Rice University, a private institution in Houston, has done its best to build a wall against the Delta variant engulfing the state of Texas by imposing stringent requirements for being on campus.
Unlike the state’s public universities, which cannot mandate vaccines or masks, Rice requires student and faculty members to wear masks and has testing protocols for all visitors. And while Rice has not risked running afoul of Texas law by requiring vaccines, it has told students they are expected to be vaccinated.
Still, the virus has surged in Houston, and on Thursday, Rice became the second university in the state to shift classes online, dampening hopes for a return to normal college life this fall. Rice delayed the start of school by two days until Aug. 25 and said that classes would remain online through Sept. 3.
It also said that members of the Rice community had tested positive for Covid despite the high vaccination rates — 98.5 percent — among the student body.
“I’ll be blunt: the level of breakthrough cases (positive testing among vaccinated persons) is much higher than anticipated,” Bridget Gorman, the dean of undergraduates, wrote in a letter to the school’s 8,000 graduate and undergraduate students. The university didn’t specify how many breakthrough cases there were.
More than 12,000 people are hospitalized with the coronavirus in Texas, where officials have prohibited both masks and vaccine mandates, and where Gov. Greg Abbott recently tested positive.
“We’re in a hot spot right now,” said Rice’s president, David Leebron, adding that the decision to move temporarily to remote classes was made to give the university time to assess the results of its recent testing.
“Having new information of concern, as people worry about breakthrough infections, as people with children are worried around those issues, we wanted to have a little bit of time to gather data and look at it more carefully,” he said.
Rice was the second Texas university that has announced a move to remote learning. Last week, the University of Texas at San Antonio said it would begin with mostly remote classes, citing the city’s high infection rate.
New York City’s high school student athletes and coaches participating in high-risk sports will have to be vaccinated in order to play, Mayor Bill de Blasio said on Friday. The announcement represents the first student vaccine mandate in New York City, and could set the stage for broader mandates for the city’s roughly 1 million public school students later this year.
About 20,000 students and staff — about half of the total Public School Athletic…
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