Washington University COVID-19 Graph, Fall 2020

 

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 November 5 to 201 on November 23. In comparison you can see the positive counts for our older faculty and staff members did continue to increase, but not at the same rate as the student population. By the time our semester ended on December 18, the student positive count was up to 273. When you consider this is for a total student population of about 14,000 students this is actually still a very meager 2% of our students.

Another topic my wife and I were wondering is how the pandemic has changed student enrollment at Washington University. The university does have a nice little online graphic that gives those numbers. In Fall 2019 we enrolled 7,115 full-time undergraduate students and in Fall 2020 the number was nearly identical at 7,109. However, I noticed our full-time graduate enrollment in 2019 was 7,175 and in Fall 2020 dropped to 6,585 which is an over 8% drop in enrollment. However, that is still more than we had in Fall 2017 or any year before then, so that actually shows how much growth we had in graduate students in 2018 and 2019. I am guessing when conditions improve we will see more graduate students wanting to come to campus and enroll in our ever expanding list of graduate programs.

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