BOSTON (WHDH) - Boston University is seeing a surge in coronavirus cases as the semester comes to a close.
In the first week of April, the school reported 61 students tested positive — nearly twice as many as the week before.
This coincides with students slipping when it comes to following health protocols.
The school’s compliance report for April 9 shows that more than 2,600 students were warned for not submitting daily proof, nearly 1,400 were warned for not scheduling tests, and more than 300 students were sanctioned for noncompliance.
Dr. David Hamer, infectious disease expert at the BU School of Public Health and School of Medicine, says that, “I suspect there might be a little bit of pandemic fatigue, that students are tired of doing the same thing.”
“Everybody to be in compliance, if they were on campus, had to have a test scheduled, have done their most recent test and do a daily health attestation, and if you didn’t do any of those, in some cases, you couldn’t enter a building,” he continued.
BU officials are urging students to keep following safety guidelines so it can end the semester on a high note.
“We still have a lot of virus circulating, so we need to hopefully get through the next month until graduation, safely,” Hammer said.
BU is asking all students, faculty and staff to schedule an extra test each week for the rest of the month to help get the school through the semester.
This university isn’t the only school having issues with the virus late in the school year.
The College of the Holy Cross in Worcester has ordered mandatory testing for all students in response to an outbreak of cases linked to virus variants.
Emerson College also temporarily halted all in-person activities to help curb the spread of the coronavirus.
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