This is the campus update for Monday, September 20, 2021.

Quarantine, testing and vaccination update

As of today, we have just one on-campus student in precautionary quarantine (at home).

As to on-campus employees, we have just one staff member (Stephenson Hall) who has tested positive and is quarantining.   We have one CDL employee who is quarantining as a close contact due to cases within that individual’s family.

Our overall employee vaccination percentage remains at 88%, and, for non-PFE employees, our percentage again rounds to 90%.  Let’s keep going; we can do even better.  The Delta surge may or may not be plateauing, but Madison County has had a very difficult week.

COVID-19 POLICIES FOR BEREA COLLEGE EMPLOYEES have been revised as of Tuesday, September 14, 2021

These are worth a careful read by all employees.  The important changes include: requiring CDL employee vaccinations; and changes to reflect the Request for Temporary Adjusted Work Accommodation process.  The latter was released last week.

Kentucky and Madison County update

The Madison County Health Department reported a total of 978 new cases for the week ending yesterday.  This brings the average number of new cases per day up to 140, the largest number ever.  Last week’s decrease seems to have been an aberration, with Labor Day and school activities probably playing an important role.  We are still far into the Red Zone, now at about 139 cases per day per 100,000 persons.  The department also reports that at this point, 48.3% of county residents have been fully vaccinated, up by 1.4% from last week.  Unfortunately, the total number of deaths in the county attributable to COVID-19 as reported by the State has again increased, this week by two, and now stands at 126.

Kentucky reported 27,932 new cases for the week ending today for an average of 3990 cases/day, down by 3.5% from last week’s number.  The Commonwealth has reported 268 deaths over the last week for an average number of deaths/day of 38.  The death rate is not yet decreasing, which always happens since deaths lag diagnoses by several weeks.  The latest test positivity rate is 12.18%, which is finally going down.  The overall Kentucky data overall looks to me like we have reached a plateau, unlike the Madison County data, which took quite a leap in the wrong direction.

Vaccination policy at other colleges and universities

As of this morning, the Chronicle of Higher Education lists 1,033 schools that will require vaccination in the fall, an increase of 10 schools over last week.

Message from an alum

Dr. Mee Yang is an alumna, a bio major from the class of 2004 who went on to medical school and is now an M.D. practicing at a small hospital in Oroville, CA.  Prof. Ron Rosen noticed the following Facebook post from her last week:

Finally OUT OF QUARANTINE JAIL – AGAIN.

I HATE COVID. I very much dislike COVID naysayers and selfish, entitled people too.

I had COVID in 11/2020, right before Thanksgiving.  I got my Pfizer vaccine towards the end of January and early February.

I finished a 13-day work stretch recently and felt a little tired. Figured it was from working 13 days, in the hospital, taking care of mostly COVID patients.  To be careful, I got checked.  COVID positive AGAIN. And with young kids, of course there was NO WAY to quarantine from my 5 kids. They ALL TESTED POSITIVE too.

I thank God for protecting my parents/brothers/sister and sister-in-law who were helping me watch my kids while I worked those 13 shifts.  They tested negative.

I thank God for keeping my kids and me safe and only giving us mild symptoms.

At least 5 of the people I took care of during those 13 days have died.  I asked the vaccinated patients I took care of if they regret taking the vaccine since they ended up getting COVID anyway.  Their answer was, “no” because they know they could’ve been much sicker had they not been vaccinated.  I asked the many COVID patients I took care of who were not vaccinated if they wished they would’ve taken the vaccine- they all said “Yes” they wished they would’ve.

I have seen friends and family post of people they know who have died recently from COVID.  COVID does not care if you’re young or old, if you have a large family who is depending on you or who loves you, if you have multiple comorbid conditions or are healthy at baseline. Young and otherwise healthy people are dying from COVID too.

I’m asking again to PLEASE VACCINATE, it’s not a 100% guarantee you won’t get COVID – obviously, I got it. But it will likely make your course less severe. Don’t be the stories we hear of people who didn’t think it would happen to them and who end up from their death bed telling people to vaccinate.

Continue to MASK.

Continue to be careful.

I checked with her to see if it was OK for me to share with all of you.  Her response, “It would be an honor for the message to be shared with the campus community.”

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