UNC students COVID, UNC-Chapel Hill reverses plans for in-person classes

 UNC students COVID, UNC-Chapel Hill reverses plans for in-person classes.

UNC-Chapel Hill will move all undergraduate classes online starting Wednesday after 130 more students tested positive for the coronavirus last week, the university announced Monday.

Graduate, professional and health affairs students taking in-person classes will continue with those, UNC officials said.

The announcement follows four COVID-19 clusters reported in three days in dorms, apartments and a fraternity house. UNC has reported 324 confirmed cases — 279 students and 45 staff members — since February, according to its online dashboard.

Those numbers may not reflect all the cases related to campus. Health officials have said students who provide an out-of-town home address or don’t self-report a positive test at a non-UNC-affiliated testing site are not immediately counted in Orange County.

“As of this morning, we have tested 954 students (last week) and have 177 in isolation and 349 in quarantine, both on and off campus,” Chancellor Kevin Guskiewicz and Provost Bob Blouin said in a news release. “So far, we have been fortunate that most students who have tested positive have demonstrated mild symptoms.”

UNC data showed 13.6% of the 954 students tested last week were positive — nearly twice the percentage testing positive in the previous three weeks.

The administration expects more students will want to move off campus with the switch to remote learning, they said in the release, but students without reliable internet service, international students, student-athletes and those with other needs can remain.

The UE150, N.C. Public Service Workers Union responded to the university’s decision with a statement, saying administration officials “gambled that they could contain a spread until tuition bills were locked in and lost miserably.”

The decision to move classes online “has come entirely too late,” said the union, which sued the UNC System on Aug. 10 on behalf of housekeepers, professors and other staff.

“It is a decision that the administration has taken on only reluctantly as a reaction to the mess they’ve created and the amount of national negative coverage they’ve received for failing to take even the tiniest amount of consideration,” the union said.

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