In Sept., The University of Wyoming released an announcement about the indicators that the school would use to guide their COVID-19 response. This set of indicators also included the potential tactics that would be used.
“We don’t have any automatic triggers anymore. Indicators are things they’re monitoring daily, but there’s nothing that says ‘if we hit this many indicators, we go online.’ That doesn’t exist,” said Chad Baldwin, Director of Institutional Communications.
Baldwin continued and explained the purpose of the COVID indicators for the university.
“All those indicators inform the decision of the President; on what to do… Some of them got to a point that he put out that pretty strongly worded message, really pleading with people to wear masks and socially distance. Some of that was really based upon what he was seeing with the indicators,” said Chad Baldwin, Director of Institutional Communications.
According to the email sent out on Oct. 3 by President Seidel urging the community to take action, UW is meeting several thresholds in the set of indicators. 3 of the 11 listed thresholds are being met.
These indicators include increases in the seven-day rolling average of total cases, total cases per day over two consecutive days, and the number of new symptomatic cases per day.
“They’re watching very closely the total cases, the total active cases, and if you look at those numbers, they’ve been fluctuating… The one they’re also watching closely is the availability of quarantine and isolation housing,” said Baldwin.
President Seidel also stated in his email that UW was reaching the threshold for capacity of on-campus isolation and quarantine housing.
According to Baldwin, though UW recently added more housing, they do not have the ability to continue to do so every time capacity is almost reached.
“I don’t think we have an unlimited ability to just keep adding housing; we don’t have that ability. But one of the things to keep in mind with housing of course, because we are testing asymptomatic people – we’re getting people who are testing positive but don’t exhibit symptoms – even those people’s close contacts have to be quarantined,” said Baldwin.
“We are being very, very aggressive – much more than just about all other schools, we’re quarantining people who maybe wouldn’t be quarantined at other schools… The good news is that what we have in place now, seems to be sufficient.”
According to Baldwin, UW will be continuing their COVID-19 Surveillance Testing in the coming weeks.
According to a UW Communications email sent out today, Oct. 12, the UW Board of Trustees will be updated on the campus’ COVID-19 response via a teleconference on Wednesday, Oct. 14.
