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Texas and Florida, two of the states reporting record-breaking numbers of new COVID-19 cases yesterday are among the most populous states in the country. https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/06/17/coronavirus-live-updates-us/ 1/
This should particularly concern schools, colleges, and universities who typically draw many students from these states. I suspect most universities with a “national” student body have many students whose permanent residence is in Texas or Florida. 2/
If you are not resident in one of those states but your university, college, school is planning in-person campus activities, you should be requesting detailed information on the states where students likely to be coming from as these activities start up. 3/
Remember, as you decide whether/how to go to a campus this summer/fall, the most relevant information about COVID-19 case numbers may not be about the cases where the campus is. You need to know about the case numbers in the places students are coming from. 4/
This information must also be available to faculty and staff whose institutions are encouraging them to come to campus. 5/
From a liability perspective, any college or university that does not affirmatively share detailed information about the locations students are coming from and rate/number of COVID-19 cases there between now and start of on-campus activities is likely acting tortiously. 6/
As a torts scholar, I believe best practices would minimally require universities to post visibly on the websites regularly updated data about permanent residences of all students and the number/rate of COVID-19 cases and number of positive tests for SARS-CoV-2. 7/
This in addition to such data for the region and state where the campus is. 8/
Be wary of any university/college/school that is not aggressively providing information about geographic makeup of student body and related SARS-CoV-2/COVID-19 figures. 9/
As I wrote yesterday, many, many U.S. universities/colleges are acting in ways that mirror the conduct of entities who end up inflicting lots of serious injury despite having plenty of forewarning about the risk. 10/
