‘Virtually every’ COVID omicron case at NY college was in fully vaccinated, official says
Cornell University is seeing an uptick in coronavirus cases and has detected the “highly contagious” omicron variant on campus, particularly in fully vaccinated individuals, according to campus officials.
“Virtually every case of the Omicron variant to date has been found in fully vaccinated students, a portion of whom had also received a booster shot,” Joel M. Malina, the school’s vice president for university relations, said.
On Dec. 13, Cornell’s COVID-19 testing lab found “evidence of the highly contagious Omicron variant in a significant number of Monday’s positive student samples,” university President Martha E. Pollack said in a letter to the campus community.
The on-campus population of Cornell is 97% fully vaccinated, according to its virus data tracker that has recorded 26,008 students and 13,311 faculty and staff members who are fully vaccinated.
Pollack noted that the evidence of omicron, first identified by South African researchers on Nov. 24, is “preliminary.”
“PCR testing has identified its hallmark (the so-called S-gene dropout) in a substantial number of virus samples,” Pollack said. “While we must await confirmatory sequencing information to be sure that the source is Omicron, we are proceeding as if it is.”
Malina said that “the presence of the initial Omicron variant coincides with an unusually high degree of transmission among vaccinated students after Thanksgiving travel and at the end of the semester.”
A look at the school’s COVID-19 dashboard shows a big jump in COVID-19 cases from Dec. 7, when 27 positive cases were reported, through Dec. 13, when 276 new positive cases were recorded.
“Increased infections in previously infected, or vaccinated individuals may be likely,” according to findings on the omicron variant from Oxford University in the U.K.
At Cornell, vaccination is required for students attending on-campus classes during the 2021-2022 school year unless they “received a religious or medical exemption.”
“For the past 20 months, Cornell has developed and followed a science-based approach to COVID-19 decision-making – including ongoing modeling and surveillance testing – that has helped us to identify positive cases early and, in concert with local public health officials, minimize the spread of the virus among our campus and the greater Ithaca communities,” Malina said.