Logan Ramsey
News Editor
Despite COVID-19 cases confirmed with both faculty and students over the summer, the Idaho State University campus reopened for the Fall 2020 semester last week. Students from all over the state, country and world returned to a slightly different campus with an uncertain semester ahead.
Incoming Freshman didn’t march through the arch en masse as is tradition. Instead they donned face coverings, lathered their hands with sanitizer and marched on their own if they chose to.
“Although the University can never eliminate all risks, a team of professionals has been working nonstop since the end of the spring semester to ensure that we were ready to safely welcome students back to campus,” said Stuart Summers, ISU Associate Vice President.
A total of 35 cases have been confirmed on the Pocatello campus with one case on the Meridian campus. There’s been two off-campus cases confirmed and none on the Idaho Falls campus. Along with one case labeled “experimental,” the total number of ISU COVID-19 cases comes out to 39.
The cases are reported on the ISU Roaring Back: University Rebound Plan webpage, which is updated weekly. The last update to the case count was on August 18.
Roaring Back also shows the operational level of alert for the University, with Green, Yellow, Orange and Red categories. ISU is at level Yellow, meaning that professors have to be prepared to transfer to distance-based instruction. If the level moves up to Orange, courses will move entirely online with exceptions approved through the COVID-19 Health Committee.
ISU encourages students to visit Roaring Back to find updated information on their pandemic response efforts. By the time this article is published, Roaring Back will have been updated to reflect any possible new cases and the current operational level.
“In talking to students over the last couple of months, we have learned––and overwhelmingly heard––that they are eager to continue their education in person,” Summers said.
The University decided to reopen with the hybrid approach and offer in-person classes that can also be accessed via Zoom. The classrooms have been socially distanced, students are required to wear face masks and sanitizer stations have been placed all over campus.
According to Rex Force, Vice President for Health Sciences, social distancing and face masks are the “cornerstone” of COVID-19 mitigation.
“When you look at disease mitigation with COVID, distancing and face coverings are among the most effective things to decrease transmission of the illness,” Force said.
Among the mitigation efforts that are readily visible to students, the University is working with the Southeastern Idaho Public Health Department to implement contact tracing, where contacts of confirmed cases are tracked down, a proactive approach.
“We have a very close, basically, hand in glove relationship with the health department,” Force said. ISU contacts the health department multiple times a day and has the ability to utilize their systems.
Another proactive measure the University took was to introduce new cleaning protocols, which Force compared to a “fogging” procedure.
“All of these efforts have put us in a markedly different position than in the spring, where proactive and precautionary risk mitigation was not immediately available,” Summers said.
On July 21, a total of 20 news cases were reported, up from four new cases the week prior. The jump was attributed to a delay in test processing. Two case clusters were identified, one in athletics and one in campus housing.
ISU hasn’t seen a jump in cases like that since July, but Idaho’s testing volume is still lagging behind the levels it needs to be at. While Southeast Idaho has had the ability to test symptomatic cases and some contacts, testing for asymptomatic cases has not been possible.
While no state has a perfect testing framework, Idaho ranks near the bottom out of the whole country in testing conducted per 100,000 people.
According to Force, ISU is using state funds to acquire a COVID-19 PCR Test, which is a “state-of-the-art” testing machine that is able to identify the genetic footprint of samples. Force said it would increase Eastern Idaho’s testing volume to 500 tests per day, which the region is not meeting currently. Both Southeast Idaho and Eastern Idaho Public Health Departments are engaged in this project.
This would increase ISU’s ability to test students living on and off campus. Force said they’re focused on testing students living on campus because cases there could spread rapidly.
“If you’re going to test an entire campus, you have to do it repeatedly,” Force said.
Force said the best thing for a possibly infected student to do is get tested through the University Health Center.
Force can’t speculate on how likely or unlikely it is that campus will close to in-person classes again this semester, but he does know that not everyone is doing their part to mitigate the disease, especially young people who don’t feel threatened.
“While we know that in young people this virus is not particularly likely to cause severe infections, it does in rare cases and there are people who are very fit and young who have had very dramatic and very adverse outcomes from COVID infection,” Force said.
This means that students need to wear their face masks, even when walking outside with a group, and maintain social distance.
“If we do not do better as a society and as a campus community in terms of these disease mitigation activities, disease could spread, and if it spreads that’s very concerning and we would move into one of these other operational categories,” Force said.
