At this rate, if COVID-19 doesn’t infect me, it might still kill me. As a Spring/Summer semester student, I was anticipating that SLU would have quarantine procedures under their belt by now (news flash: they don’t). My move-in day was January 10th, I was in quarantine until the night of the 14th, and all seemed to be going well. I had three negative COVID tests on campus so far, including my most recent on the 18th. My first in-person class was the 19th, and I had a few more after that. I felt like I was following all the procedures properly and I only ventured outside of campus if it was important. I saw that other people were being sent home with COVID, but I wasn’t close enough to them to catch it or ask them about the process of being sent home.
Flash forward to Saturday the 23rd around 12:30. I’m in the Student Center three bites into a waffle loaded with whipped topping and strawberries while my family unit grabbed their orders from the Pub. Out of nowhere my phone starts buzzing with an unknown caller from Canton, and I answer it with a bit of hesitation. It was the Health Center calling to inform me that I was in contact with someone who has COVID-19. My eyes lock onto my roommate’s face, expressing my grievances immediately, and as soon as she catches on, I start to cry.
“I’m in the Student Center eating. What do you want me to do right now?” I asked, concerned for my friends’ safety and how my family would react if I had to be sent home.
“Go back to your dorm, and we’ll have security take you over to Kirk in an hour. You can spend the night there, but you’ll have to go home tomorrow,” the Health Center representative told me.
Go home? What if I have COVID and give it to my family? What about the fact that we all share one bathroom? What about my grandparents that my mom sees at least twice a week? Why didn’t they tell me that I was in contact with this person on Thursday until Saturday?
I asked why I couldn’t stay in Kirk and be tested on campus, but the lady told me I had to go home per the Laurentian Pact 500-mile radius rule. I live within 500 miles of campus, but it’s still about three and a half hours away and I don’t own a car. So off I went on a mostly empty stomach pillaging my room for stuff to bring home. Luckily, I found a ride from my friend to leave within the same day, as we’re both in the same class and we’re going through the same situation. My mom would’ve had to drop everything to get me otherwise.
The way that St. Lawrence has gone about this is very wrong, in my opinion. Of course, I’m outraged to be sent home within two weeks of finally being back, but I understand the concern of keeping people safe. The only thing is, I think that St. Lawrence just wants to cover their backs and not keep us safe necessarily, because if they did, they wouldn’t send us home to at-risk family members. They would test us before sending us home. They would pay for the tests that I’m ultimately going to have to pay for while I’m home before I can go back to campus. It goes against CDC guidelines to send us home without testing us first. They made everyone wait until they got tested to go home for break last semester, so why wouldn’t they do the same for someone they thought had COVID-19? It should be the school’s responsibility to find out if I have COVID-19, because there’s a good chance that I don’t, and they could have sent me home for virtually nothing. I can’t say I’d ever expect them to refund room and board for this week, but it would be nice if they did.
College campuses near my hometown are quarantining students on campus whether they’re within 500 miles or not, and they usually put people who tested positive together. What happened to SLU’s deal with the Best Western? How are they out of space in Kirk Douglas already?
The St. Lawrence procedure as of right now is to send the students who have been in contact with an infected person home, have them quarantine, test on Day 5 (5th day since contact with the virus when it’d start to test positive), and test on Day 10. If they had allowed me to stay on campus for quarantine and they tested me on Day 5, I would’ve been in quarantine for about four days if I were to test negative. Now I’m at home for at least nine days.
I understand why they would want to send me home and I’m not dismissing how serious COVID-19 is, but there are much better ways to handle this. If I test positive for COVID-19, my family will suffer the consequences.