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COVID-19 Updates  ›  News & Communications  ›  Communications Archive  ›  2021  ›  October  ›  Updating Capacity Limits for In-Person Meetings and Gatherings
October 01, 2021

Updating Capacity Limits for In-Person Meetings and Gatherings

Dear Members of the Carnegie Mellon Community,

As we begin the second month of the academic year, I want to thank you for your diligence and resilience following CMU’s protocols and mitigating the risks presented by COVID-19. It’s been invigorating to see our campus filled with energy and it’s heartening to see the renewed activity around us. As noted in our public dashboard, our community is now 95% vaccinated, CMU cases have been declining over the past three weeks, and our asymptomatic testing continues to indicate a low virus prevalence.

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These positive trends, coupled with our assessment of the broader data over the past month, enable us to further relax the limits for in-person meetings, gatherings and events.  

Beginning on Monday, October 4th we are updating the minimum requirement related to meetings as follows:

  • Indoor meetings and university-sponsored events of up to 50 persons or 50% of the indoor space capacity (whichever is greater) are permitted.
  • Outdoor meetings and university-sponsored events are permitted up to 75% of outdoor facility capacity.

While I am gratified by our recent campus trends, it is critical that we collectively maintain our discipline, as there are still uncertainties and challenges associated with the pandemic. Case numbers in the Pittsburgh region are still high. While we hope to soon see declining caseloads regionally, ongoing vigilance is necessary, including the wearing of facial coverings.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to extend a heartfelt thank you to the Tartan Testing staff, University Health Services and their amazing team of contact tracers, all of whom have shown remarkable dedication to ensuring the health and well-being of our community during these challenging times. They’ve had a busy month as our campus was re-populated and we worked our way through our testing regimens, vaccine documentation and rigorous contact tracing.

We have come a long way since COVID-19 emerged last year, and it is my hope that we will continue with significant progress in the coming months as we forge ahead together as a CMU community.

Sincerely,

Daryl Weinert
Vice President for Operations, Interim Vice President for Research, COVID-19 Coordinator