In just six days, UO reported just under a thousand cases, blowing out the total cases from last term entirely. Every day, I walked past McArthur Court, seeing the line for symptomatic COVID-19 testing wrap outside the building. It is clear — the administration’s current measures against COVID-19 are not preventing the spread.
Just like last term, the administration boasts an over 95% vaccination rate among students and faculty in their justifications, claiming it will suffice as a precautionary measure if we remain masked in the classroom. The problem, though, is that what the administration considers “safe” does not prevent students and faculty from infection.
The omicron variant has shown an astounding ability to infect vaccinated individuals. Since mid-December, we knew the variant was exponentially more likely to do so. So while masks and vaccines remain an essential source of protection, UO needs to bolster its precautionary response at the same rate the omicron spreads through the school population. We need mandatory testing.
Our current testing infrastructure is laughable. The fact that there are unvaccinated students in the classroom is a separate conversation, but Anna Mattson’s report for the Eugene Weekly spotlights UO’s incomplete system. People can be on campus for days before getting their results and the unvaccinated have been able to skip their testing appointments without consequence.
This may seem ludicrous given that UO struggles to mandate testing for over 700 unvaccinated people, but UO needs to mandate testing for all students. It’s not uncommon — an entire school district in California has successfully mandated weekly testing for all students and faculty that participate in in-person instruction. Early last year, before the delta and omicron variants, researchers at the University of Illinois prescribed a similar procedure. If we want in-person instruction to come without consequence, they found that “frequent bulk testing” is the only way to do so.
Of course, this is an expensive and currently unrealistic task. For now, demographics like the Graduate Student’s Union deserve protection through a short return to remote learning. The long term is different. As a nation, we seem incapable of eradicating COVID-19, and it is likely we are going to have to live with it. Testing infrastructure that requires hundreds of students to wait outside the stadium and takes days to return results will not be sufficient for other, more contagious variants. Making a test mandate successful necessitates eliminating the inconvenient factors for participants.
Northeastern University already successfully implemented a testing mandate. They’ve designed a “test-scheduler,” which helps students find testing sites in the Boston area and on campus every week. It seems to be working a lot better for it. With a comparable student body size, it seems to hover around 100 daily cases with a campus in the middle of the Boston metro area. UO averaged just under 200 a day in Eugene.
A testing mandate is not easy. Cost aside — though I’m sure there is a budget for it given UO’s large spending in other departments — it would require tens of thousands of students to take a precautionary measure every week. These are the sacrifices we must make. UO is determined to make in-person education work. If it wants it to work, we need more tests, faster results and more sites. Everyone has to for it to work.
