Dear Bereans,<\/p>\n
This is the update for Monday, August 16, 2021.\u00a0\u00a0 We are delighted to have welcomed 385 new students to Berea College, 345 incoming first-year students and 40 transfers.\u00a0 We are so pleased to have you here and are hoping that your first weeks at Berea go very well.<\/p>\n
As of today, we have four on-campus students in precautionary quarantine, but no positive tests.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 None of those cases seems serious, but quarantines will currently run through this week and into the next.\u00a0 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.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0\u00a0 For non-PFE employees, our percentage is now 90%, also up by 1%.\u00a0 Well done, Bereans!<\/p>\n
[Repeating this thought from last week because it is so important\u2026]\u00a0 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.\u00a0 We are getting there!\u00a0 Unfortunately, in our county and state, the percentages are much lower, so outbreaks off campus will almost certainly continue.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n