Dane County is asking the University of Wisconsin-Madison to send the students who live in its dormitories back home.
The university has seen a dramatic rise in the number of COVID-19 cases on its campus, and Dane County Executive Joe Parisi said in a Wednesday letter that it’s time to take serious action.
On Tuesday, the school reported that over 1,000 students and staff members have tested positive for the virus. Public health officials in Madison & Dane counties reported the same day that in the past week, the area experienced 901 new cases, 71% of which came from the university.
In response, UW-Madison moved to limit student movements and interactions.
But Parisi doesn’t believe that’s enough. The county is recommending that students who live in the dorms be sent back to their homes and suggests a 14-day quarantine for those students before doing so. They also have requested that the university create more on-campus quarantine facilities, triple the number of contact tracers at the university, and increase its testing capacity.
“I know everything the University worked on this summer to attempt at a return to ‘normal’ was the result of careful thought and planning,” Parisi wrote. “We all want to get back to our lives as they were prior to this pandemic. Unfortunately as we have seen across this country and other parts of the globe, this virus willfully spreads whenever the opportunity presents.”
