Bowling Green State University has had 62 new cases of COVID-19 reported from Sept. 1 through Sept. 8, according to the university’s COVID-19 dashboard. Last week 38 new cases were reported.
All the reported cases, not all of whom live in Wood County, are students, and 87 percent of those students live off campus.
This brings the total number of cases at BGSU since March 1 to 138, of whom 130 are students and eight are faculty.
The university now has one student who is COVID positive isolated in university housing, and nine students who are being monitored for COVID quarantined in residence halls.
In his remarks on YouTube, Chief Health Officer Ben Batey told students that if they have been exposed to COVID-19 they must remain quarantined for 14 days, even if they test negative, because symptoms could present themselves at any point during that time. “You cannot test out of quarantine,” he said.
Anyone in the campus community should contact their primary care doctor or the Falcon Health Center if they have symptoms.
The university is also doing random tests of people who have no symptoms nor have been exposed to COVID-19. In the past week, 82 of these randomized surveillance tests have been done and have found two cases, a 2.4 positivity rate. Since March 1, the university has conducted 502 tests and have identified eight cases, all students. That is a 1.6 percent positivity rate.
Batey has said that the university will be increasing the amount of surveillance testing in coming weeks, including expanding it to the Firelands campus.
