With less than one month before the start of the Fall semester, the number of UF students and faculty who tested positive for COVID-19 on campus has been temporarily taken down by the university.
UF removed its COVID-19 dashboard Monday. For now, the statistics have been replaced with a message: a new dashboard will be published soon.
The move comes less than a week after the New York Times reported UF sixth in the nation for positive COVID-19 results. The Times’ list includes all four-year public colleges in the U.S. and every private institution that is part of a group of research universities or competes in Division I sports.
It is not clear when the new UF dashboard will come out or how it will differ from the original.
Less than two weeks ago, UF reported for more than a week that nearly 25 percent of UF students tested for COVID-19 at the Student Health Care Center received positive results.
The director of the UF Health Screen, Test & Protect Program said these figures were misleading because the sample size of people tested was still too small to accurately represent the entire Student Body.
“If I could turn back time, I would have never put that up,” Lauzardo said in a previous interview with The Alligator about the high numbers reported by the dashboard.
UF Health updated the dashboard daily until July 22. On July 23, The Alligator reported that the figures were misleading, and the dashboard has not been updated since.
