Falwell’s Liberty University reopens amid pandemic, and now students have COVID-19 symptoms

Less than a week after students were invited to return to Christian college Liberty University, a school official has announced that nearly a dozen students have displayed symptoms of COVID-19.

Officials in Lynchburg, Virginia, were fielding complaints last week about the hundreds of students who had returned from their spring break to Liberty University, where President Jerry Falwell Jr. welcomed them back amid the coronavirus pandemic.

"We could not be more disappointed in the action that Jerry took in telling students they could come back and take their online classes on campus," Lynchburg City Manager Bonnie Svrcek told The Associated Press.

Now Dr. Thomas W. Eppes Jr., who runs school's student health services, told The New York Times at least a dozen Liberty students were sick with symptoms that suggested COVID-19, and three of those students were hospitalized. The remaining eight students have self-isolated.

"We've lost the ability to corral this thing," Eppes said he told Falwell. But he did not urge him to close the school. "I just am not going to be so presumptuous as to say, 'This is what you should do and this is what you shouldn't do,' " Eppes said in an interview.

Falwell is an influential voice in the evangelical community and has long been a supporter of President Donald Trump. On Sunday, as Trump extended guidelines suggesting self-isolation through April, Falwell said he was suggesting students returning to campus self-quarantine for 14 days.

"Liberty will be notifying the community as deemed appropriate and required by law," Falwell said in an interview Sunday when presented with the numbers of students sickened.

Of the 1,900 students who returned last week to campus, 800 had left, according to Falwell. He was unsure whether those students returned to off-campus housing or to their family homes.

Hundreds of colleges across the country remain closed to students and have transitioned to online-only classes for the remainder of the semester. Falwell had received backlash for going against this trend, with many fearing what ultimately happened with students or worse.

"I think we have a responsibility to our students -- who paid to be here, who want to be here, who love it here -- to give them the ability to be with their friends, to continue their studies, enjoy the room and board they've already paid for and to not interrupt their college life," Falwell told the Richmond Times-Dispatch last week.

According to a later report by The New York Times, the university asked four students who returned from the New York area and two of their roommates to self-quarantine, but none of them were referred for testing and none had symptoms. One student who returned to campus from a county with a high number of cases with a cough and fever volunteered to self-isolate from home as he awaited test results.

Two weeks ago, Falwell had promised city officials that even if he let students return it would be limited to a certain number of students. However, Falwell, in an interview with Todd Starnes, a conservative radio host, said he felt pushing students away was not the right move.

"We think it's irresponsible for so many universities to just say 'closed, you can't come back,' push the problem off on other communities and sit there in their ivory towers," Falwell said Wednesday.

Some concerned parents have been responding to a post on Twitter that Falwell tweeted March 15, disputing his stance. Jeff Brittain, who described himself as a parent of three students at Liberty, said inviting the students back was "crazy" and "irresponsible."

Falwell replied, calling him a "dummy."

Virginia has increasingly become a hot spot for COVID-19, with reportedly more than 800 cases as of Monday morning. Virginia health officials have urged residents to stay mostly indoors this weekend and take the pandemic seriously.

“We want to make sure that the community understands the seriousness of this disease,” Dr. Elizabeth Cook, a Lynchburg hospitalist, told News Advance. “It’s really easy to be lulled into a false sense of security because we only have a few cases in the community, and it feels like it’s happening in other places. But this is a very serious challenge for the community.”