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By Ashley Legassic

COVID-19

Sprott Shaw College cancels public events, including graduations, amid COVID-19 risks

Mar 12, 2020 | 4:27 AM

KAMLOOPS — Sprott Shaw College is taking precautionary steps to limit the risk of COVID-19 — including cancelling events at the Kamloops campus.

Sprott Shaw president Victor Tesan says all public events have been cancelled to help minimize the transmission or spread of COVID-19.

“We believe it’s important to take proactive measures to help mitigate the growing risk of transmission,” Tesan says. “We recognize as well, the government and the media [have] said currently it’s been assessed as low in Canada. We know the situation is changing every day globally in unpredictable ways.”

Tesan adds that at this point graduations, professional development workshops, ferry travel and airline travel have been cancelled.

“We’ve cancelled all of those activities; as the virus comes under control as it changes, obviously then our grads and everything will commence,” Tesan says. “But in the meantime we have a social responsibility to the communities we’re actively participating in just to help control, minimize and not put anyone at risk and just make sure we’re taking always the public safety as the paramount priority for our organizaiton.”

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Next week starts spring break for college students, and Tesan says that alone will help ease any risks on campus.

“We’ve been building our plan that should we need to — or should we make the decision to — move to online delivery, we’re going to move forward with that,” Tesan. “The fact that next week is spring break and there are no students in, our staff are basically going to be skeleton staff at the campus, so anyone who can work from home we’re allowing to work from home.”

At this point, no cases of COVID-19 have surfaced in Kamloops or the surrounding area.

“We communicate daily with our staff. We communicate with our students, we continue to post updates,” Tesan says. “I think the most important thing we can do as a citizen is remain informed, remain educated, we know… they’re saying the risk is low. We do realize concerns are high; I think it’s just important for us all to stay calm, stay educated and do as much as we can proactively to help move through this and make sure we don’t contribute to more spread of the virus.”