Going into the fourth week of classes, Bentley has seen a total of 125 positive COVID-19 test results on campus and an almost 1% positivity rate among all tests. The worst day for positive cases so far came on September 13, with 20 cases detected among students, faculty, and staff. Since then, the number of cases per day has dropped, but the spike occurred only a week into classes and has been more severe than the start of the last spring semester.
This rise comes in wake of the school relaxing their COVID policies on campus. After originally planning to go completely maskless for the 2021-2022 school year, Bentley announced prior to the start of the semester that masks would be required inside classrooms and in specified buildings around campus, but not in residence halls, certain indoor areas, and outdoors. The new policy is much less restrictive than last year’s, which required students to wear masks everywhere, including in their own residence halls.
Prior to the start of the school year, an on-campus testing program was announced for the month of September. On Monday, Bentley’s Director of Emergency Management, Geoff Bartlett, announced that the program would be extended through October for all undergraduate and residential students. Bartlett cited the “highly transmissable nature of the virus” as the motivation behind the increase measures and emphasized that the school would monitor how these policies play out over the next several weeks. It is likely that the early spike in cases contributed to this decision.
The biggest step Bentley made towards protecting the campus, however, was mandating vaccinations for all students, with the exception of those with religious or medical exemptions. This has been a common trend for colleges and universities and has been cited as a big reason for Bentley’s more relaxed testing and masking policies. However, the amount of cases so far could motivate a change of attitude from Bentley’s decision-makers. Some more regulations similar to last year’s, like masking in residence halls, contact tracing, and testing throughout the rest of the year, may be on the horizon.
Despite the changes, campus life remains relatively normal right now with the exception of on-and-off mask-wearing, and it appears that the school intends for it to stay that way. Students may find out more about Bentley’s tracking and vaccination rates on the website’s COVID-19 Testing Dashboard and COVID-19 Vaccination Dashboard.
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