White House Said to Keep Sick Kids on Campus. Emails Reveal the Messy Reality.

[Nevilledog]

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Last Monday, top officials on the White House coronavirus task force issued an urgent warning to governors across the country: Stop sending your COVID-infected college students home to their parents or risk another nationwide surge, just like the one that overwhelmed the South this summer.

So far, the task force’s request for governors to talk to their college presidents appears to have made little difference. By the end of the week, some colleges in the country’s biggest coronavirus hot spots not only were still allowing students to go home after they’d been exposed or infected—they were ordering them to.

“You need to relocate, as soon as possible, to your home or other off-campus location for the duration of your self-isolation period,” said a form letter sent Wednesday from the Office of the Dean at Georgia Southern University to on-campus students who reported being exposed to or infected with the coronavirus. The university even tried to run students in off-campus housing out of town, telling them to “return home to self-isolate as soon as possible,” according to the email, obtained by The Daily Beast.

That lack of containment has had severe consequences. Statesboro, the small town where Georgia Southern is located, registered more than 700 positive coronavirus cases during the last two weeks in August. It was one of the highest per capita rates of increase in any United States metro area during that stretch, according to data from Johns Hopkins University.

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