April 26, 2020

To Faculty, Staff, and Students,

As part of our continuing effort to provide updates regarding the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) while we work to maintain the health and wellness of our students, faculty, and staff, we wanted to inform you that an onsite employee at the Albany campus has tested positive for COVID-19 and will remain isolated from the campus population until public health officials have indicated they may return. We sincerely wish this individual a full and rapid recovery.

At this time, we know the individual is a member of a fab team which has not been onsite since Wednesday morning at 7:30 a.m., and this person was not experiencing any symptoms at that time. It appears there was minimal contact with others on campus as a result of current social distancing and work from home efforts. The Human Resources team is working with the individual to create a contact tree; those who may have come into contact with the individual are being notified and will work from home in quarantine for 14 days as a precaution.

The locations (NFN and NFC fabs, the gowning room, and staff break area) that the individual with confirmed COVID-19 exposure had worked in are being sanitized starting Monday at 7:30 a.m. For those essential employees who are on campus, please know you may see deep cleaning in the specific areas on campus where the individual had been, which may involve a cleaning crew wearing hazardous materials suits. Additionally, cleaning staff have continued usual site-wide cleaning efforts and will conduct an extra cleaning of the common areas as a precaution.

As we have previously shared with you, given the likelihood that our campus would be impacted with an illness, SUNY Poly has been preparing and established a COVID-19 task force that meets regularly via video conference to address priorities and plan future responses. COVID-19 Exposure Guidance procedures have been implemented and are being followed. It is also the institution’s responsibility to safeguard the privacy of those on campus, and in accordance with federal law related to health information, any impacted individual(s) cannot be identified. 

Those in our community directly affected by this unprecedented public health crisis will likely grow in the coming days and weeks. As we learn about them, we will continue to alert you about COVID-19 cases impacting our campus.

To help answer a number of questions and to keep our community informed about the latest COVID-19 information, please visit SUNY Poly’s COVID-19 webpage, which is updated regularly: sunypoly.edu/covid19

SUNY Poly will continue to put in place the necessary measures to maximize our community’s health in as transparent a manner as possible. We hope by sharing these facts, it will help us to remain calm in the face of uncertainty. We truly appreciate your flexibility, patience, and understanding.

The Office of the President