Coronavirus forces UNC to abandon in-person classes after one week
17 August 2020
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill will shift to remote learning after clusters of five or more coronavirus cases spread in three residence halls and within a fraternity, just one week after class began.
Driving the news: Students who returned to campus are calling out the glaring problems with their school's off-campus partying culture, demanding leadership address the potentially-devastating communal spread of COVID-19 in their college towns. "We all saw this coming," The Daily Tarheel, the school paper, wrote in an editorial.
The big picture: Universities determined to reopen this fall boasted preventative measures of smaller class sizes, cleaning protocols and even testing options, but the results thus far haven't been especially successful.
- Reports of parties and informal gatherings are fueling the lack of social distancing practices among students, which are out of a university's control when they occur off-campus.
What they're saying: Students are now calling out their universities in college media outlets for not preparing for the inevitable.
- "University leadership should have expected students, many of whom are now living on their own for the first time, to be reckless," The Daily Tarheel wrote.
- "After only one week of campus operations, with growing numbers of clusters and insufficient control over the off-campus behavior of students (and others), it is time for an off-ramp. We have tried to make this work, but it is not working," UNC's Dean of Public Health Barbara Rimer said in a blog post Monday.
Transcripts show George Floyd told police "I can't breathe" over 20 times
Section2Newly released transcripts of bodycam footage from the Minneapolis Police Department show that George Floyd told officers he could not breathe more than 20 times in the moments leading up to his death.
Why it matters: Floyd's killing sparked a national wave of Black Lives Matter protests and an ongoing reckoning over systemic racism in the United States. The transcripts "offer one the most thorough and dramatic accounts" before Floyd's death, The New York Times writes.
The state of play: The transcripts were released as former officer Thomas Lane seeks to have the charges that he aided in Floyd's death thrown out in court, per the Times. He is one of four officers who have been charged.
- The filings also include a 60-page transcript of an interview with Lane. He said he "felt maybe that something was going on" when asked if he believed that Floyd was having a medical emergency at the time.
What the transcripts say:
- Floyd told the officers he was claustrophobic as they tried to get him into the squad car.
- The transcripts also show Floyd saying, "Momma, I love you. Tell my kids I love them. I'm dead."
- Former officer Derek Chauvin, who had his knee on Floyd's neck for over eight minutes, told Floyd, "Then stop talking, stop yelling, it takes a heck of a lot of oxygen to talk."
Read the transcripts via DocumentCloud.