WKU News

WKU has taken an aggressive approach to figuring out how best to bring students back on campus during the COVID-19 pandemic.

WKU’s Amy Bingham breaks down information about testing, contact tracing and more in this week’s View from the Hill.

WKU is partnering with public health and Graves Gilbert Clinic to handle the COVID-19 pandemic.

“Graves Gilbert is gonna be our center for physicians and for health care resources for campus.”

“If they are symptomatic there’s an entrance we will bring them in that keeps them separate from people coming in for other medical purposes similar to how the hospitals are set up now.”

Emergency manager David Oliver says once a case is suspected, contact tracing will begin almost immediately.

“We are going to be very rapidly, bringing public health in on any of these potential cases. They will do their due diligence as contact tracers and they will make the determination of who is potentially at risk and who fits guidelines to be quarantined or tested.”

With masks and social distance required on campus, Oliver says a positive case won’t necessarily mean a whole classroom has been exposed.

“In most cases if a professor tests positive or if a student in a class tests positive there should not be a contact if those rules are followed.”

Housing and Residence Life has a plan to relocate students who have either been exposed or tested positive.

“We have identified quarantine spaces and isolation spaces.  Those are different.  Quarantine is something you do for yourself when you’re not positive.  Isolation being something you do when you have a positive case.”

“We’ve worked closely with food service to make sure that we have food delivery that we can bring to students  who are in these spaces.”

In order to work the plan will require cooperation from students.

“We are working very hard to give them the opportunity to come back in person classes and  they’ve got to help us.  If they have these gatherings and other things away from campus, that come back to campus, gonna be really difficult for us to deal with.”

“We can’t outrun it, the vaccine is not around the corner kind of thing so we’ve got to figure out what do we do to continue living life kind of thing, alongside of this.”

Graves Gilbert Clinic will provide testing on campus beginning Monday (Aug. 3).

To find out more about WKU’s response to COVID-19, visit www.wku.edu/restart