Post #1084: William and Mary brief COVID-19 update

Posted on March 31, 2021

I’ve added another day’s worth of testing information to my prior table.

The surprise here is that they added fewer than 200 new test results yesterday.  They still don’t have tests back from what appears to be about one-sixth of the students.

It’s not clear to me what that means.

On the one hand, they might just be waiting for the lab performing the tests to return results.

On the other hand, maybe a lot of students aren’t cooperating with the testing.  I looked on the William and Mary website and all I could find is the phrase “testing is required”.  I can’t see anything about (e.g.) penalties for non-compliance.

On yet a third hand, maybe the total count of students ever tested (on the W&M COVID-19 dashboard) is significantly larger than the count of persons required to be tested.  That seems unlikely, as W&M appears to make few exceptions to its testing requirement.   The make “limited exceptions for students enrolled in certain graduate programs“.  But there’s no public information on the number of such students exempt from the testing requirement.  They also exempt persons who have tested positive, for 90 days following a positive tess, due to the likelihood of a false positive test during that period.

So it’s not crystal clear, but it certainly looks like test results are still pending for more than 1000 students.