Last Updated: June 18th, 2020

As of June 14th, 2020, Austin officially entered Stage 4 out of their five COVID-19 risk-based staging guidelines [1] due to an influx in hospitalizations [2]. In June alone, Austin has accumulated 1,729 new cases, with June 17th seeing a record-high in its daily number of reported cases at 220 [3].  Travis County currently ranks as the fifth highest Texas county [4] in its total amount of confirmed COVID-19 cases (which resides at 4,991 [3]), making Austin responsible for at least 34.6% of the total number of county cases. Despite an extension/replacement of Austin’s ‘Stay Home, Work Safe’ order—which was issued on March 24th and expired June 15th—with ‘Stay Home, Save Lives’ [5​,6], the city’s new COVID-19 cases continue to rise rapidly due to sustained transmission [7]. 

In a Fall 2020 Planning Update email written by UT Austin’s Interim President on June 8th, 2020, Jay Hartzell reiterated that UT’s plan was to allow asymptomatic members of the university to be tested on a voluntary basis. Such a plan endangers the health and safety of university students, faculty, and staff, and will not “reduce the spread” of or provide a “complete picture of the presence and impact of the disease.” I am writing this petition today to call for mandatory COVID-19 testing for asymptomatic/symptomatic individuals, whether it is in the form of scheduled random testing that selects people from specific dorms/buildings/etc. or an alternative method that will make contract tracing much easier and leave no room for potential disaster. It is better to be safe than sorry, and UT undoubtedly should be doing more to prevent on-campus cases in a school of more than 50,000 students. Our lives are in your hands.