Almost all students at Worcester’s College of the Holy Cross must undergo mandatory COVID-19 testing Monday or Tuesday as part of the response to an outbreak of dozens or cases that officials linked to more infectious variants of the disease.
Officials on Friday implemented significant restrictions on campus life, canceling all in-person classes and athletics, ordering students not to gather inside or outside with anyone besides their roommates, closing libraries and other study spaces, and shifting Sunday mass to a livestream.
All students, except those who recovered from COVID within a 90-day window, must be tested Monday or Tuesday, while off-campus students are only allowed onto Holy Cross’s campus for COVID testing, health services visits or to pick up food.
In a Friday message, Holy Cross officials said they identified more than 40 positive cases among students in the past week, leading to more than 130 people being placed into isolation or quarantine — numbers that are “worse than any we have seen all semester.”
Officials said they believe the spike in cases shows “effects of the more-contagious COVID variants,” noting that more close contacts are then testing positive compared to earlier in the year and that more students who test positive are reporting serious symptoms.
“Contact tracing tells us that the vast majority of spread of these cases is coming from outdoor gatherings, with a smaller amount from Easter Break travel,” officials wrote. “To be clear, any student gatherings — inside or out, on-campus or off — will lead to serious consequences. We cannot allow the actions of a few to ruin things for the many.”
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