As of Thursday evening, two asymptomatic undergraduate students have tested positive for COVID-19 and are receiving care in isolation on campus.
“The incidence is not surprising, given the volume of testing that has been conducted,” College spokesperson Diana Lawrence wrote in an email statement to The Dartmouth.
2,360 undergraduate and graduate students have been tested so far, as well as 743 faculty members.
Last week, in an incident unrelated to the two undergraduate cases, 23 graduate students from the Tuck School of Business were placed in quarantine following a social gathering on campus.
The College has previously stated that it would reconsider hosting students on campus should one percent of students test positive for COVID-19 on a given day. Lawrence wrote that the College is “not anywhere near the one percent threshold at this time.”
Of the two positive cases so far, one was identified during pre-arrival testing and the other through “surveillance screening.” Lawrence added that the cases are not known to be connected, but declined to provide further details due to privacy concerns.
Dartmouth reported the cases on its COVID-19 reporting dashboard — updated every Monday and Thursday — on Thursday.
According to the dashboard, 59 students and two faculty members are in “quarantine,” meaning they “do not have symptoms and have not tested positive for COVID-19 but are identified as having a risk factor for exposure to COVID-19.”
Four students and one faculty member are in “isolation,” after either having tested positive or displaying COVID-19 symptoms while awaiting test results.
“The testing is doing exactly what we intended it to do: identifying cases so we can isolate people,” Lawrence wrote.
Contact tracing details for COVID-19 cases will remain confidential, according to the College.
