Ohio University Graduate Student Senate started its meeting Tuesday with an update from Gillian Ice, special assistant to the president for public health operations, following a recent spike in COVID-19 cases on campus.
Ice spoke about the current campus infection rate and said COVID Operations has gone from a high of 400 incident reports in its inbox to about 30. She reported that a few days ago there were no positive tests, and the current coronavirus positivity rate is below 2%, down from 8% at the height of campus infection.
“(The spike) really was burdening our system,” Ice said. “So we did some things to catch us up and to be in a little bit better situation … We hired on five new people, we reallocated some of the staff that we had existing to help directly serve students, and did some things with our processing that were a little bit more efficient than we typically would do.”
Further, Ice explained about 37% of the cases the university is seeing on campus are breakthrough cases or positive cases that come from vaccinated individuals. Despite that, she reported the unvaccinated population at OU is 3.7 times more likely to contract COVID-19 than a vaccinated individual.
Ice ended her update by talking about the university’s COVID-19 vaccine mandate and its enforcement at OU.
“There’s not a lot of consequences that we’re comfortable doing in the Fall Semester, in terms of people can still finish out the Fall Semester if they’re not yet vaccinated,” Ice said. “Where it will become enforced, more clearly, is in the spring. People will not be able to enroll in the Spring Semester if they’re not vaccinated.”
Senate then moved into the rest of its agenda, including two new resolutions. One showed support for the university’s recent vaccine mandate and the other appointed a new member to Senate. Both resolutions passed unanimously.
After the resolutions passed, Senate discussed the yearly Administrative Senate Service award ceremony, as well as new information from OU President Hugh Sherman in regards to the online hazing education training that all students, faculty, and staff are required to undergo.
