Commitment to safety post-Quarantine Week

To the MIT community,

Thank you to our students, heads of house, and staff in MIT Medical and the Division of Student Life for making Quarantine Week (Q-Week) a success! Q-Week officially concluded yesterday morning as some in-person, on-campus instruction began.

During the course of the week, MIT Medical conducted 15,821 COVID tests. We can now report that only one undergraduate student tested positive after Q-Week. However, as we've reported on our online dashboard, there were seven positive cases among faculty, staff, and graduate students during the same period. For MIT to remain open to as many students as possible, we must all remain vigilant and follow MIT’s COVID-19 policies for on- and off-campus behavior. Continue to wear your mask, physically distance yourself from others, avoid crowds, and wash your hands often.

And, remember, if you have symptoms or were exposed to someone who tested positive for COVID-19, do not come to MIT Medical’s testing trailer. Covid Pass testing is for asymptomatic individuals only. If you are sick and waiting in line with others, you put your colleagues, peers, and everyone around you at risk. Instead, if you feel ill, you should stay home and log your symptoms into Covid Pass, or call MIT Medical’s COVID-19 hotline at 617-253-4865.

If you’re undergoing regular COVID testing at MIT Medical, or accessing campus, please be diligent about answering your phone: That call from an unfamiliar number could be MIT Medical calling to share a positive test result, or someone attempting to reach you as part of contact tracing efforts. If so, it’s urgent that you begin isolating or quarantining immediately, so as to stop the spread.

MIT Medical’s testing program is helping us to catch cases early and to isolate individuals who test positive. It’s working. But testing alone isn’t enough. Our behaviors matter even more. We need to show our care for one another and our commitment to our community’s health and safety. Thank you for doing just that during Q-Week!

It’s a long semester ahead of us, but thanks to your partnership, we are off to a great start. We still have a ways to go. We remain confident the MIT community will do what it takes to keep each other safe.

Sincerely,

Cecilia Stuopis, MD
Medical Director, MIT Medical

Suzy Nelson
Vice President and Dean for Student Life