This last week started as most second weeks usually do, with a regrettably early 1A. Midday Monday, however, my cold symptoms which I had possessed for the previous handful of days started to progress, and by Tuesday, I had accepted that at some point in the last week, I had gotten COVID-19. Though I had done a reasonable job to avoid contracting COVID-19, it appears that catching COVID-19 at Carleton is as inevitable as Death, Taxes and Farm being just mediocre.
Until my diagnosis, I had assumed that the COVID-19 response by the college was mostly the same as last year’s. It wasn’t until I went through the bureaucratic loops and endless emails that I realized that the virus wasn’t the only thing giving me a headache.
On Wednesday morning I awoke to realize that this is the sickest that I have ever been in my life. To my chagrin, President Joseph Robinette Biden Jr. had recently declared the pandemic over. The blood being coughed up, the sleepless nights and the lack of taste or smell that I currently have, as you can imagine, don’t make it feel that the pandemic is really over. It seems, though, that many on campus have started treating COVID-19 more and more like it is over, making me scared of future contractions.
On the administrative side, I’m increasingly disappointed in how quarantined students are being handled. The notification that I tested positive came in at 11:20 a.m., but the notifications pertaining to logistics and meals came in at 1:33 p.m. — three minutes after the only meal option for the day closes. This meant that there would be no realistic option for me to get food except through caring friends until noon the next day. Beyond this, the logistics of quarantining are haphazard. I’m lucky that I have a single, so I’m quarantining in my room, but even that comes with its dilemmas.
For instance, second Musser, the floor cursed to have me as an RA, has designated gendered bathrooms as is college policy to make people feel more comfortable on a given floor. Now one of those bathrooms has to be given to me to have a quarantined bathroom. This is great, and I’m happy to have a bathroom to myself, but Res Life has neither put up a sign nor delegated the RAs of the floor to put up a sign designating this bathroom as a quarantined bathroom. I should know, as I’m one of the RAs.
I don’t want to come off as ungrateful for the policies that the college has put in place, or dismissive of the attitudes that some have toward the status of the pandemic. I just think they could use a little work. So as I sit here, looking out my window and yelling at the squirrels, I can’t help but wonder if the college’s policy would be better with a little more coordination between individual facilities and a more generalized outlook that COVID-19 isn’t over, despite what the president says.
Coming to you from 2nd MUSS
-Bax “I know this is an email thing, but I felt like it” Meyer
