Fully vaxxed colleges now seeing surges in COVID cases
/(Natural News) Colleges with students fully vaccinated against the Wuhan coronavirus (COVID-19) are now seeing surges in infections. The case spikes were largely driven by the highly transmissible B11529 omicron variant.
The University of Oregon (UO) is one such college that saw COVID-19 cases rise among fully vaccinated students. Aisha Ghorashian, a senior at the university, told NPR: “You feel the stress on campus. People, I think, don’t feel safe. You see that double masking and those N95 [masks] that I’ve never seen people wear before.”
Despite UO’s student body having a vaccination rate of more than 96 percent, the university still reported 960 COVID-19 infections in the first week of January 2022. This coincided with students returning to campus for in-person classes.
Several colleges and universities also reported spikes in infections in the first week of the spring semester. The University of Georgia reported almost a thousand positive cases on campus. Dartmouth College in New Hampshire, meanwhile, reported 1,196 confirmed COVID-19 cases.
Dartmouth senior Sophia Kriz told NPR that she is worried that the steady rise of COVID-19 infections on campus could shut down the semester. “It sort of feels like we’re in a state of limbo. We’re all on campus, but we’re all just waiting to hear how things are going,” she said. “All I can do from there is just hope that things get a little more normal.”
According to NPR, colleges are some of the most vaccinated places in the United States. It cited a study by the COVID States Project, which said that 74 percent of college students were injected with the COVID-19 at least once as of September 2021, compared to 54 percent of the general population. [MORE]