BREAKING: Forty-five students, two employees test positive for COVID-19
Image: Ian Henshaw
Mercer University saw an additional 47 positive coronavirus cases during the week of Aug. 28 to Sept. 3, the university announced Friday in its weekly update of COVID-19 cases.
The university breaks those 47 cases into four different subsections of the Mercer population: Macon students, Atlanta students, Macon campus faculty/staff and Atlanta campus faculty/staff.
In that breakdown, 43 of the 47 cases come from Mercer Macon students, two come from Mercer Atlanta students and two come from Macon faculty/staff. There have been no announced cases among Atlanta’s faculty/staff members so far this year.
The 47 total new cases come from a total of 476 tests the university has conducted. These numbers show a 9.87% positivity rate — which indicates what percentage of tests returned positive results.
In comparison to the results from last week, the university conducted 1.75 times more tests, jumping from 272 tests last week to 476 tests this week. On top of that, the 47 new cases this week is roughly 2.75 times higher than last week’s 17 new COVID-19 cases. The positivity rate last week was 6.25%.
Since the start of the pandemic, the university has reported 192 COVID-19 cases.
The Cluster will continue to provide updates to Mercer’s COVID-19 numbers as soon as they are made available.
Lars Lonnroth, The Cluster's News Editor for fall 2020, is a sophomore journalism and political science student, originally coming from the suburbs of...
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