According to campus officials, Cornell University is seeing an uptick in coronavirus cases and has detected the highly infectious Omicron variant on campus, particularly in completely vaccinated people.
Its online dashboard shows that between December 7 and 13, the Ivy League school in Ithica, New York, reported 883 students testing positive for COVID 19.
Joel M Malina, the school’s vice president for university relations, said in a statement provided to McClatchy News that almost every case of the Omicron variant to date has been found in completely vaccinated students, a portion of whom had also received a booster shot.
University President Martha E Pollack said in a letter to the campus community that on December 13, Cornell’s COVID 19 testing lab discovered proof of the highly infectious Omicron variant in a substantial number of Monday’s positive student samples.
Martha E Pollack assured that out of the students infected with COVID 19, the school hasn’t seen severe infection as of December 14.
According to its virus data tracker that’s recorded 26,008 students and 13,331 faculty and staff members who are completely vaccinated, the on-campus population of Cornell are 97 per cent fully vaccinated.
Martha E Pollack noted that the evidence of Omicron, first recognised by South African researchers on November 24 was preliminary.
Martha E Pollack said PCR testing has identified its hallmark, the so-called S gene dropout in a substantial number of virus samples, and that while they must await confirmatory sequencing information to be certain that the source is Omicron, they’re proceeding as if it is.
She added that the detection of Omicron had prompted the university to enact an Alert Level Red to limit further spread ahead of the end of the fall semester.
According to Pollack, this means that the school’s final exams are now online as of December 14, the ceremony for December graduates on the 18 is cancelled and all undergraduate events are cancelled.
Malina said that the presence of the initial Omicron variant overlaps with an unusually elevated degree of transmission among vaccinated students after Thanksgiving travel and at the end of the semester.
Cornell’s president admitted that some might wonder why the school was imposing such serious steps and said it was clearly excessively dispiriting to do so in the letter, and she said that they do have a part to play in easing the spread of the disease in the wider community.
The Omicron variant seemingly circulates quickly, but some doctors have indicated that it’s a mild strain, which might bring herd immunity the natural way, but that said, until this is confirmed to be the case, people still need to take precautions, particularly those that are unvaccinated.
The anti-vax brigade has done real good and the propaganda is so good that they’ve managed to get people to have selective amnesia, since now flocks of people are now questioning the validity of the vaccine because it’s not prevented people from getting sick, nor has it stopped people passing the disease on.
However, it might just be like the flu jab where you have to have a flu jab every year to prevent people from getting the flu, and of course, you can still catch the flu even after having the jab, but not as severe, so it stands to reason that even if you’ve had the COVID jab that you will still catch it, but just not as severely.
But forcing everyone to be vaccinated does end up turning into a dictatorship.
THE MONTHLY MOSQUITO 