As Coronavirus Spreads, Liberty University Opens Back Up

School is back in session for students at Liberty University in Lynchburg, Virginia, despite Centers for Infection Control and Prevention requesting that each person practice social distancing if they can in a task to slow the rapid spread of COVID-19, the infection caused by the novel coronavirus.


Liberty University President Jerry Falwell Jr. announced Monday (March 23) that students should return to campus although continue classes online for the rest of the semester, since the state of Virginia has a ban on gatherings of 10 or more people. The campus’s academic buildings, library, and health club will all remain open, and students have been told to go back to their dorms. Professors are expected to hold office hours on campus. As of Tuesday, about 1,900 students were back on campus, a university spokesperson told Lynchburg’s News and Advance.


“I think we have a responsibility to our students — who paid to be here, who aspire to be here, who love it here — to give them the ability to be with their companions, to continue their statistics, appreciate the room and board they’ve already bought and to not interject their college life,” Falwell Jr. Instructed them Richmond Times-Dispatch.


This comes just days right after Virginia Governor Ralph Northam ordered all K-12 schools in the state to close while in the complete academic year. Most of the universities In the
U.S. Are closed and remaining closed up until the pandemic slows.


“We could not be more disappointed in the action that Jerry took in telling students they could come back and take their online classes on campus,” Lynchburg City Manager Bonnie Svrcek told The Associated Press. Doctors and public health experts seem to agree with Svrcek, telling the Day-to-day Beast that the choice to reopen the school is “nuts” and “utterly irresponsible.”


“If Liberty University reopens, people will die,” Max Cooper, an emergency-room doctor at Crozer-Chester Medical Center in Pennsylvania who served In the
U.S. Navy and is currently leading his area’s Emergency COVID-19 Task Force, instructed them Day-to-day Beast. “To mention nothing of the several educators and university support employees whose age and mortality likely skews older and higher. It’s imperative that Liberty and other universities stay closed.”