9/24/20 Full Edition

Page 1

News: Camino’s arrival impacts Campus Grounds Page 5

Opinion: Ruth Bader Ginsburg’s death threatens democracy Page 8

Sports: Deacons come up short to NC State Page 11

Life: Lizzy McAlpine debuts first album Page 18

Old Gold&Black

WAKE FOREST’S STUDENT NEWSPAPER SINCE 1916 VOL. 107, NO. 5

T H U R S DAY, S E P T E M B E R 24 , 2 0 2 0 “Cover s the campus like the magnolias”

wfuogb.com

Code of Conduct regulates student life The public health addendum has led to a higher volume of student hearings this semester BY RAFAEL LIMA News Editor limara17@wfu.edu

Katie Fox/Old Gold & Black

Seventy-seven percent of Wake Forest students are registered on the SneezSafe app, a figure that could look higher when considering students who are attending classes on campus. Yet, daily usage rates stand to improve.

SneezSafe helps contain COVID-19 on WFU campus

The daily symptoms survey aids health officials to detect early cases of COVID-19 at Wake Forest BY ISABELLA MASON Contributing Writer masoif20@wfu.edu As of Wednesday, Sept. 23, the COVID-19 cases on campus have continued to rise to 127 cases, though the rate of increase in cases has decreased by 17.1% in comparison to the previous week. With the university’s promises of an improved COVID-19 dashboard, many students continue to check the dashboard daily. Starting Tuesday, Sept. 22, a new feature has been added to the dashboard, which was highly requested among the student body. This feature shows the COVID-19 Asymptomatic Sample Testing data, which represents only the testing done through surveillance random testing, rather than students who came to Student Health Services with symptom concerns.

Tuesday’s data demonstrates a 1% positive testing rate among asymptomatic students, with a total of 1,258 tests being performed randomly thus far, resulting in 13 positive test results. Over the past week, 600 surveillance tests have been done, yielding three positive test results and a 0.5% positive test rate. One of the most prominent ways that the university is able to get a greater view of students’ health is through the SneezSafe app, which is a web app engineered by Wake Forest Baptist Health and the university itself, designed to be a screening tool for symptoms of COVID-19. According to Cheryl Walker, acting executive director for news and communications, 77% of students are registered for SneezSafe. This figure refers to all students, graduate and undergraduate, on and off campus. It is important to note that many students remain off campus for the semester and as such can request exemptions from registering for SneezSafe. Still, SneezSafe is proving to be a useful tool for many university officials who

Wake Forest has successfully kept campus open since move-in started on Aug. 17, a timeline that sounds short but is on the longer side of higher education in-person operations in North Carolina when considering the early switch to online learning seen at UNC Chapel-Hill and NC State. Yet, despite achieving larger compliance from students, faculty and staff over the past month, police reports of students breaking social distancing and safety rules have also been a frequent occurrence this semester. As of Tuesday, the Office of the Dean of Students has received 281 reports of possible COVID-19 violations on campus through the university’s COVID-19 Health and Safety Compliance Form, a platform that allows students to anonymously report on COVID-19 violations.

See Conduct , Page 4

RBG leaves legacy of empowerment Ruth Bader Ginsburg devoted her life to advancing women’s rights across the United States

are trying to keep tabs on the overall health of students this semester. “[University officials] are seeing students use the tool [to] endorse symptoms, which helps us to connect them with a medical assessment. [Students can also] report a positive test obtained off campus, which helps us to guide isolation, do contact tracing to notify their contacts, place those who were exposed in quarantine and connect them with support; and [allows] others [to] report potential exposures to someone with COVID-19,” said Student Health Services Clinical Director Dr. Joanne Clinch. Clinch made it clear that the SneezSafe platform, when used properly, yields many helpful and informative results. Still, it is likely that fewer than 77% of students use the platform on a daily basis, therefore some may worry about the true accuracy the student body in regards to reporting symptoms.

On the evening of Sept. 18, Supreme Court Justice and feminist icon Ruth Bader Ginsburg passed away in her home at the age of 87. She died of complications related to her metastatic pancreas cancer, which has been a cause of her waning health since 2009. Ginsburg was the second woman to serve on the Supreme Court, and she held the position for 27 years. In her time on the court, she fought vehemently for gender equality starting with her first brief in 1971. This case represented the first time a state law was struck down on the basis that it was gender-discriminatory, and it was just the beginning of a robust career marked by activism that advanced women’s rights.

See SneezSafe, Page 5

See RBG, Page 6

BY TAYLOR THORNTON Staff Writer thortl18@wfu.edu


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