Hunter Oberst
News Editor
Keene State reported 14 total active COVID-19 cases and an incident rate of 0.27% as of March 18.
Out of those 14 cases, five are on-campus students and nine are students that live off campus. The college still remains in green/yellow operational status.
Construction Clerk of the Works Colin Burdick said the numbers appear to be on a downward slope, although the college’s COVID management team remains vigilant.
“There tend to be blips in the cases around certain dates like the Superbowl and with St. Patrick’s day. We’re still holding our breath,” Burdick said.
Burdick added that he’s worried St. Patrick’s day may result in more positive cases due to students wanting to socialize and go to bars. Director of Strategic Communications and Community Relations Kelly Ricaurte is also concerned.
“It’s a time people like to get together,” Ricaurte said. “I’m worried. I’m optimistic but things can change at any time.”
Keene State will know the post-St. Patrick’s Day testing results by the end of the following weekend, but President Melinda Treadwell is confident said she drove around town over the holiday and did not see much activity. Treadwell added that on St. Patrick’s Day, the only activity of note was a group of seven socializing in a campus double dorm on where the capacity limit is four.on campus. That group was broken up within 15 minutes, Treadwell said.
President Treadwell said she is proud the college has been able to maintain low incident rates, especially as surrounding areas are increasing. Treadwell said the City of Keene is at over 8.4% positivity.
“I’m worried about the city bringing case counts up, but we haven’t seen that yet,” Treadwell said. “If we were going to see a lot of spillover, we would have seen it by now. Off-campus students are doing a lot to keep themselves and the community safe.”
Treadwell added that she thinks spring weather and increased vaccination in the community will work to lower the risk of COVID-19 on campus.
“As it gets warmer the risk is less significant because people will go outside,” Treadwell said. “If we can make it past St. Patrick’s Day, we will have an increasingly better semester and with more people being vaccinated, we will have increased protection in the area. I’m confident but I’m not overconfident.”
A trend being seen for Keene’s spring semester is most viral infection is occurring among off-campus students. Burdick said a common question he’s getting from staff and faculty is that with the college in green/yellow operational status, why is the college not starting to go remote? Burdick said that when most cases are happening off-campus as opposed to on-campus, locking down the school won’t accomplish much.
“How does locking down the campus make it safer when not much is happening there?” Burdick said. “It won’t change on-campus because we’re not seeing it.
By going remote, off-campus students might have more opportunity to socialize with them not having to attend in-person classes. Plymouth [State University] needed to lockdown because they had on-campus spread. We don’t have much on-campus spread.”
Hunter Oberst can be contacted at:
news@kscequinox.com
