On Sept. 14, a campus-wide email announced that the Furman Focused team had posted a new update to the COVID-19 Dashboard. Over the past week, there has been an increase in positive student diagnoses, both on- and off-campus. The new dashboard also included information about Greenville County’s case numbers. Additionally, at the top of the updated dashboard, there is a cumulative tally of positive cases for students and employees since August 12. The figure currently stands at 49 cases.
The Dashboard shows that 13 on-campus students were tested since Sept. 7, resulting in 8 positive cases. The utilization of on-campus isolation and quarantine spaces remains at 7%, but the number of students in quarantine on campus has increased to 16. This suggests that some students are be allowed to quarantine in their dorms or apartments rather than being forced to move into a separate, isolated quarantine dorm. Although only 6 students are currently quarantining off campus, this does not reflect the second- and third-year students who tested positive for COVID-19 prior to returning to campus between Sept. 11-13 and are still at home.
In addition to updating the dashboard, Furman informed community members that among all of the returning second and third year students who were required to take a PCR test prior to moving in, there was a 1.4% positivity rate. This positivity rate is significantly higher than the 0.024% rate observed among on-campus students (mostly first-years and fourt-years) after campus-wide tests on Friday, Sept. 4.
Administration officials previously shared that the University is monitoring “critical guidelines from CDC, SC DHEC, and our on-campus clinicians and health experts,” and this week’s Dashboard update featured Greenville County disease metrics reported by the South Carolina Department of Health and Environmental Control (SC DHEC). The stats reflected an increase in the two-week cumulative incidence rate, which indicates a rise in “the number of new COVID-19 cases in the last two weeks per 100,000 individuals.” Although the current incidence rate of 199.2 is classified as “medium” by SC DHEC, any rate equal or greater than 200 is classified as “high.” Similarly, the two-week percent positive rate, the “percent of individuals who tested positive out of the number of individuals who were tested,” also increased from 12.7% to 15.1%. Any two-week positive percent rate equal or greater than 10.0% is classified as “high” by the SC DHEC.
