The OCU Communications Office recently announced mandatory monthly COVID-19 screening for on-campus residents.
The university announced on Jan. 29 residential students will now complete monthly COVID-19 surveillance testing through the Campus Clinic in February, March and April.
Joey Croslin, Title IX coordinator and member of the Emergency Operations Center, said testing is an additional mitigation measure the EOC felt necessary to take.
“We felt it was in our best interest for the health and safety of the campus community to layer in additional testing strategies to our existing mitigation strategies to prevent the spread of the virus on campus, especially in our high-risk areas like our residential area and athletics,” she said.
Croslin said students will take a rapid COVID-19 test for monthly screenings instead of the Polymerase Chain Reaction test the campus clinic usually uses.
“It’s less reliable. Although the reliability is high, it’s less reliable than the PCR test which is what we do for entry testing for residential students,” she said. “If we get positives, we’ll confirm those with a PCR test.”
Croslin said residential students are divided into cohorts alphabetically by last name. Residential students with last names beginning with letters A-D test the first week of every month, E-L the second week, M-R the third week and S-Z the fourth week.
Though the monthly surveillance testing is currently only for residential students, Croslin said it will soon be available for any students who want to voluntarily be screened.
“A student who is not symptomatic or exposed can get a screening monthly if they want to,” Croslin said.
Casey Kreger, director of housing and residence life and member of the EOC, said the monthly screenings will make campus safer and allow the campus community to be more aware of their environment.
“Just because our bubble on campus has been doing well in this period, since school started in August, the community obviously is very variable on the fluctuation of COVID cases and hospital levels,” he said. “With that, we wanted to enhance safety on campus in this pandemic, both within the residential halls and other activities on campus.”
Eyoel Abera, music performance sophomore, said testing more often will help control the spread on campus.
“I guess it’s an ideal thing because the severity has gone up,” he said. “I have friends at large universities who get tested regularly, and it happened during last semester as well. It’s something that’s designed to help our safety, so I’m assuming it will help prevent the spread of the virus.”
Laura Sue, psychology/acting sophomore, said monthly testing is a necessary process that should have been implemented last semester.
“It will empower us to be better protected by providing our community with accurate information,” she said. “Yes, it will likely raise the alert level, and might even send us home if things are worse than they appear, but having had several close family members contract the virus, suffer through it and even die, I’d rather be taking online classes from home for a few weeks knowing that I’m safe than stay on a campus that could compromise my health.”
Sue said she has been uncomfortable at times from a lack of social distancing.
“I, personally, do not feel safe living on campus,” Sue said. “Classes and extra-curricular activities have been doing a mostly good job enforcing proper mask wearing, but even so, classrooms are over-crowded, and many students are definitely not six feet apart in lectures. Students spending their free time in the Caf, lounges and dorm common areas display an atrocious disregard for COVID safety protocols.”
Croslin also said she’s seen less compliance with safety protocols.
“For this semester, I think we’re all getting fatigued by all the extra steps we have to take to remain safe, and at the same time, we’re getting excited of the prospect of vaccines and our lives getting back to normal in the foreseeable future,” she said. “So, I think there has been a little bit of a lack of following our basic safety protocol, which is wearing a properly fitted mask, keeping your distance and limiting your social gatherings, washing your hands and those sort of things. That’s what we need to do, and overall, of course, our campus community is doing a great job.”
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