University Park is among the latest crop of five Penn State campuses that will once again require indoor masking beginning on Tuesday, May 31.
Masks will also be required indoors at Penn Stater Beaver, Greater Allegheny, New Kensington and Schuylkill because of their locations in Pennsylvania counties now with “high” COVID-19 Community Levels, according to the CDC.
Centre County returned to the high level in the CDC’s weekly update on Thursday night. At the high level, the CDC recommends masking indoors in places open to the public.
To be at the high level requires 200 or more new cases per 100,000, with 10 or more COVID hospital admissions per 100,000 and/or a seven-day average of 10% of hospital beds occupied by COVID inpatients. Centre County had a case rate of 248.79 and 13.7 new COVID admissions per 100,000 people over the last week, with 5.7% of inpatient beds occupied by COVID-19 inpatients.
State College Area School District also will require indoor masking once again beginning on Tuesday.
The county had previously been at the “low” level for 12 weeks. Penn State dropped its mask mandate and began to roll back COVID-19 testing on March 22. It paused operations of its testing clinic on May 13.
Students showing symptoms of COVID-19 can still get tested through myUHS.
The university’s COVID-19 dashboard has not been updated since April 7, but Centre County’s seven-day rolling average of positive cases was 57 as of the Pennsylvania Department of Health’s weekly update on Wednesday. It’s the county’s highest average since Feb. 12.
Penn State Abington, Behrend, Brandywine, Great Valley, Hazleton, Lehigh Valley and Wilkes-Barre also announced new indoor masking requirements Thursday.
StateCollege.com’s Geoff Rushton contributed to this report.
