Nonprofit Mississippi News There have been at least 896 coronavirus-infected students, staff, and faculty since classes started for Mississippi’s eight public universities just a month ago. The new COVID hotspots will be college campuses. Infections are likely to rise as students return to campus to share living spaces and other common areas. Except for the University of Mississippi which opened on August 24, all public colleges in Mississippi started classes on Aug. 17. It is difficult to assess the extent of infection at Mississippi’s public colleges and universities as they do not have to share this information with the public. Also, different metrics are used by each institution. Mississippi Department of Health has been reporting K-12 cases county-by-county since recently, but no weekly report is available for higher education institutions. Alcorn is the only university that publishes case count numbers, but all universities do it differently. The University of Mississippi dashboard, for example, shows detailed case counts and other trends but does not disclose how many tests were performed. It’s not possible to determine the area’s positivity rate without knowing this information. This tells you how prevalent infections are. This metric is included by the University of Southern Mississippi, but it is not updated daily. The dashboard at Delta State University only shows the cumulative number of infections since classes began. It’s not possible to know what the daily totals are. Jackson State University hasn’t updated its tracker since August 19, and it also doesn’t show the total number of tests that were conducted. Mississippi Valley State University’s tracker does not contain this information. Although the dashboard at Mississippi State University shows the total number of tests, it doesn’t show how many cases remain active. The dashboard at Mississippi University for Women doesn’t include daily totals or disclose how many people were tested.