#Cornell University closes campus as Omicron outbreak spreads

Cornell University has closed its main campus amid an outbreak of COVID-19’s Omicron variant.

A “substantial number” of students infected with the coronavirus at the Ivy League school’s upstate Ithaca campus have the strain, officials said Tuesday.

“Our surveillance testing has continued to identify the rapid spread of COVID-19 among our student population,” Cornell University President Martha Pollack wrote in a letter to students.

The university is now on “alert level red” in response to the “rapid spread” and immediately closed libraries, canceled sporting events and moved all final exams online, Pollack said.

With final exams for the semester already underway, the school’s professors are scrambling to reschedule and digitize tests.

“While faculty and staff case numbers currently remain low, just last evening our COVID-19 testing lab team identified evidence of the highly contagious Omicron variant in a significant number of Monday’s positive student samples,” Pollack said.

“I want to make clear that our evidence of Omicron is preliminary,” she said.

“PCR testing has identified its hallmark (the so-called S-gene dropout) in a substantial number of virus samples. While we must await confirmatory sequencing information to be sure that the source is Omicron, we are proceeding as if it is.”

The university assured students that the Omicron variant is believed to cause milder cases of COVID-19 but warned it also may likely be more transmissible than earlier variants.

Visitors have been banned from stepping foot on the campus, and all students have been urged to stay within the town and get tested.

The dining hall has shut, and students who live on campus will be offered “grab-and-go” food.

Infected students have so far not shown symptoms of severe illness, according to Pollack.

The latest outbreak comes two days after Dr. Anthony Fauci said “sobering” preliminary studies show the Omicron variant of COVID-19 appears to evade some of the protection provided by vaccines.