Some UNE Students Are Quarantined In Their Dorm Due To COVID
Remember over the summer, everyone predicted a surge of COVID was going to pop so we all got super cautious and it never happened? I think that hurt us a bit, honestly -- because not a lot of people believed the predicted surge that would happen in the fall, yet here it is.
According to a report from WMTW this morning, one entire dorm of students at the University of New England have been quarantined (and basically put on lockdown inside of the building) after three students tested positive for Coronavirus.
Those three students have been sent home for quarantine, but since it's believed that the exposure happened at an off-campus event, everyone else exposed has to be monitored, too, the news station stated.
If there's any silver lining to this whole situation -- it sounds like everyone that could've been exposed to those three positive-testing students are all residents of Featherman Hall, so it makes it a bit easy to isolate the exposure for a couple of weeks.
According to that WMTW report, the students (all first-year, since Featherman is a freshman dorm) will be quarantined until at least next Tuesday, and testing for the residents will start next Friday.
Even though they're not allowed to leave the building or have visitors, meals are still being prepared for those students, but inside of the dorm, the news station added. There are also two classrooms inside the building, but they've been closed down and those students have been rocking the whole remote learning option for classes, according to WMTW.
To bring it back around to the start of this article where I said the whole predicted surge over the summer that never came hurt us -- I think we've gotten SUPER lax on keeping up with prevention. Personally, I was hopeful it would be another false alarm prediction of a surge, but we were way more careful with the first predicted surge.
This is actually the second reported incident at UNE in two months -- WMTW mentions in their report that in late August, three different students tested positive for COVID after gathering off-campus to watch a basketball game. And of those three, one of them wasn't even watching the game with the other two.
Honestly, I know we're all sick and tired of masks, over the COVID thing, and just ready to get back to a normal life -- but buckle in kids, we're in this for the long haul at this rate. If we're seeing a surge basically from school picking back up, just wait until holidays like Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas/Hanukkah, and New Year's come around. We'll get through it, but we have to get smarter about it.
Stay safe out there!