Protect PurdueSummary Report

Protecting Our Purdue Community

Purdue University embarked on a careful journey back to normal operations in the Fall 2021 semester, optimistic yet cautious about a second academic year amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This time, however, the campus community had the added benefit of safe, effective vaccines in its tool belt to operate as safely, openly and actively as any university in the country, while closely monitoring the science and local public health conditions.

“With over 88% of both students and the overall campus community vaccinated against COVID-19, we were one of the safest places anywhere.”

President Mitch Daniels

The Purdue community of over 53,000 students, faculty and staff was well armed against the highly transmissible COVID-19 and was the safest place to be in our community. If Purdue was its own ZIP code for public health reporting data, the campus ranked among the top 2% in the entire state of Indiana, according to data from the Indiana Department of Health.

Purdue is in the top 2% of all of Indiana ZIP codes for vaccination percentage.

So, here we are, wrapping up another uninterrupted semester during this pivotal moment of Purdue’s 150-year history where:

• Over 88% of the campus was vaccinated, including 89% of students and 95% of faculty.
• Not a single case of COVID-19 was traced to a Purdue classroom, and only one case was tied to a research laboratory.
• Efforts by the Purdue community meant only six hospitalized cases were added to the county’s overall hospitalized population.
• The overall positivity rate was just 1.71% during the semester from 91,673 COVID-19 tests administered.

This Protect Purdue Summary Report highlights the many small steps that 53,000+ students, faculty and staff took to complete in-person instruction safely and successfully from August through December 2021 during the ongoing challenge posed by the COVID-19 pandemic.