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Two students test positive for COVID-19; College identifies 14 close contacts

March 30, 2021

Two students tested positive for COVID-19 on Monday. The cases are not believed to be “connected to each other or to any of the cases reported last week,” COVID-19 Resource Coordinator Mike Ranen wrote in an email sent to the Bowdoin community on Tuesday afternoon.

These new cases bring the College to three active cases of COVID-19, including an employee who tested positive last Wednesday and is quarantined at home.

The College has identified 14 close contacts of the two positive students, all of whom have been placed in designated isolation and quarantine residences. All these students are asymptomatic at this time.

In his email to the College community, Ranen explained that students in quarantine will be supported by the College. All will receive meals through delivery and have access to telehealth, COVID-19 testing, and counseling. As is procedure, students in isolation will remain quarantined until they receive two negative COVID-19 tests.

Ranen assured in his email to the Orient that the College has adequate quarantine space to house these students at this time.

“We have not seen evidence of cases spread between members of the Bowdoin community,” Ranen wrote in his email to the Orient.

In an email to the Orient, Ranen was not able to disclose where individuals may have contracted the virus or how other students living on campus came into contact with peers who have tested positive.

Ranen explained in his email to the Orient that close contacts arise in a variety of ways. However, they seem to most often develop through living spaces.

He stressed that not all members of the same residence are automatically identified as close contacts, and that contact tracing protocols are followed uniformly for each positive case.

Ranen iterated in his email to the Orient that, as of now, the College is remaining in status level yellow, but it will continue to monitor cases and contacts on campus.

Maine, along with the rest of the United States, is currently seeing an uptick in COVID-19 cases, and Ranen urged students, faculty and staff to continue using proper facial coverings and following social distancing guidelines to help stop the spread of the virus.

The College will continue to update its COVID-19 dashboard with results from the previous day.

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