By Aidan Joly, Editor-in-Chief
Canisius President John Hurley announced Tuesday that the school has reinstated a mask mandate, effectively immediately, regardless of vaccination status.
All students, faculty and staff will be required to wear a mask while in campus buildings or vehicles outside of personal offices or residence hall rooms. Unvaccinated individuals must also wear a mask outdoors and vaccinated individuals are encouraged to do so where social distancing is not possible.
For unvaccinated students, the school said that it is currently developing plans to conduct periodic mandatory COVID testing during the fall semester at the expense of the student. For vaccinated students, they must upload a proof of vaccination or a negative test result within 72 hours before arriving at residence halls at the beginning of the semester.
As of Tuesday, the school still has not required the vaccine, but is monitoring the developments of the final approval of the Pfizer and Moderna vaccine by the FDA, which could lead to a vaccine mandate.
All of these new mandates come as a result of the concern over the more contagious Delta variant, which according to the CDC now accounts for approximately 82% of all new cases in the United States. Some of those cases have been breakthrough infections — infections among those who had been vaccinated.
According to the Erie County Department of Health, there were 73 new cases in the county on August 2 and there have been 574 total cases in the past seven days.