Penn State on Tuesday reported 91 new COVID-19 positives among students and two among employees, marking a continued decline and the second consecutive update with fewer than 100 new cases.
The new positives reported in the university’s semi-weekly COVID-19 dashboard update bring the the campus community’s total to 3,548 since Aug. 7, including seven employee cases. However, only 195 of those are still considered active.
“We are seeing the number of positive test results continuing to decline among our students at University Park, but the next month is critical as we are seeing the number of cases of COVID-19 increase in Pennsylvania and across the country,” Kelly Wolgast, director of Penn State’s COVID-19 Operations Control Center, said in a statement. “As temperatures grow colder and we enter flu season, we need to do all we can to prevent us from facing both COVID-19 and influenza. I strongly encourage everyone in our community to get the flu vaccine and we must continue taking health precautions, including wearing masks, social distancing and avoiding large gatherings.”
Between Friday and Sunday, on-demand testing yielded 33 student positives from 264 completed tests, with another 87 awaiting results. There were no positives from 615 completed on-demand tests, though another 203 are still pending.
For the week of Oct. 9-15, 58 additional student positives — 55 from on-demand tests and three from random screening — were reported from tests that had still been pending at the time of the last update on Friday. For that week there was a total of 193 positives — 184 from 2,060 completed on-demand tests and nine from 3,046 completed random screening tests.
Two employees also tested positive from 437 random screening tests between Oct. 9-15.
According to the updated dashboard, 52 students are currently in on-campus isolation and 48 are in on-campus quarantine, down from 91 and 59, respectively, on Friday. University Park has 250 rooms available for isolation, 150 for quarantine and another 140 available if needed. Students may also isolate and quarantine at home or if they have suitable space off-campus residence, according to the university.
Many of the newly reported university cases have likely already appeared in the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s daily COVID-19 reporting for Centre County. Penn State updates its dashboard only twice a week, and the health department does not distinguish student testing results in publicly available data, so it’s unclear when exactly cases have been added to the DOH totals.
Centre County has seen a downward trend in new cases corresponding with Penn State’s decline.
For the first time in six weeks, Centre County does not have the highest COVID-19 incidence rate in the state over the past seven days, according to the health department’s early-warning monitoring dashboard, which is updated on Fridays. For the week of Oct. 9-15, the county’s incidence rate was 188.0 per 100,000 people, third highest in Pennsylvania and down from 264.1 the previous week.
The county’s positivity rate for the last week was 5.6%, according to the DOH dashboard, down from 7.8% and 14th in the state.
COVID-19 hospitalizations at Mount Nittany Medical Center, however, have trended higher. As of Monday morning, 13 COVID patients are currently hospitalized, while in late September the average daily COVID inpatient census was between six and eight.
Mount Nittany continues to operate under the surge capacity plan activated on Oct. 9, including the rescheduling of non-essential/elective procedures and surgeries that require an overnight admission at the Medical Center.
Last week 2% of emergency department visits were due to COVID-like illness, up from 1.7% the previous seven days.
