Wayne Community College will continue to require individuals to wear masks on its campus in the Spring semester.
WCC employees, students, and visitors must wear masks indoors through at least mid-January when the college will next review its COVID-19 precautions.
“We will start the semester in masks,” said President Patty Pfeiffer. “The college’s Pandemic Response Team will evaluate the situation, including the CDC (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention) county-level positivity rate, every 30 days beginning on Jan. 13.”
Wayne County is currently rated as having a “high level of community transmission” by the CDC.
This week, the North Carolina Department of Health and Human Services reported the highest one-day number of COVID-19 cases and that the number of individuals currently hospitalized with COVID-19 has nearly doubled since the beginning of December.
The mask mandate is one of several protocols the college has in place to keep everyone who comes onto the campus healthy. It follows CDC guidance in its monitoring of those with symptoms and exposures and other processes that provide protection against the virus and its variants.
WCC has taken a proactive approach to protecting the health and safety of all of its constituencies throughout the pandemic, said Pfeiffer. “We have kept the campus safe,” she said, noting that the college has had no infection clusters and minimal reported exposures.
This Spring semester, WCC is returning to full classroom capacity for classes taught wholly or in some part face-to-face through traditional, blended, or hybrid instruction. The college offers 39 percent of its courses completely online.
