COVID has never been worse in Louisiana.
The state has shattered hospitalization and case number records again and again. Hospitals have been forced to cancel hundreds of elective surgeries. Waiting times for emergency room beds span hours. Medical professionals are being stretched to exhaustion.
But one would hardly imagine a state in crisis looking at Louisiana’s flagship university over the past week, where Welcome Week superspreaders abound. A carnival, a silent disco and, soon, full capacity classrooms—nothing to suggest a hospital overrun with COVID patients just a few miles down the road.
With hardly 40% of the student body vaccinated and the pandemic reaching new heights of destruction, our community desperately needs strength from the university. But all the administration has to offer is misinformation and weak policy.
The university’s new COVID plan does nothing to meet the gravity of the moment and ignores repeated pleas from faculty to offer remote teaching options.
One of the most egregiously weak measures laid out in the COVID map is the monthly testing of unvaccinated students.
The Delta variant is as contagious as chickenpox and twice as contagious as previous strains of the virus, rendering monthly testing essentially useless. From one test to another, a student could catch COVID, spread it throughout the community and recover, all without ever realizing they were infected.
Testing students who are not fully vaccinated twice weekly is a reasonable, common sense measure based on guidance from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Why the university refuses to implement what should be an obvious policy—especially after failing to mandate the vaccine and lying to do so—is unclear.
Another new measure announced in the plan requires students to submit either proof of vaccination or a negative COVID test “prior to arriving on campus,” a measure that has been largely unenforced.
Clearly, “required” means little more than “pretty please.”
The appearance of mitigation is valued more highly than actual mitigation.
Understandably, these lackluster protocols, combined with an often unenforced mask mandate and a nonexistent vaccine mandate, have left many faculty and staff afraid for their health and the health of their loved ones.
In response to these fears of the low vaccination rate among students, President William Tate said, “people have their own risk mitigation strategies, and we have to respect that while preparing to lower our collective risk.”
A person’s decision to not get vaccinated puts all those around them at risk. When it comes to public health, all “personal” decisions are ultimately of collective concern, something the individual liberty argument recently embraced by the administration ignores.
University leadership believes a student should be able to choose not to get vaccinated, but a vulnerable professor should have no choice but to be exposed to the virus. Biweekly testing is apparently an obstruction of liberty, but not wanting to teach in a classroom too small to accommodate social distancing is an “abandonment of duties.”
If professors are unable to gain approval to move their classes online, they are left with two options: step down, or move instruction remotely under threat of termination. With a deadly virus raging through the state, that’s not a choice anyone should have to make.
For all his promises of putting “scholarship first,” Tate is doing little to address the heart-wrenching concerns expressed by so many faculty and staff.
The anxiety of many in our community, the inevitable outbreaks of COVID on campus to come, the further stresses on the local hospital system and another abnormal semester of college could have all been avoided with one email from the university to the Louisiana Department of Health requesting permission to mandate the vaccine.
But our leaders didn’t have the courage, even as the legal and constitutional validity of mandates were upheld across the country and state. They traded the health and safety of those on campus for the easier political choice, cowering behind the non-binding legal opinion of corrupt Attorney General Jeff Landry.
Tate has promised to mandate the vaccine once it is approved by the FDA. Approval set to come for Pfizer on Monday, and Tate has yet to say how long students will have to get vaccinated or how strictly that mandate will be enforced.
Even in the best case scenario, it will be weeks before newly vaccinated students are fully protected. In the meantime, the administration needs stronger pandemic protocols to keep campus safe.
We’re all hopelessly tired of the pandemic, but that doesn’t mean it’s over.
Public health must come before revenue, football games and all else. In Louisiana’s darkest hour, the university must finally act in ordinance to that priority.
Claire Sullivan is a 19-year-old coastal environmental science sophomore from Southbury, Connecticut.
Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article stated that the Delta variant is more contagious than the chickenpox. According to an internal CDC report, the Delta variant is as contagious as the chickenpox.
