US colleges suspend class due to virus

At least 200 US colleges and universities have announced that they are either canceling classes in favor of online education or suspending campus teaching altogether in response to the coronavirus, which has now infected more than 1,400 Americans.

The initial round of closures at first only affected schools in the earliest-hit states — Washington, California and New York — but have since affected institutions nationwide.

The National Collegiate Athletic Association (NCAA) announced Thursday that it was canceling its immensely popular men's and women's Division 1 basketball tournaments, dubbed "March Madness", to help stop the spread of COVID-19.

The NCAA had initially announced Wednesday that it would hold the event — one of the biggest on the US sports calendar — but bar fans from attending the dozens of tournament games.

The wave of school closures began last Friday when the University of Washington in Seattle became the first major educational institution to cancel all in-person classes for its 50,000 students after a university staff member tested positive for COVID-19.

The Seattle area has been hard-hit by the coronavirus outbreak, with 270 confirmed cases and 27 confirmed deaths reported since Jan 21 in King County alone, where "U-Dub" is located.

The university said it planned to resume normal operations on March 30 when its new quarter begins, but on Wednesday, Governor Jay Inslee prohibited gatherings of more than 250 people in King County and other neighboring counties.

Washington state has seen 373 confirmed cases and 30 confirmed deaths from COVID-19, with one recovery, according to data from Johns Hopkins University, or more than one-quarter of all cases in the US, which numbered 1,663 as of Thursday evening.

Yale University and the University of Pennsylvania were the latest major institutions to shutter its classrooms, joining fellow Ivy League schools Harvard, Princeton, Columbia and Cornell. (As of Thursday, Dartmouth remains open.)

Harvard took the additional step of asking students to move out of their dormitories. Yale and Cornell made similar requests, leading to logistical dilemmas.

"There's been many people crying, hugging each other," Michael Wilkinson, a junior at Tufts University, told NBC News. "They're not sure if they're going to see their friends for quite some time."

The Boston, Massachusetts-area school had emailed students Wednesday evening that they would have to move out of their dorms by Monday, with all classes moving online after an extended spring break.

"The dorms are cruise ships", wrote MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell on Twitter, quoting an unnamed university official, comparing student housing to the viral outbreaks that have threatened lives on several ships due to the close quarters onboard.

Students at the University of Dayton in Ohio were asked Tuesday evening to vacate dorms within 24 hours — three days ahead of the scheduled start of spring break — leading to a campus protest late Tuesday night by "a large disorderly crowd that grew to more than 1,000", according to a university statement.

The Dayton Daily News reported that police in riot gear from several departments carrying pepper powder eventually dispersed the crowd.

A University of Alabama professor said on Twitter that parents of college students should consider taking in other students who can't otherwise get home during campus shutdowns.

Some campuses are taking only short breaks while others have hinted that on-campus teaching may not resume after spring break.

An online spreadsheet maintained by Bryan Alexander, a senior scholar at Georgetown University, recorded 215 school closures as of Thursday afternoon.

The affected schools include Stanford, Penn State, MIT, Rice, Duke, Johns Hopkins, Julliard, Rutgers, New York University, Ohio University, Indiana University, Iowa State University and multiple campuses of the University of California.

At many of the colleges, the closures affect only classroom operations and not research facilities, which include the labs currently studying the coronavirus itself.

"Higher education has a very strong herd mentality," Alexander told forbes.com, "so I think once (the University of Washington) made a shift to teaching online, I think that really got everyone excited."