The University of Minnesota announced Monday that it will reinstate a campus-wide mask mandate as the COVID-19 Delta variant continues to cause a rise in new cases nationwide.
The announcement from University President Joan Gabel states that effective Aug. 3, all students, faculty, staff, contractors and visitors on campus will be required to wear a face covering indoors, regardless of vaccination status.
The mask mandate was reinstated after new CDC guidance on indoor mask-wearing to curb the more transmissible Delta variant, Gabel said in the email announcement to the University community.
“This guidance recommends that in any county where the COVID transmission rate is shown to be substantial or high, individuals wear facial coverings while indoors, whether vaccinated or not,” Gabel said.
Gabel lifted the University’s previous mask mandate on May 14.
New daily cases of COVID-19 in the United States are hovering around 100,000 for the first time since April. On Monday, the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) released its latest numbers showing that 632 new cases and six new deaths have been confirmed in the last 24 hours.
Minnesota’s rolling positive rate stands at 3.3%, slightly lower than MDH’s line of caution at 5%.
Gabel said that the mandate will apply to all University campuses and also encouraged students to get vaccinated as part of the University’s “Get the Vax” campaign.
“Wearing a mask or facial covering indoors has been shown to slow the transmission of COVID-19 and, as we saw as a nation, virtually eliminate other airborne illnesses like the flu,” Gabel said. “This requirement applies to all of our campuses and offices statewide, whether a given location is in a substantial or high transmission county or not.”
Ustudent20
Aug 20, 2021 at 12:46 am
Thank you for saying what needed to be said!
Richard Turnbull
Aug 13, 2021 at 1:12 pm
Sure, I suppose from your perspective — ensorcelled within your own grotesque waking hallucinations — as opposed to medical sciences, built on several thousand years of halting progress in battling diseases that are the scourge of human life, “Delta and covid 19 (sic)” are “hoaxes.”
You’re a tiny part of the sick enabling and encouragement of the needless, completely avoidable death of innocent children, like a character out of The Brothers Karamazov or The Demons.
How do you people sleep at night, seriously, how do even look your self in the mirror without cringing inwardly, on some unconscious or barely sapient level of awareness? Are you all spiritually, ethically, morally dead, that your crackpot weltanschuung makes total sense to you?
What an existentially empty and terrifyingly bizarre set of prospects you must have in front of you, day in, day out, your life creeping at a petty pace, until all your yesterdays are exploding M-80s to light the way for the Trump cultists to an ignominous demise, unwept, unhonoured, and unsung.
Well, it’s back to the telecaster for me, anyway; I wish you well in all your future trolling, “Rusty.” But don’t think you are fooling anyone for a leptosecond, ok? Sound fair?
P.S. Btw I do recommend you make a monumental effort, and delve into Shakespeare and the Goddess of Complete Being, by Ted Hughes, it will enlighten you…or not. But it’s fascinating stuff, in any case!
Richard Turnbull
Aug 13, 2021 at 1:00 pm
Independently wealthy in a luxury apt. sixth floor of seven in NE Mipples near Central and University, wingnut —(not as many books as I would have liked in here, only about 1300, from The Encyclopedia of Philosophy and Law’s Empire to Women on Top by Nancy Friday and everything in between); twenty + electric and acoustic guitars i.e Telecasters, Strats, Blueshawk, Takamine acoustic -electric, Roland Juno DS-88 keyboard synth, five other useful synths, DR3 and Alesis SR-18 drum machines, Zoom R24 portable 24 track recording studio, good microphones, Special 20 blues harps, anti-gravity inversion table (a MUST HAVE!) massage table for…, well, anyway; Fender Twin Reverb (got to use that carefully vis-a-vis the neighbors, though!) and Fender Mustang GT 200 (that has headphone input, unlike the Twin Reverb) and other practice amps like the great Vox Mini-Rhythm 5 etc.
