IU released its public COVID-19 testing dashboard Friday, hours after eight greek houses were forced to quarantine due to a spike in cases.
The dashboard reports that on the Bloomington campus, the positive symptomatic test rate nearly doubled from 10.53% to 23.36% from the week of Aug. 13 to the week of Aug. 20.
Since Aug. 1, IU has conducted 288 symptomatic tests, and 47 have been positive — a 16.32% positivity rate.
IU has seen a rise in both the total number of positive cases and percent of tests coming back positive as students continued to move in. IU administered 33,788 tests for students on-arrival, and 344 were positive — a 1% positivity rate.
The dashboard reports 378 total positive on-arrival tests and 62 positive symptomatic tests across all IU campuses.
Mitigation testing from the first week of classes was not reported on this dashboard. According to IU, that data will be released Monday.
IU’s release comes after multiple schools across the country have produced similar dashboards, including the University of Notre Dame. IU administrators have made statements to students about the risk of partying, especially as students return to campus and videos of partying circulated on social media.
IU is continuing with in-person classes as of Friday.
IU President Michael McRobbie and Provost Lauren Robel said classes will be forced online if IU sees a large number of cases. There has not been a clear designation on what type of increase would necessitate such a shift.
In a video posted to IU’s website, Dr. Aaron Carroll, IU's director of surveillance and mitigation for the COVID-19 pandemic, said the quick response antigen test given to students living on-campus is “not as sensitive as others.”
The FDA reports the saliva test given to off-campus students — a molecular test — is the most accurate type of COVID-19 test.
