VERMILLION, SD – COVID-19 infections are on the rise on university campuses across the state. University of South Dakota (USD) President Sheila Gestring says they are now sharing as much infection information as they can. “We want to keep health and safety top of mind. And we have to be very conscious of confidentiality. We want to make sure we’re protecting the privacy of students, faculty and staff.
USD recently developed a dashboard that tracks and reports infection information now shows four employees and 94 students with active infections. There are also 406 students in quarantine or isolation.
Gestring says they are working with a constantly changing infection model. “In that model, it gave us some capacity numbers in terms of what we would need. That’s built on spread rate, and what we would expect the infection rate to be. We’re also finding that students here are more social than the national data indicates. We almost doubled that number compared to what we estimated in the model.”
Gestring says they have also reached out to the community for help when students leave the campus. “We’re a small community here. We work together with others like the Chamber of Commerce, Sanford Health and local community agencies on joint messaging.”
A facemask mandate has been imposed on the USD campus for all students, employees and visitors.