And unlike you, a girlfriend of many years, who herself has worked eight years for a battered women’s shelter…Look, there’s far far more than that, but it’s clear YOU are the “troll,” not me!
Laissez les bon temps roulez, but all things in moderation, too!
Rusty
Aug 12, 2021 at 9:51 pm
getting paid tomorrow, Troll?
Rusty
Aug 12, 2021 at 9:39 pm
Delta and covid 19 are hoaxes.
Rusty
Aug 12, 2021 at 9:38 pm
The Delta is a reaction to the Covid 19 “Vaccine,” mostly fatal.
A Gopher
Aug 12, 2021 at 4:25 pm
To me, it seems that Gabel is being a bit spineless. Claiming that she has to wait for FDA approval when other Big Ten schools required vaccine with no further approval. There will be no physical difference between the vaccines that have EUA and more formal FDA approval. Disappointed in Pres. Gabel and hope she handles the next crisis with an iron fist.
Richard Turnbull
Aug 8, 2021 at 5:34 am
Next step is to require credible documentation this intentional act, which will inevitably increase the risk of spreading a lethal virus on the U campus in classrooms, labs, libraries, halls, restrooms, and dining facilities and lounges, via its highly infectious and more deadly mutated variants, that have caused an ongoing global pandemic and is not a “hoax,” is due to a health condition that tends to rule out vaccinations of this kind, or a sincere “religious belief,” as opposed to being hornswoggled by the grifting neo-fascist conman Donald J. Trump, the raving lunatic Mike Liddell of MyPillow infamy, or the Faux News purveyors of bigotry and misinformation, whose number is legion.
Yet these people so often refuse to heed world-renowned experts like The University of Minnesota’s own Michael Osterholm, blithely and unaccountably willing to substitute their ignorance for scientific expertise.
O tempora, o mores!
Richard Turnbull
Aug 7, 2021 at 1:39 am
^^^^^
“Rusty” has added enabling the spread of a lethal disease, a global pandemic, which can not only cause catastrophic illness, death, and expensive hospitalization in scarce Intensive Care Unit hospital beds — thus depriving others of their use — but also cause permanent lung damage, permanent cardiovascular (heart) damage, permanent brain damage, including neuropsychiatric symptoms, and permanent loss of the sense of smell, to his already deranged attacks on women’s reproductive freedoms, and their right to respond through the legal system to sexual assaults, without being stigmatized or further abused by a process supposedly set up to help them. He has been on these comment boards for years flogging that foul merchandise.
Note the hyperbolic paranoia in the claim of a world-wide conspiracy of medical doctors, epidemiologists, virologists, public health experts, and the host of elected officials and bureacratic staff people who would be required to plot and carry out a conspiracy on this level, a conspiracy whose deadly effects would hardly leave them, their families, friends and lovers unscathed, of course.
For further info, consult The Fringes of Reason, A Whole Earth Catalogue: A Field Guide to New Age Frontiers, Unusual Beliefs & Eccentric Sciences (Crown Publishers, 1989) Edited by Ted Schultz, Foreword by Stewart Brand. Or any comprehensive abnormal psych text, or the DSM-V.
On top of that, he vicariously connects JFK to his inane lies and distortions. What stellar work as a troll!
Rusty
Aug 5, 2021 at 2:16 pm
The Delta “virus” is the deadly reaction to the Covid 19 “Vaccine” that’s designed and engineered to kill.
The Covid 19 scam is to get you in for the deadly Jab that is designed to do you in.
jenpetcar
Aug 3, 2021 at 11:15 am
Here’s why, from COVID Q&A with University of Minnesota Campus Public Health Officer, which was posted 4 days ago in Parent & Family News:
“Due to my personal beliefs, I do not intend to be vaccinated.
We understand. We hope you will continue to independently monitor and evaluate the situation.”
Perhaps it’s time to get more targeted in the guidance. Just a thought.
Laker2000
Aug 2, 2021 at 4:18 pm
Why no vaccine mandate?