Nearly 300 COVID-19 cases reported within Queen’s University last week

After a week marked with COVID-19-related issues, Queen’s University today updated the data on the number of cases of the virus reported within its community last week – more than doubling the number of cases reported within the Queen’s community for the week from Monday, Dec. 6 to Sunday, Dec. 12, 2021.

As of Friday, Dec. 10, 2021, Queen’s had 135 total cases listed as having been reported over that week. Since then, and added to the University’s active case count listings today, Monday, Dec. 13, 2021, another 147 cases were added to that listing, bringing the total number of cases reported last week at the University to 282 cases.

For context, only 23 cases of COVID-19 were reported within the same population the week prior. In fact, fewer cases of COVID-19 have been reported within the Queen’s community in the weeks from Monday, Aug. 30, 2021, to Sunday, Dec. 5, 2021 (a total of 107 cases) than were reported last week alone – the total cumulative cases from August 30 to December 5, 2021 are actually less than half of the total cases reported last week.

Because Queen’s solely lists the number of cases reported within its community on a weekly basis, it is impossible to know how many of the cases of the virus are currently active, however, since a positive case needs to self-isolate for at least to 10 days (and even close contacts must now isolate for at least 10 days, too), it is safe to assume that there are at least 282 active cases, as those have all been reported within the past 10 days.

Within the past seven days, Queen’s University has reported an outbreak among its varsity sports community, five student residence buildings were experiencing COVID-19 outbreaks, prompting over 4,500 students to sign a petition to move from in-person exams to having exams held online, Last week, it was announced that the Omicron variant of COVID-19 is suspected among cases within the University community. On Sunday night, the university announced that it was discontinuing in-person exams as a result of the rising concern.

Although the number of cases detected within the whole of the Kingston, Frontenac, Lennox and Addington (KFL&A) Public Health region since Friday had not been announced by time of publication, the region was reporting 618 active cases of COVID-19 on Friday, Dec. 10, 2021. The cases reported within the Queen’s University community last week account for over 45 per cent of the currently-reported 681 active cases in the region, however, the number of active cases in the region is expected to rise by over 200 cases when the cases detected since Friday are reported later today.

Kingstonist will continue to monitor this situation and provide updates as more information becomes available.