STANDISH — Saint Joseph’s College of Maine remains on high alert after nine cases of COVID-19 were detected on campus over the weekend.
The college reported its first two cases in a campus-wide email on Thursday. While the college is not conducting universal testing, administrators said they are conducting both random and periodic testing of students, as well as wastewater analysis to detect cases of COVID-19 among students, faculty and staff.
In an announcement on Saturday, President Jim Dlugos said that most of the cases were confined to one residence hall, but did not say which one.
The students who tested positive, as well as anyone who came into close contact with them, are in quarantine.
The campus will remain in “study in place” mode for at least the next two weeks. All classes will be remote and students are advised to remain in their rooms as much as possible.
In Tuesday’s update to the college’s “Campus Health Dashboard,” administrators wrote that students could go on walks and sit at outdoor tables, but could only be with one other person, masked and physically distanced.
“And a bit of good news: out of 109 individual COVID-19 tests taken yesterday, all of them were negative,” the update said.
It also rated “compliance with infection managing by campus community” as “poor,” indicating a widespread breach in protocols.
“There’s a lot of trust built into the reopening plans,” Oliver Griswold, the chief brand and marketing officer, told the Lakes Region Weekly in June. “We think that our community is small enough (for) that. Housing is part of that, (and it’s) essential that everybody honors the community and do what needs to be done inside housing.”
Griswold told the Portland Press Herald over the weekend that the college is working with the Maine Center for Disease Control and Prevention and will test as many community members as they can over the next two weeks.
All nine cases were asymptomatic when they tested positive, Griswold said.
The Press Herald contributed to this report.
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