Additionally, Gov. Andrew Cuomo said Tuesday that any college in New York that has more than 100 positive coronavirus cases must report it to the state Department of Health immediately.
The edict follows Cuomo's announcement Aug. 29 that a college needs to go to online learning for 14 days if more than 100 positive cases are reported or if an outbreak is equal to more than 5% of the campus population.
One hundred "cases can happen very easily," Cuomo said Tuesday.
"You saw all the other colleges that have it. That Department of Health regulation is going to go out today. It is going to be unequivocal. And as soon as the college has notice from any source, they have to immediately report it."
The new measures come amid growing concerns about COVID outbreaks on college campuses in New York and across the nation as students returned for the fall semester.
SUNY Oneonta last week sent students home for the semester after more than 350 of them tested positive in the first weeks of their return.
The SUNY tracker Tuesday showed campuses administered more than 35,000 tests and 500 came back positive, an infection rate of about 1.4% — which is slightly higher than the less than 1% the state has been under for the past month.
The colleges with the highest positive rates were Oneonta at 9.4%; Geneseo at 8.8% and Cortland at 8.7%.
But the sample sizes can be small: Geneseo had tested 57 students and five came back positive, while Cortland tested 23 and two were positive.
The system of more than 415,000 students had 779 who were in either in a precautionary or mandatory quarantine, the tracker showed Tuesday.
The tracker also showed that SUNY had 3,722 rooms on campus to house students who may be infected, and 473 were being used.
"As coronavirus cases spring up on our college campuses, we are reviewing real-time case data around the clock," SUNY Chancellor Jim Malatras said in a statement.
"This data is crucial to helping SUNY make quick, smart decisions that contain COVID-19 and protect our campus communities."
SUNY's 64 campuses have sought to bolster its testing and tracing in recent weeks.
SUNY is starting to conduct "pooled surveillance testing" for COVID-19, which allows 10 to 25 people to be screened as part of one test. The tests, developed through SUNY Upstate Medical University, are done through saliva swabs rather than by swabs inserted in a person's nose.
The samples are then combined into one and tested for the virus. If the test comes back negative, they are all presumed to be COVID free.
If the test comes back positive, the individual saliva samples within the pool would need to be tested again to pinpoint the exact positive cases, SUNY said.
The university system estimated it has the capacity to regularly pool test all of its students once every two weeks, or test even more where outbreaks occur.
The combination of surveillance pool testing and the saliva testing can allow SUNY to test 15,000 samples a day without the need to collect a new sample, officials said.
SUNY's "COVID-19 Case Tracker" dashboard is updated daily on cases and testing by campus.
The state is also launching a similar dashboard for all kindergarten through 12th grade schools, Cuomo said Tuesday.
©2020 Observer-Dispatch, Utica, N.Y. Distributed by Tribune Content Agency, LLC.
