Hugh's Worthless Blog

Orange= Fall 2020, Blue - Fall 2021 Today was the final day of class, so we have successfully completed another semester during the pandemic here at Washington University in St. Louis . Since the campus COVID-19 dashboard was updated today with final numbers for the semester, I have decided to create a graph that compares the student positive count from Fall 2020 to Fall 2021. The orange line shows last semester, and the blue line shows this semester. For Fall 2020 we ended a slightly abbreviated semester with 273 total student cases over the 95 days from the beginning to the end of classes. For Fall 2021 we only had 175 total positive cases, so we had a reduction of about 36% over 102 days. The total number of positive faculty and staff cases also dropped significantly, from 120 last fall to only 78 this fall (a very similar 35% decrease.) Last Fall the university did require masking when in any public indoor spaces, and that continued again this year when a lot more people were pres...

  Commencement was yesterday on-campus at Washington University in St. Louis so the semester and school year are officially finished. On our COVID-19 dashboard the final date was May 12, and at that point we had 602 positive student cases (504 undergraduate and 98 graduate students) and 208 positive faculty and staff cases for the full academic year (since September.) My graph above shows the positives with the students combined as the orange line on top and the faculty and staff on the bottom in blue.  Since we have 7100 full-time undergraduate students and 6600 full-time graduate students for the academic year, that comes out to about 7.1% of our undergraduates and about 1.5% of our graduate students being positive at some point during the year. The large difference is probably due to our undergraduate population primarily living on campus and congregating together whereas the graduate population lives on their own and most likely interacts with much smaller groups of frie...

  Happy New Year! The year 2020 is thankfully over and we can all look forward to a brighter 2021 when we can all get vaccinated and things will start going back to some form of "normal". The Fall semester at Washington University has ended and Spring semester does not start again until the last week of January.  During the fall, I was tracking the total reported positive cases off of the university's dashboard and was happy to see how well we were keeping the spread at bay at first. Within our population of over 7,000 on campus undergraduate students and nearly as many graduate students, we stayed under 100 total positive student cases through all of September and October (our classes started September 14.) In my graph the total student positive cases is in orange and the total faculty and staff numbers are in blue.  In the middle of November, as the temperatures turned colder and students spent more time inside, our positive numbers spiked, doubling from 95 on Novembe...