A week after UNC-Chapel Hill and Notre Dame opted to switch to remote learning to contain the coronavirus spreads hitting their respective campuses, the president for the University of Alabama has said that they too have experienced an "unacceptable rise" of COVID-19 cases.
Alabama started up classes six days ago, according to CNN.
Up to this point the Tuscaloosa campus (a.k.a. the main one) has tallied 531 total confirmed cases. Other university locations in Birmingham and Huntsville have a combined 35 positives.
The school's COVID dashboard reports an at-the-moment low positivity rate of 1.2 percent, stating that the 566 persons who've been hit with the virus were learned about after 46,150 tests were issued.
Still, that's a lot of people, and in an effort to avoid the same fate (or something worse) than Notre Dame and UNC, Alabama President Stuart R. Bell asked for students/faculty to team up "at this critical moment" to prevent the disease from spreading further.
That means that Bell has urged common remedies, including wearing a mask, social distancing, and preventing gatherings from getting too large.
"Completing the fall semester together is our goal," he said in an email addressed to students on Sunday. "The margin for error is shrinking."
In addition to asking nicely, the university will also go the enforcement route by having school and city police monitor off-campus residents, restaurants, and Greek housing, to see that people at those locations are following guidelines.
To combat the rise in cases, Tuscaloosa Mayor Walt Maddox also ordered the city's bars to shutdown for two weeks.
City officials had said earlier in the summer that young people were going to what they called "COVID parties" to infect one another with the virus. The school looked into that accusation and didn't find any students who actually did that.
