Stranded alone in my dorm room 20 hours of the day is not how I imagined my final semester of college, but given the current state of the world, it’s far from the worst situation I could find myself in. While I was fond of my roommate last semester, it certainly feels much safer to not be breathing someone else’s air, and some extra space for furniture is hardly a bad thing.
My personal status aside, I am looking forward to this semester more broadly. With vaccines on the horizon, it’s possible this will be the last one spent in lockdown. Even if that’s not true, NC State’s administration seems to have learned some hard lessons from the fall, which may enable us to overtake the four-week mark this time around.
Most, if not all, COVID-19 outbreaks announced by email in the fall centered around residence halls or Greek Village, which makes sense given that these locations host many students living in cramped quarters. When you have a dozen people using the same bathroom and an entire building with the same air ducts, it’s not hard for an airborne virus to spread quickly, particularly when people fail to wear masks.
Requiring all rooms to be single occupancy presents a significant step toward reducing the population density, which greatly reduces the chance one person will bring it into the hall and likely helps reduce spread if they do. Weekly testing will also enable the administration to more reliably enforce quarantine procedures, as the previous self-report system enabled those who tested positive to avoid quarantine, if they even got tested in the first place.
Last semester, the UNC Board of Governors — which sets policy for the whole UNC System — was briefed by health officials that mass testing would be unproductive, according to The News & Observer, warning of a “false sense of security” from negative results. The underlying assumption there that students would refuse to go to parties just because they lacked information on their COVID-19 status proved overly optimistic, at the most charitable, or negligent at the least.
Regardless of whom we ultimately assign blame to, a robust testing apparatus was cited by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as a key reason why Duke University never closed during the fall semester, meaning the current plans may enable the administration to effectively isolate areas where spread is common and keep the rest of campus safe. Duke had also reduced on-campus housing by about half, limiting it to first- and second-year students, which may be a tactic NC State employs in the fall in order to keep up the single-occupancy protocol.
Of course, no amount of caution and testing can protect against stupidity, so students must continue to practice healthy habits, like mask wearing and social distancing, and the more stringent mask requirements put out by the University for this term may assist with that. Rather than wishy-washy language from last term where masks weren’t strictly required when outside and “far” from other people, the rules are much firmer, clarifying that outside of sitting alone in your dorm room, masks are always required. If combined with stringent disciplinary measures, these rules may further reduce spread on campus by not allowing a small group of students to spew diseases all over the rest of us.
There are never guarantees when it comes to COVID-19, but the University’s current policies seem to have taken a great deal of inspiration from mistakes last term, and indeed, from Duke’s astonishingly successful semester. With hard work on behalf of students, faculty and staff — particularly the essential maintenance workers who keep our halls sanitized — we stand a real chance at surviving this semester with minimal disruption.
