By Miles DeRosa, Staff Writer
There are a lot of things to say about Susquehanna’s COVID-19 plan to handle the recent surge of the Omicron variant.
You could say it leaves students without secure housing situations and those who cannot simply travel home in a day completely out to dry. You could say it continues to ignore the risk the virus poses to students with disabilities or compromised immune systems, even if they are vaccinated, and refuses to offer an alternative option. You could say it ignores the moral responsibility the university should feel towards its broader community—a community that is medically underserved and largely consists of older, unvaccinated people.
But ultimately, the only thing to say here is that the plan is no plan.
The vaccine and indoor mask requirements are positive steps. Only about four percent of the student body remains unvaccinated and this is crucial to lowering the risk COVID-19 poses to students. Although many students still fail to wear their masks correctly in class –and many professors fail to be diligent about holding students to that standard– this is also a very important requirement and strong preventive measure.
Susquehanna has worked hard to ensure that no one will get COVID-19 while on campus. But the most recent plan shows that they have failed to prepare adequately for the very likely scenario that someone does actually get COVID-19 while students are on campus.
Susquehanna announced in the recent update to the Plan that students who can return home should do so if they are sick. This puts students in a very difficult position. If they have a car, they have to decide whether or not to drive home, potentially putting their family members at risk. If they don’t, a family member will have to come to pick them up, virtually ensuring a significant enough exposure to contract the illness.
If this option is deemed unsavory for the obvious reasons (many people’s guardians may be unvaccinated, disabled, elderly, or immunocompromised making it extremely reckless to return home) or the student lives a distance too far to reasonably return home (like me, I’m from California), students must still find alternate housing, according to the Plan.
The option most students have defaulted to considering is a hotel stay off-campus but still near Susquehanna.
This is particularly interesting to me. One, hotels are expensive. Food enough for a ten-day hotel stint is also very costly (for the sake of argument we will say 30 $10 microwave meals, totaling at $300).
We as students are already paying upwards of $20,000 a year or building up large amounts of debt to live on campus.
By my research, hotels in the Selinsgrove area run at a median rate of $109 a night. So, in addition to the $20,000 yearly the university demands students pay for room and board, it is also asking students to pay what would end up being over $1,000 just for the hotel stay.
Not to mention the $300 for three meals a day (I’m assuming anyone with COVID-19 would not want to frequent a continental breakfast) and home remedies required to comfortably manage even a mild case of COVID-19.
For students who receive no financial help from their families, this could potentially obliterate a large chunk of what savings they have, if they have enough to pay for it at all. For students without a car, will they be asked to get a ride from a friend, putting them at risk? Will the university require a staff member to transport them to an off-site location, putting that individual at risk?
Not to mention that placing sick students in contact with hotel staff and community members poses a risk to the workers at these establishments.
To put it bluntly, this blatant lack of a plan is not feasible for every student or every family. There has been no suggestion from the school that financial help will be made available to help students who need to find a place to stay off-campus, nor has it offered refunds for the time the student spends away from campus, refunds that could help cover this expense.
As the plan currently stands, students who would not be able to go home and not be able to afford a ten-day stay in a hotel are being implicitly encouraged by the university to simply not get tested.
If a test coming up positive means you will be forced to leave campus with no place to go, why would you test? Why would you notify anyone if you did test positive? How can you expect these students to act in the safest manner when you have left them with no options for isolation housing?
If these students do stay on campus, in the event they have nowhere else to go, they pose a great risk to unvaccinated, immunocompromised, and disabled students.
Susquehanna’s defense for this lack of consideration is based on the contagious nature of the Omicron variant. It is true that Omicron is more contagious than previous iterations of the virus, and therefore warrants a stricter isolation policy, but this reasoning strikes me as especially flimsy for two reasons.
First, if you are this worried about the virus being more contagious, why is there still no online option? Why do you feel it is safe to bring students back into a dormitory setting at all? Second, if the variant is this contagious that you cannot provide isolation housing, why are most other schools in the area seemingly able to provide such housing, despite the contagious nature of the virus?
And if this housing can’t be provided on campus, why aren’t you offering to pay for students’ hotel stints if that is what is necessary?
Both Penn State and Bucknell are continuing to provide isolation housing through the spring semester. Why isn’t Susquehanna?
This would be a simple fix. Either offer isolation housing on campus this would be ideal) or offer to pay and help arrange off-campus housing for symptomatic students. In addition, restart an online option so that students who are high-risk can make the safest decision possible for themselves.
Many students will not be able to travel home safely on a whim and will not be able to afford a ten-day stay in a hotel. If students can’t go home, and can’t go to a hotel, where do you expect them to go?
You are leaving them out to dry. I understand these changes are costly, but it is utterly unacceptable to cut financial corners when student safety is involved.
I urge the university to update its plan to accommodate these simple fixes on behalf of student safety.
