Loyola University announced Wednesday it will suspend in-class instruction and transition to online learning due to the coronavirus pandemic.

The announcement came just minutes after a similar one by the University of New Orleans and were made to help limit the kinds of large public gatherings that encourage the spread of coronavirus.

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"In consultation with state and city government, we are going to move to online instruction beginning Monday, March 16th, for the rest of the spring semester. In the last few days, it has become clear that there now exists community spread of COVID-19 in New Orleans," Loyola President Tania Tetlow said in a message to students.

She said the university would cancel classes Thursday and Friday to give faculty time to finalize their preparations, and to give students time to pack and move out if they plan to leave. Faculty was set to begin teaching online on Monday.

The campus will remain open but Loyola will begin avoiding gatherings in classes and will begin canceling public events.

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In an interview, Tetlow said that the local university presidents had been in "close touch" about coronavirus concerns for about three weeks. She had also been in talks with state and local health officials about Loyola, underscoring that it's a "unique situation" of residential campuses occupied by a diverse body of students from around the world.

Loyola was continuing to keep campus housing open because officials said they recognized it would prove difficult for some students to get home. But officials also encouraged those who could to head home and work from there.

Having students leave would also clear space for others who might need to be quarantined from other students, should they travel against university advice or come into direct contact with someone who tests positive for the virus.

While she said this detail didn't factor into the school's decision to go online-only, Tetlow added that a faculty member and two undergraduate students had lunch at an investigative journalism conference this weekend with someone who was subsequently diagnosed with COVID-19.

“They discovered and reported this last night,” Tetlow wrote in a message to students. “The professor and these two students, who all live off-campus, are self-isolating and do not have any symptoms. I have spoken to the director of state public health, who tells me that there is not a reason to broaden that circle more widely — those who later interacted with the faculty and students do not also need to self-isolate. We will continue to update you on all such information.”

In the interview, Tetlow said that living in a city that frequently is under threat from hurricanes and other big storms had helped prepare school leaders for other emergencies, including potential virus outbreaks.

In that sense, universities and colleges had been holding seminars and training sessions for teachers in preparation for potentially having to move classes online.

As of Wednesday, six patients in Louisiana had tested presumptive positive for the novel coronavirus, officials said. The World Health Organization has officially classified the virus outbreak as a pandemic.

"I never thought I'd be so grateful for the obligation of preparing for hurricanes," Tetlow said. "But there is feeling when you make the move from the planning to the actual crisis -- there’s complexity to the situation and a level of uncertainty. We’re all feeling the heightened anxiety already."

Stay with The Times-Picayune|New Orleans Advocate as this story develops