The University of Texas at Dallas has announced that its students will not be resuming campus for the spring semester as scheduled.

Students were expected to return to classes on Monday, January 10. However, the resumption has been postponed till January 18, a week later.

UT-Dallas President Dr. Richard C. Benson said in a statement that the delay in the start of the spring semester is due to the surge in COVID-19 cases brought by the Omicron variant.

“The highly contagious omicron variant of coronavirus is now projected to account for 92 percent of current COVID-19 infections in a multistate region that includes Texas,” he said.

The new start date falls a day after the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday.

The university officials said that other changes might be made, depending on how much Omicron cases increase.