Four positive COVID-19 coronavirus cases in a nursing class at Mississippi University for Women this week prompted an investigation from Mississippi State Department of Health, MUW President Nora Miller confirmed Wednesday.
Two students tested positive on Tuesday, the day after classes started, and the university soon identified others who had been in close contact with the students, Miller said. Two more students have since tested positive, one on Tuesday and one on Wednesday, according to MUW’s online COVID-19 tracker.
All four positive cases are asymptomatic, and they and the other 71 students in the nursing class are all quarantining for 14 days while the class will be taught online, according to a Wednesday press release from MUW.
“Our normal procedures would have been instructing those close contacts to quarantine, but (MSDH) said that because these cases were all within a certain cohort, three or four cases trigger treating it as an outbreak, and that requires quarantine of everyone,” Miller said.
Contract tracing has shown that the spread of the virus “apparently did not occur on our campus,” let alone in the nursing classroom, she said.
Some of the students have moved into the residence hall MUW designated specifically for quarantine. Miller said the building has about 22 rooms.
The university has recommended COVID-19 testing for all students in the nursing class, and while MUW has limited testing resources, MSDH will send a team to campus Monday to administer some tests to the quarantined students, Miller said.
All four students who tested positive were on campus within a week before receiving the diagnosis, according to the tracker. Students who live on campus spent last week moving into residence halls, but Miller said the four COVID-positive students all live off-campus.
MUW implemented social distancing and a protective face covering requirement for students’ return to campus, according to its website. Miller said administration is working closely with state health officer Dr. Thomas Dobbs to keep campus as safe as possible.
“Unfortunately, we knew we were going to have COVID on campus coming back, and we’re following our procedures and working through it,” she said.
As of 6 p.m. Tuesday, Lowndes County has 1,167 confirmed positive COVID-19 cases and 47 deaths, including one new death on Tuesday, according to the MSDH website.
MSDH did not respond to a request for comment Thursday morning.
Tess Vrbin was previously a reporter for The Dispatch.
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