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Several students at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, have received citations for throwing a party in an off-campus house after testing positive for the novel coronavirus.
Police approached the party around 4 p.m. last Saturday, finding seven men on the front porch, drinking and not wearing masks, according to body camera footage published by WOIO.
The officers ran one of the students’ IDs and discovered that he had tested positive for COVID-19. “I’ve never seen this before,” the officer said. “There’s an input on the computer that you tested positive for COVID?”
“Yes,” the student said. “This was, um, a week ago.” In response, the officer asked if he was meant to be quarantining, and the student said that he was at his house and that everyone else who lived in the house was also positive for COVID.
“But you have other people here and you’re positive for COVID? You see the problem?” the officer replied. The student said that some of the visitors were also positive, later adding that there were about 10 people inside in addition to those on the front porch.
“You’re not quarantining if you’re mixing with other people,” the officer said. “This is what we’re trying to prevent. We want to keep this town open.”
Following the confrontation with police, six of the students who live in the house received citations, which included a $500 fine, according to The Washington Post.
The Ohio college plans to resume in-person classes on Sept. 21, but reported 159 new student cases of COVID-19 over Labor Day weekend, WCPO reported. The new cases bring the university’s total to 1,037 active coronavirus cases.
In the state of Ohio, there have been 134,086 total cases and 4,354 coronavirus-related deaths, per data from The New York Times.
