I have avoided getting sick throughout the entirety of the COVID-19 pandemic. I have taken every single precaution advised by the CDC and the university, even abiding by some university policies that have since been lifted. I wear masks everywhere, wash my hands before taking off my mask, clean my masks on a regular basis, carry hand sanitizer, don’t go to overpopulated events, have gotten vaccinated and even received my booster shot.
Yet, I still caught COVID-19. After two years of avoiding it, of feeling like we were finally in the clear, of feeling like maybe I could have a chance at a normal college experience again, the omicron variant showed up. Hospital beds were filled, testing sites were experiencing such long lines that hadn’t been seen since the beginning of the pandemic and events were getting cancelled again.
I began feeling sick the second week of school, when NSU recorded over 500 people testing positive. Several of my friends had tested positive or received notification that they had been exposed as well. Testing was hard to find; I wasn’t able to schedule a test until nearly a week after I began feeling sick, both on and off campus.
Even worse, according to the new CDC guidelines, I was safe to return to normal after five days so long as I continued wearing a mask around others. NSU’s automated COVID-19 response system began sending me emails and text messages saying I was eligible to return to classes, and only when I double checked with my case worker and confirmed I was still experiencing symptoms that I was told to wait for my test results to come back. Even after this, I received several more texts and emails saying that I was eligible to return to campus unless I had symptoms, even though I had confirmed with several people several times that I was in fact experiencing symptoms. It was confusing, especially since things were sent over various emails and text messages instead of just one single thread. Although I know there were hundreds of students being managed at the time, it felt like productivity was being favored over wellness.
Let me be clear: you do not want to catch COVID-19. I’m fully vaccinated, and even when I am sick, I am the type of person who likes to get things done. COVID-19 rendered me useless. I ran a fever for two days. I was too exhausted to leave my bed. My throat was so sore that I couldn’t swallow anything but liquids and when I got up to make myself soup, I found I had to sit on the floor for a few minutes in between my walk from my bedroom to the kitchen. Although I started feeling better after about three days, it was three days that I felt totally defeated and alone.
I understand many students don’t work well over BlendFlex. I’m a marine biology major, and I feel that many of the experiences I could have had were robbed because of the pandemic. That being said, NSU put many of its students in danger by choosing to only mandate masks–a mandate that was poorly reinforced–over the first few weeks of this semester, and many of us suffered the consequences. While 558 people may not be a huge percentage of NSU’s population, it was a number that NSU had not seen through the entirety of the pandemic, and seemingly chose to ignore.
