Dear Bereans,

This is the campus update for Monday, October 4, 2021.

Quarantine, testing and vaccination update

Starting with the good news, as of today, we have no on-campus students in any sort of quarantine.  As to on-campus employees, we have one new positive test in FM.  The infection appears to have been acquired off campus, and no other employees are needing to quarantine at this point.  (The employee is vaccinated, so this is a breakthrough case, a good reminder for all of us to continue to exercise care even if we are vaccinated.)

Our overall employee vaccination percentage remains at 89%, and, for non-PFE employees, our percentage rounds to 91%, up one percent from last week.  Let’s keep going; we can continue to improve!

Kentucky and Madison County update

Facebook and Instagram had an extended outage today, so I had to go directly to the Madison County Health Department for the numbers.  Madison County had a total of 465 new cases for the week ending yesterday.  This is down by about 200 from last week and lowers the average number of new cases per day to 66, well off last week’s record-setting number.  We are still far into the Red Zone, now at about 57 cases per day per 100,000 persons.  The department also reports that at this point 49.5% of county residents have been fully vaccinated, up by 0.6% from last week.  Unfortunately, although the number of new cases is decreasing, the total number of deaths in the county attributable to COVID-19 as reported by the State has again increased, this week by eleven(!), sadly even worse than last week, and now stands at 144.

Kentucky reported 19,939 new cases for the week ending today for an average of 2,848 cases/day, down by about 10% from last week’s number.  The Commonwealth has reported 240 deaths over the last week for an average number of deaths/day of 47.  This is substantially up from last week, consistent as usual with the fact that deaths lag new cases by several weeks!  The latest test positivity rate has decreased to 9.31%.  Although we are still far from being out of the Delta-woods, at least new cases and the test positivity rate are moving in the right direction.

Vaccination policy at other colleges and universities

As of this morning, the Chronicle of Higher Education lists 1,058 schools that are requiring vaccination in the current term, an increase of 5 schools over last week.

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