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NEW ULM -- Martin Luther College released a statement on Friday due to growing concerns of COVID-19 cases among college student athletes in the area.
On Feb. 5, MLC received 16 positive tests affecting both men's and women's athletic teams. In retests, 15 of those 16 tests came back with two negative results, meaning that only one person was truly a positive case.
The positive case did not affect the teams' schedules.
In the statement released by MLC Director of Public Relations Bill Pekrul, Pekrul said that MLC has been following directives to ensure the safety of the campus family and community.
"To ensure the safety of our campus family and our community, Martin Luther College (MLC) has been following directives from the MN Department of Health (MDH) for higher education, Brown County Health Department (BCHD) and NCAA for inter-collegiate sports," the statement said. "Our regular procedures include (but are not limited to) COVID symptom monitoring for the entire campus family and regular testing for our athletic teams. Our athletic teams have been testing for COVID three times/week for over three weeks with no positive results from our athletes until Friday, Feb. 5, when we received reports of a significant increase in positive cases. However, we viewed these results to be inconsistent with any social activity or contact our students reported. In communicating with other schools in the Minnesota college conferences, multiple schools experienced a similar unexplained spike in positive results on that same day. We worked with MDH to look further into the results and determined the appropriate response was to re-test those students who received positive results.
"As we now have received reports from follow-up re-tests, we can assure our connected communities that this was not an outbreak of COVID on our campus," the statement said. "Our subsequent re-testing yielded negative results in almost all cases. We will continue to work with local and state health departments and follow appropriate safety protocols to keep our campus family and our community safe."