Each week, The Temple News will provide a brief breakdown on COVID-19 trends and cases at Temple University.
Case counts include students registered at any of Temple’s Philadelphia-area campuses, according to the university’s case dashboard.
Here’s what happened this week:
What happened with Temple cases today?
Temple reported 90 active cases of COVID-19, including 85 among students and five among employees, as of Oct. 26, according to the dashboard.
The figure is the highest number of active cases since Sept. 13, The Temple News reported.
How did cases change last week?
The university recorded 71 new COVID-19 cases during the week of Oct. 19, an increase from 34 cases the week prior, according to the dashboard.
Temple tested more than one thousand people for the fourth week in a row, according to the dashboard. The university recorded a 5.77 percent positivity rate among those tested this week, up from 2.80 percent the week before.
“We do not have one specific reason for the increase in positive cases,” wrote Mark Denys, the director of Student Health Services, in an email to The Temple News. “Nation and citywide, the number of cases are increasing and Temple is also experiencing an increase.”
Denys and contact tracers will continue to look for patterns, he wrote.
The overall positivity rate among those tested at Temple since March 10 is 4.40 percent, according to the dashboard.
What happened with cases in Philadelphia?
Philadelphia recorded 239 new COVID-19 cases on Friday, down from 288 on Oct. 16.
The city averaged 241 new cases per day from Oct. 9 to Oct. 23, according to city data.
The city averaged 197 new cases per day from Oct. 2 to Oct. 16, according to city data.
Philadelphia is not planning to restrict activities, but it is a possibility if cases continue to rise, wrote James Garrow, a spokesperson for the Philadelphia Department of Public Health, in an email to The Temple News.
“The Health Department is seeing new cases throughout the city, and our case investigations are identifying that most people who get the coronavirus get it from household and family members,” he wrote.
The ZIP codes 19121 and 19122, which encompass Main Campus, have recorded 1,933 positive cases of COVID-19 combined since March and 48 deaths, according to city data.
Philadelphia has recorded 43,003 confirmed cases and 1,859 deaths since the beginning of the pandemic, according to the Philadelphia Department of Public Health.
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