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In reply to the discussion: SOURCES: BIG TEN to play football this season [View all]BumRushDaShow
(128,906 posts)after their hybrid model failed. The rest of the other large universities in the city knew better and had already opted for virtual (like Drexel with 26,000 and Penn with 25,000). Only Temple took the risk and blew it. And since many of those at Temple who contracted the virus were not "permanent" residents of the city, they got counted elsewhere.
They started spiking the last week of August and had gotten up to over 400 by last week (forcing them to close the campus for the semester and go virtual with some exceptions). St. Joe's opted for hybrid and are up to 76 cases. Villanova, which also went hybrid was up to 70 as of yesterday.
Kenney and Farley (Health Dir.) are no fools and we are carefully calibrating any reopening here to keep our case counts down. We did NOT expand our indoor restaurant capacity allowances with the state nor are any bars open AT ALL unless food is served. We did expand the outdoor gatherings to 150. We are waiting to see if there is any fallout from Labor Day but fortunately we are finding that the mask usage indoors/at public transit locations (averaging 60% - 80% week to week) has definitely helped here.
Yesterday at the weekly presser, the city had referenced a study done on outdoors mask use, where although almost at 60%, a large percent were not worn correctly (below nose or as chin guards and whatnot), which will be a focus of new educational outreach efforts.
This virus usually dies down with drastic measures and can be reduced to small pockets of barely-simmering embers. But those embers are still hot and are waiting to re-spark wildfires when people get careless.