Gettysburg College went into lockdown Tuesday night, quarantining all students to their dorm rooms for at least the rest of this week, Your Content has learned.
PennLive first broke the story after Julie Ramsey, dean of students, posted a message to the college website.
“At (a) town hall on Sunday, we discussed that we were at an infection point: we were beginning to see a trend of positive cases on campus that, according to the results we had, were connected to certain affinity groups or social gatherings,” Ramsey’s letter reads. “As we discussed at the town hall, we determined that to better understand the state of campus — and to confirm that these were, in fact, clustered incidents — we would test the identified affinity groups and certain residences in addition to the surveillance testing we had already planned.
“We have begun to receive test results from this week and have more positive cases to report. As of 6 p.m. tonight, of the 348 test results we have received, 25 of those have been positive. Similar to what we were beginning to learn last week, it appears that most— but not all — of these positive cases relate to the previously identified clustered incidents.”
Ramsey said that while the college expected there to be positive cases in the latest batch of tests, due to the number of positive test results received so far, the number of test results that have yet to be returned, and the presence of a small number of cases that could be outside the existing clusters, the school is increasing its alert level to High.
A High alert is the second-highest level on Gettsyburg College’s four-tiered alert system. It means the number of positive test cases and potential exposures is rising, and confidence in the ability to accurately complete contact tracing is moderate, according to the school’s website.