ALISA OPPENHEIMER
News Editor
If you’ve taken a look at Fredonia’s COVID-19 dashboard lately, you may have noticed some changes.
On Sept. 24, President Kolison sent out a campus-wide email, which discussed various topics, one of them being the newly revised COVID-19 dashboard for our school.
The local dashboard has been removed, and only presents the SUNY-wide dashboard — where you now have to manually select “Fredonia,” to see our status individually.
Kolison wrote: “To eliminate any confusion over which dashboard is the authoritative source for information, we will remove our local dashboard and embed the SUNY dashboard on our website. Notwithstanding, we will continue to collect all the information we need internally to guide local decision-making.”
While this may alleviate confusion for some, some students have voiced contrasting opinions regarding the topic.
In a virtual classroom discussion, one student took the floor to voice the origin of their confusion with the dashboard.
“They changed the dashboard again to make things easier, but what’s more confusing is having to figure out and understand a new dashboard set-up each week,” they said.
“It’s not too much of a big deal because you can just click Fredonia and find what you need to, but it wasn’t so hard to just find the collective SUNY dashboard if you wanted more information,” another student responded.
“I also liked having something that was like, just for us,” they continued.
Though all the information needed is now easily accessible as a whole, there are changes being made every week, and it’s hard to keep up.
The email sent by Kolison also discussed surveillance testing.
In the past few weeks, Fredonia has increased the number of students taken in for surveillance testing, and with this, we’ve had some great outcomes.
It was announced that in last week’s pool, out of 337 students, there was only one positive test result.
This is good news for us, but the pandemic has continued to spread all over the world, so we still must remain cautious.
“While I continue to pray for no positive cases, a result of one positive out of 337 could be described as ‘good,’ given the contagious nature of this virus. Of course, while this could be seen as ‘good’ news, the worst thing we can do now is let our guard down,” said Kolison.
“The pandemic is far from over, and new cases nationally are reported to have increased by 15 percent. Hence, we must not let our guard down. We must continue to be #FREDstrong and avoid large gatherings, wear a facial covering and social distance,” he continued.
Fredonia will administer another large round of student testing this week, but after that, the number of students being tested will again increase due to recent guidance by SUNY.
The campus-wide email said, “…in light of the new guidance we received last week from SUNY, we will soon need to conduct 1,000 tests a week. No, that is not a typo. One thousand tests per week is what we need to achieve going forward.”
With this increase of pool testing, many are wondering how this will be possible for Fredonia.
“As you can imagine, this will require additional resources and investments, and we are working on the logistics to make this happen. We hope to have the process for achieving this new expectation in place by the end of next week,” said Kolison.
Hopefully, with this increase of testing, we will not see an increase in positive cases.
To make this happen, we must all take the necessary steps to avoid the spread of COVID-19.
For more information, students can utilize the following resources: