Health officials believe that the worst of the recent norovirus outbreak on campus has passed and that a second peak in the trend of infected students will likely be avoided.

In addition, although the D.C. Department of Health has not yet completed its investigation of the origin of the virus, it has determined that food was not the source.

“The food that we sampled came up negative for food borne passages,” said LaShon Beamon, the interim communications director at the DOH. The investigation will continue to look at other possible points of origin, including the sanitary conditions of university facilities.

The outbreak has sent at least 212 people in the past week and a half to the Georgetown University Hospital or Student Health Center. Original speculation was that O’Donovan Hall could be the source of the gastrointestinal symptoms among students, leading the university to close the dining hall for almost two days.

The dining hall — which experienced several changes since it reopened, including Leo’s workers serving all food to students and several stations being closed — resumed normal operations Wednesday morning. It did, however, maintain its limited Grab ‘n’ Go menu, which will gradually expand over the next week, according to the university Web site.

He also said Georgetown would be adding an event to help make amends for the disruption in normal dining options over the past week: a catered GUSA Election Panel and Debate Watch Party in the dining hall on Oct. 15, free for all students.

The university will also keep its cleaning and sanitation efforts in public spaces across campus in place until Oct. 20.

The student affairs head lauded the emergency responses of university officials, the coordinating team and students who helped ill students during the outbreak. GERMS, for example, more than tripled its previous record for the number of calls in one shift on the second night of the outbreak, according to Taylor Burkholder (MSB ’09), director of public relations for GERMS.

“[Our Mass Casualty Incident Protocol] involved GERMS calling in extra volunteers to be able to run two ambulances full-time with frequent breaks and to bring people in to our office, where we set up an enhanced command center,” Burkholder said.

Outbreaks of norovirus, which have plagued Georgetown now for over a week, have not been rare in the past couple of years. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention has reported that there has been an overall national increase in norovirus outbreaks since 2006, largely due to two new co-circulating norovirus strains. The CDC did not track the number of these outbreaks prior to 2006, resulting in limited records of norovirus outbreaks.

In 2006 the National Calicivirus Laboratory within the CDC reported that most norovirus outbreaks occurred on cruise ships, with 37 reported cases out at sea, 37 cases in long-term care facilities and assisted living facilities and 13 in restaurants and catered events. Only three of those outbreaks occurred at colleges and schools.

More recently, though, a norovirus outbreak at the University of Southern California followed Georgetown’s only a few days later. According to its student newspaper, the Daily Trojan, as of Wednesday, 415 students had been infected on their Los Angeles campus.