Some students are beginning to get tired of COVID-19 mitigation efforts, but that may be a problem for high-risk individuals.
LSU has made it a priority to return to campus this fall with as much normalcy as possible. To make in-person learning possible, the university is requiring COVID-19 vaccinations, masking and has put a HEPA filter in every classroom.
Despite this, some students feel that COVID-19 is not a threat anymore and want to return to pre-pandemic policies. Some believe that because college students are young and healthy, it is not necessary to worry about the virus. These students are beginning to get weary of the COVID-19 mitigation policies they say are making their college experience less enjoyable.
Kinesiology freshman Cross Tally believes that COVID-19 isn’t a concern for most young people, so mandates that enforce guidelines on all students shouldn’t exist.
“Most of us around here are pretty young, like our immune systems can handle it,” Tally said.
Philosophy senior Michael Cedeno said he wouldn’t personally care if restrictions were loosened at LSU.
“I’m vaccinated, so I really don’t think I would necessarily care that much,” Cedeno said.
Cedeno’s sentiment was echoed by Peter Allen, a foreign exchange student from Sussex University studying American history.
“I’d be completely comfortable if there were no masks on campus at all,” Allen shared.
Not all college students are perfectly healthy, however. There are many on campus with underlying health conditions who are at increased risk of serious COVID-19 symptoms, death or long-term COVID-19 complications.
“You assume a normal 20-year-old is pretty healthy and has a good immune system, but you do forget that sometimes people do have these things that keep them from having a normal immune system, which then makes COVID more deadly to them,” said senior Logan Berthelot.
According to the CDC, young adults with medical complexities, such as genetic, neurologic, metabolic conditions or any condition that causes immunosuppression can be at higher risk if exposed to COVID-19.
Masking works best when everybody in a room wears a mask. While wearing a mask can help reduce that individual’s risk of contracting COVID-19, more than anything, it helps reduce the risk of spreading the virus.
If an individual has COVID-19, even if they are vaccinated or asymptomatic, the droplets and aerosols that they produce can spread the virus. Aerosols can even spread COVID-19 from a greater distance than six feet. Masks catch most of the droplets and much of the aerosols an individual produces, which is why health officials say it is important for everybody to wear a mask and to have increased airflow to reduce the spread of aerosols.
Some people with high-risk conditions are not able to get the vaccine or may have harsher side effects from the vaccine. Although to a lesser degree, vaccinated individuals are still at risk of contracting the virus. Only about 1% of COVID-19 cases are in vaccinated individuals. This week, a student at the University of Georgia died of COVID-19 related complications, despite being fully vaccinated.
“One of my childhood friends has Crohn’s disease, and they got the booster shot last week,” Berthelot said. “After they got the shot, they were out of school for a whole week. Because that’s how hard people with these underlying conditions can get hit by COVID, and it’s going to be more deadly for them.”
Rebecca Christofferson, a pathobiological sciences professor and member of LSU’s Health and Medical Advisory Committee, said that students should understand the risks.
“I don’t know that people in general aren’t aware of how the virus is spread, I think they still don’t believe it will hurt them,” she said. “Mortality is one thing, but some of the people who leave the hospital recovered have ongoing reduced respiratory function and there is a lasting effect from COVID. And it isn’t necessarily the risk to any one person, but the risk that one person who is fine transmits it to someone who will not be.”
Sophomore Carson Loup said students should think beyond themselves. “For these underlying conditions that people have, you need to take more precautions to prevent them from getting it. Just because you’re vaccinated and are less likely to get it, doesn’t mean you won’t transmit it to someone who can get it,” he said.
Don Zhang, a psychology professor at LSU, said that a number of factors create a perfect storm. “If you combine everything, the age aspect of it, they’re already kind of prone to taking risks, but then you add on top of things like being stuck at home for a whole year, not seeing their friends, not socializing during a period where socializing is really important,” he said.
Zhang also pointed out that personality traits that lead to selfishness are more pronounced in college students. “Dark personality traits, so things like narcissism, callousness, these types of traits… unfortunately, also tend to be a little bit more amplified in younger adults,” he said.
Zhang said that hope is not lost. Recent research has shown that for those who do not perceive themselves to be at risk, a community-safety or pro-social framing can help encourage mask-wearing. “So instead of saying, ‘Hey, you know, you should wear masks because it will help you,’ making it about being helpful for other people around you, make it about you’re doing a service for other people who do need the protection,” he said.
Zhang said pivoting from a frame about personal risk, which is relatively low for college students generally, to one about how that affects those around you, could help encourage resistors to adhere to COVID-19 mitigation policies. “So making that less about the individual and more about the benefit for society,” he said.
Erica Leonard, an undergraduate researcher at LSU, is studying how COVID-19 misinformation affects people’s vaccination behaviors. Leonard said that it is hard for college students to think beyond themselves.
“The majority of college students feel like that age is the healthiest. So they can’t understand someone else their age, being scared, or having a higher risk for that,” she said, “Because they themselves are kind of content and calm with the idea that they’re kind of immune to it, or not immune to it, but it wouldn’t affect them as much as someone else.”
Leonard said that she understands why students do not want to mask. “Not any one of us really wants to wear a mask anymore. Wearing a mask for, eight plus hours does get rather tiring,” she said, “But it is proven that it reduces the risk of it spreading.”
Ultimately, Zhang said that it is important for students to think of others.
“I think it’s important for the students to realize that their behaviors are not just about themselves, and certainly to think about the teachers who might have a health condition and the older employees on campus,” he said.
