Orange County, NC – Saturday night, hundreds of students and fans at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill flooded Franklin Street after the basketball team won Duke University. It is a famous tradition on UNC-Chapel Hill for students to celebrate a victory over rival Duke.
“I haven’t seen so many people in so long. It was definitely wild,” said Hannah Willcox, general manager of Sup Dogs.
Willcox said he anticipated it happening, even during the coronavirus pandemic.
“Freshmen, sophomores … they’ll want to hurry up Franklin Street. They’ll want to party like they’ve seen so many people do before,” he said.
On Sunday, UNC-Chapel Hill leaders said in a letter that they had received hundreds of student complaints related to the celebration on Franklin Street.
“These contacts will be evaluated and students who have violated our COVID-19 community standards will be subject to disciplinary or developmental action,” school leaders said in a statement.
The city of Chapel Hill and Orange County have spent months trying to keep the number of coronaviruses low.
“We get together all the time talking about how to do it together and keep people safe, and we want our companies to survive the pandemic, and you can only do that by having safe practices because people need to feel safe going to the pandemic. business i [the] companies need safe practices, ”Chapel Hill Mayor Pam Hemminger said.
“It was so annoying,” Hemminger added. “We’ve worked a lot together. We’ve been sending messages together. We’ve been working together …[we] made the students sign a promise “.
Hemminger said that while some people might say they understood why students and fans celebrated, it was not good during the pandemic.
“It’s not okay to drop the guard right now. We’re so close to the light at the end of the tunnel. The numbers are just starting to come down from the holidays. We have to be careful. We see the light. We just have to follow that path. to him. Events like this take us back. ”
“We have to sacrifice those experiences to be able to overcome the pandemic,” Willcox said. “It’s frustrating for companies that have followed the rules and are doing their best [they can] to make sure Chapel Hill was safe. ”
Sunday was the last day for students to return to campus during the spring semester. School leaders said that despite complaints about the incident, undergraduate face-to-face classes will continue on Monday as planned. However, teachers will be able to stay with remote instructions on Monday and begin face-to-face learning on February 17th.
