Monday’s St. Thomas men’s basketball game at Bethel was postponed “due to COVID-19 protocols,” St. Thomas Athletics said in a statement.
The game is the first postponement for the men’s basketball program.
The team joins men’s and women’s hockey as the third St. Thomas team to suffer a COVID-19-related postponement.
St. Thomas men’s hoops was scheduled to play their first home game Wednesday against Hamline. The Tommies won the last match-up with Hamline Feb. 3, defeating the Pipers 81-52.
In the latest weekly St. Thomas Center for Well-Being update, COVID-19 cases on campus declined for the third week in a row.
Five student cases and four employee cases were reported for a total of nine cases last week. Of the total cases, seven came from the St. Paul campus and two came from the Minneapolis campus.
As of Saturday, 556,482 Minnesotans have received their first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine and 158,763 more have completed the vaccine series, according to the Minnesota Department of Health.
A hacker gained unauthorized entry to the system controlling the water treatment plant of a Florida city of 15,000 and tried to taint the water supply with a caustic chemical, exposing a danger cybersecurity experts say has grown as systems become both more computerized and accessible via the internet.
The hacker who breached the system at the city of Oldsmar’s water treatment plant on Friday using a remote access program shared by plant workers briefly increased the amount of sodium hydroxide by a factor of one hundred (from 100 parts per million to 11,100 parts per million), Pinellas County Sheriff Bob Gualtieri said during a news conference Monday.
Sodium hydroxide, also called lye, is used to treat water acidity but the compound is also found in cleaning supplies such as soaps and drain cleaners. It can cause irritation, burns and other complications in larger quantities.
Fortunately, a supervisor saw the chemical being tampered with — as a mouse controlled by the intruder moved across the screen changing settings — and was able to intervene and immediately reverse it, Gualtieri said. Oldsmar is about 15 miles (25 kilometers) northwest of Tampa.
Gualtieri said the public was never in danger.
Maddie Peters can be reached at pete9542@stthomas.edu.