PARK: Increased testing services benefit everyone
Column: The Queue
The “first-year plague” is often overshadowed by its sister scare, the “freshman 15.” Students are so focused worrying about the pounds they will gain before returning home for Thanksgiving break, that they fail to worry about the cold they might catch within the first month of school.
The first-year plague is an occurrence — at schools across the country, not just New Jersey — where a mass of first-year students, and students in general, get sick during their first semester of college.
Something that is and was relatively common in the past is now being carefully watched. No one dares to cough, sneeze or clear their throat in fear of the people around them thinking it is the coronavirus disease (COVID-19). But what if it really is COVID-19?
At Rutgers, testing for COVID-19 is not required for all employees or students. After being the first university to publicly announce its required vaccine mandate for on-campus students, it is questionable that Rutgers is not taking charge of testing the members of its community.
In the past week, there has been a rise in the number of students getting self-tested. It is easy to get an appointment, and I applaud the university for making that accessible to students and staff. All you have to do is call the student health center, request an appointment, list your COVID-19 symptoms such as coughing, a runny nose and a sore throat and show up. But getting a test is not the issue.
At the beginning of the semester in late August and early September, students who got a spit polymerase chain reaction (PCR) test waited only 24 to 48 hours for their results. When I went to get my test the week of Sept. 13, it took more than three days for the results to show up in my email inbox.
Waiting for test results is simply a pain. To go to class or to not go to class is the question when you only have a few in-person classes each week. As a result, students, although masked up, can be heard coughing from classrooms to buses to dining halls, and to no fault of each student. It is a common phenomenon from many years prior, unless it is COVID-19.
Rutgers has limited contact tracing and social distancing rules in place. Besides larger classrooms to spread out students, the buses remained packed Sunday to Sunday. I am just as happy as the next guy about returning to campus and filling SHI Stadium every other Saturday, but it begs the question of are we doing the most to keep our students safe?
The presence of greek life at Rutgers is not quiet. If you are walking down College Avenue you can see tens of houses pridefully adorned with their letters. At its core, it is philanthropy, but every college student knows parts of what the media portrays about sororities and fraternities are true.
Drinking, partying and getting busted by the cops is the regular Friday night scene at nearly every big state university across the country, and Rutgers is no different. While everyone has their fun, are they jeopardizing their health just to do so?
Here, it is not the greek life-affiliated chapters that are overwhelming the testing sites at Rutgers, but rather the stragglers of sick students.
Students are not required to get tested weekly or bi-weekly like other schools such as Tufts University, which also requires COVID-19 vaccination in order to live on campus. While testing is readily available for Rutgers students, there should be some sort of organized system for testing.
Students participating in greek life are not the only ones who leave their dorms — they are just notorious for doing so. Our D1 sports teams, club sports teams, music groups and other clubs that congregate in person and also travel to other schools and states do not have to get tested unless contact traced or actively shows symptoms.
Social distancing works. Vaccines work. Masks work. But none of those things is going to stop the freshman plague. Respiratory illnesses peak during the fall and winter seasons like the flu and common cold. Allergies, small dusty rooms, maybe a mass of more than 16,000 students living on campus is to blame for our sniffles and sneezes. Until then, stay cautious, do not go to class if you are not feeling well and keep testing negative.
Annabel Park is a Rutgers Business School first-year majoring in marketing and minoring in journalism. Her column, "The Queue," runs on alternate Fridays.
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