Washington University COVID-19 Graph, Spring 2021

 

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 friends and contacts. They are most likely more like the faculty and staff population which never saw a large spike, just a few occasional cases which made our line increase quite slowly.

Similar to the spike in positive cases in November 2020, we saw another large influx of positive cases in the student population in late February and March when students started to socially gather together more after the semester began in late January. By mid-April however the line flattened out as students were able to start getting vaccinated and people congregated outside more as the temperature became warmer (we had a very cold February.)

Hopefully this will be the one and only full school year in a full-blown pandemic as the rates across the country diminish and everyone should get vaccinated. Washington University is one of the group of universities requiring students to be vaccinated and hopefully that will keep our numbers low. Interestingly the faculty and staff are only "highly recommended" to be vaccinated, but they made us either submit proof of vaccination or fill our a "voluntary survey" to tell them why we were not yet vaccinated. Since that is essentially the same process as for the "required" students (they can be excluded by filling out a waiver explaining their medical, religious or philosophic reason for not vaccinating), I am not sure there is any practical difference except in the nomenclature.