I am a graduate student here @ASU and the university is doing a completey inadequate job of reporting COVID cases. If the most official report provides us figures as as of August 30th, 3253 students have been tested since August 27, 323 of those tests came back positive.

That is a positivity rate of 9.93%. That is over 100 new cases per day. The last time we were able to calculate this was between Aug 24 and Aug 27, when 4420 tests were administered between faculty and students, and 319 tests came back positive. A rate of 7.22%

The person who did that calculation wrote a long medium post about cases and the likelihood that we were facing an out of control epidemic. https://medium.com/@steffen.eikenberry/mathematical-analysis-of-publicly-disclosed-covid-19-case-data-at-arizona-state-university-779d0dcb466a

This person, actually a post-doc in mathematics, showed that the COVID case rate in our community was 64 times greater than that of Arizona. Our reproduction rate (R0) as of the 27th was 2.82, and that we could risking 25% of campus being infected within a week.

Using their same methods, and the data we have from August 28 to August 30, our reproduction rate for the period was 1.71, which is much lower than 2.82, but still indicative of a spreading virus. We still see more than 100 new cases of COVID every day among those tested.

What we get from the the university instead is an inappropriate figure about COVID cases among the entire student population (currently 1.04%). Comparing positive cases against the entire student body doesn't tell you how the virus is spreading!

We also hear that Arizona's reproduction/replication rate is 0.85, but we need to know what the rate is among students in classes and in dormitories, and among faculty in contact with those students!