Vivian La
To get into University of Illinois buildings, students and employees are supposed to show an app saying that they’ve had a recent, clean COVID-19 test. Nearly one-third of the time, however, there’s no one at the door to check their status.
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s revised calculation of the campus positivity rate of COVID-19 has potentially lowered the rate substantially by reducing the number of reported positive tests. Epidemiologists say the more accurate way to calculate positivity would be to divide unique positive tests by unique total tests, but that information is not always available.
University Housing
Last year, 233 criminal incidents occurred on the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign campus according to the 2019 annual security and fire report, mandated by the federal crime reporting law for colleges known as the Clery Act. But the university’s daily crime log routinely reports many more incidents. Some law enforcement officials said the Clery Act guidelines can be confusing and unclear for crime reporting and can lead to ‘unintended harms’, especially in the wake of COVID-19, which may make campuses appear less safe than reality.
Photo: Christine Herman/Illinois Newsroom
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s saliva-based COVID-19 test has never operated under emergency use authorization from the U.S. Food and Drug Administration, despite prior claims that it did, an FDA spokesperson tells Illinois Newsroom. So far, campus officials say the U of I has been contacted by 35 organizations, including other universities, expressing interest in adopting the campus’ Shield program, which involves testing, contact tracing and other mitigation measures.
University of Illinois
University of Illinois officials reported 1,754 new cases from Aug. 15 when students started coming back to campus, through Sept. 8, although a team of researchers working directly for the university administration had projected only 500 to 700 cases by Thanksgiving.
Pam Dempsey/CU-CitizenAccess
The University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign quietly announced on Tuesday an expansion of its Covid-19 testing by requiring students to be tested routinely even if they live in the community but do not plan to come to campus. The decision comes during a week when two university epidemiologists recommended in a letter to city officials in Champaign and Urbana that they go back from current Phase 4 of the Illinois reopening plan to Phase 3 to limit the spread of the virus during the surge of returning students.
Pam Dempsey/CU-CitizenAccess
Most of the international students from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign’s 2019-2020 academic year are from countries with lower daily Covid-19 infection rates than the United States, according to a CU-CitizenAccess analysis. Last spring, 9,824 international students attended the University from more than 100 countries, according to university data.
Pam Dempsey/CU-CitizenAccess.org
Champaign County has had about 2 percent of those tested for the virus receive positive results, which means the person should self-quarantine for 14 days. But a comparison of state public health test data on August 3 and ZIP code data for students who attended the University in the last academic year shows that 20,000 out of 28,000 students from Illinois may arrive from ZIP codes with positive percentages above 5 percent, according to a review of the data by CU-CitizenAccess.org.
Pam Dempsey/CU-CitizenAccess.org
Since the Covid-19 pandemic began in January, Champaign County – home to the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and about 50,000 faculty, students and staff – has experienced a low number of positive cases when compared to many other areas of the state and the U.S. A comparison of university data on where out-of-state students are from as of the last school year and data on the positivity rates in those states show as many as 5,000 students may be arriving from 32 states that have positivity rates higher than 5 percent, according to a review of the data by CU-CitizenAccess.org
Despite continuous coverage of misbehavior in Urbana School District 116, there have been overall disciplinary improvements, parents said.