Dear Truman Faculty, Staff, and Students,
As we predicted last week, the numbers this week are high. Too high.
Here’s an 9-minute video where we go into it.
We’re seeing the cases continue to bloom from a number of “spreader” events that occurred at the beginning of the semester. One bright spot is that our contact tracing continues to be able to track cases within 12-24 hours, so we think we may have a handle on the current outbreak. This number of cases is still well within our capacity to handle on campus, but this level of growth is not sustainable, so we need to make sure that we don’t have additional events that spread cases to multiple people.
Live Super Bowl parties are a VERY BAD idea. We know the Chiefs are playing on Sunday, but we just cannot say this enough ways. A live football party hits all the boxes: different pods of people close to each other for an extended time, eating, drinking, shouting at the screen. A virtual party where you each watch the game together with others from your own house sounds less fun (it probably is), but it’s a much better idea.
We have heard reports that a handful of faculty aren’t following COVID protocols in their classroom, and we want to encourage everyone to follow the protocols. We know it’s a lot to ask, and that we’re all tired of doing this for so long, but we need to get through to the light at the end of the tunnel.
We still don’t know when the vaccine will be widely available for those of us on campus, but we do continue to encourage you to get vaccinated as soon as you can.
==
Although we aim these videos and sheets for faculty and staff, please do share this information or the video with students in your classes, with parents, and elsewhere. This information is shared with all students via Blackboard page and sent directly to all Truman faculty and staff, and shared on our public web page here:
https://www.truman.edu/coronavirus/covid-19-working-group-videos/
If you have questions or topics you’d like to know more about, please contact us at: ndmoore@truman.edu
-Faculty Senate COVID-19 Working Group
Nancy Daley-Moore, PhD, Health Science
Christine Harker, PhD, English
Scott Alberts, PhD, Statistics