At the start of the fall semester, the College of William and Mary was sitting at under a dozen positives on its nearly fully-vaccinated campus. But within a week, the number skyrocketed to over 100, then over 200 shortly after. Now, students and faculty are questioning the safety protocols put in place by the College’s administration this semester, which include in-person classes, restricted access to testing and limited quarantine options.
QUARANTINE
Lucia Eovino ’23 was sent to the Wyndham Gardens Hotel after testing positive for COVID-19. After her two free nights of hotel provided by the College, she had to pay for the rest herself, splitting the cost with her roommate.
“It’s an awful thing to say, but I almost wish I had gotten COVID last year, ‘cause at least everything’s online, so my classes are accommodating, and Richmond is open, and I don’t have to spend $20 on one meal just DoorDashing it,” Eovino said.
“It’s an awful thing to say, but I almost wish I had gotten COVID last year, ‘cause at least everything’s online, so my classes are accommodating, and Richmond is open, and I don’t have to spend $20 on one meal just DoorDashing it,” Eovino said.
The hotel was $80 a night — $120 on Fridays and Saturdays — along with the cost of delivering food. When Eovino was quarantining, the College still lacked protocols in place to deliver food from the dining halls.
Other students, such as Nicki Ganti ’24, found the quarantining protocols disorganized and stressful. Ganti knew she had COVID-19 when she couldn’t taste her mouthwash or toothpaste in the morning, and she immediately reported her symptoms and was transported to the Holiday Inn with the promise that her first two nights were free. But she ended up using her own credit card to pay for the first two nights, hoping to be reimbursed later.
“I came in with the idea that I’d go to the hotel, the first two days would be prepaid, and that they were in contact with the hotel, because I didn’t make the reservation, the case manager did,” Ganti said. “So I came in with the idea that they knew my situation, that I could be staying anywhere from two to 10 days.”
But after the first two days, hotel staff called her in the middle of her lecture, informing her that she had to vacate the room or pay for the rest of her stay immediately. And when she took a school-provided COVID-19 test on Sunday, she didn’t get her results back until Thursday. By then, she had already taken an at-home test which came back positive. Along with these difficulties, Ganti also felt disheartened by the lack of contact from the College.
“They said in the email that we do get calls everyday to check in on us, but we don’t,” Ganti said. “The only time I’ve talked to a case manager or anyone, I’ve always initiated the phone calls, whereas last year they did check in on us every day.”
The College sent her a care package, but Ganti found its content unsatisfactory.
“It was all frozen meals, and my fridge doesn’t have a freezer, so I had to throw it out because I couldn’t preserve them,” Ganti said. “But I appreciated the gesture”
For many students, the financial burden of a hotel stay is prohibitive. But Chief Operating Officer Amy Sebring emphasizes that funds are available for students who need it.
“We indicate to the student, if you have a financial need, let us know,” Sebring said. “The university has HEART funds or other emergency funds that can help with your stay. We had a handful of cases where in those instances, we worked with the hotel and said the hotel would just directly bill us, so the student never gets charged.”
Additionally, Sebring pointed out the small number of students quarantined in hotels.
“The maximum, we’ve had one day where we had 17 students in hotels, so the numbers are really small so far, in total,” Sebring said. “Most of those are students who are just there for a night or two while they wait for mom or dad to pick them up, or wait for morning to drive in the morning, depending on if they’re able to transport themselves.”
TESTING
Other students had difficulty getting tested in the first place. Per the College’s guidelines, students have access to tests at the Sadler front desk or through the COVID-19 test vending machine, but only if they’re a confirmed close contact — defined as having spent more than 15 minutes unmasked within six feet of a COVID-positive individual — or have reported symptoms. For some students like Laura Pace ’22 who tested positive, she met neither of those conditions. Pace got tested for COVID-19 unintentionally, after going to urgent care for what she thought was an earache.
“I didn’t go to get tested, I got tested because they felt bad for me, pretty much,” Pace said. “If they’d let me walk out of there, I would have been walking around campus infecting people, which is kind of ridiculous.”
After her positive test on Monday, Pace filled out the Report COVID form, but by Wednesday she still didn’t have a case manager.
“I just think it’s kind of irresponsible to put a bunch of undergraduates on a campus with virtually no restrictions and say, ‘ok, it’s normal!’ and then people get sick and the university’s not responsible for that, in their words,” Pace said. “But they are, everyone here is paying to be here, and it’s their job to make sure everyone is safe, and they’re not doing that, and it’s super frustrating. I want to have a normal semester as much as anyone, but we can’t do that if they’re not taking COVID seriously.”
“I just think it’s kind of irresponsible to put a bunch of undergraduates on a campus with virtually no restrictions and say, ‘ok, it’s normal!’ and then people get sick and the university’s not responsible for that, in their words,” Pace said. “But they are, everyone here is paying to be here, and it’s their job to make sure everyone is safe, and they’re not doing that, and it’s super frustrating. I want to have a normal semester as much as anyone, but we can’t do that if they’re not taking COVID seriously.”
Though the College has 15 case managers and five more in training, the lack of communication from case managers is a common refrain among students who tested positive.
Amelia Levine ’24 also was tested off campus, using an at-home kit from Walmart to expedite the process.
“It’s really tough for me because I live out-of-state, I live in Connecticut, so I was like, ‘I’m going to need a lot of time to figure out what to do, because I can’t go home and risk my grandparents,’” Levine said.
Levine ended up quarantining in South Carolina, in a home owned by her family. She too struggled to keep in contact with her case manager. She was assigned a case manager on Sunday, who told her they would be in contact the next day. By Wednesday, she still hadn’t heard back, leaving her to conduct contact tracing on her own. This lackluster response made her question the College’s COVID protocols.
“I think going into the semester, we should have had COVID tests to submit, and then once we got here, submitted another COVID test,” Levine said. “I think the mask mandate indoors was good, should have been enforced a bit more, maybe. People are wanting to get back to the normal college experience, and there’s nothing William and Mary can really do about the off-campus parties and stuff like that.”
Faculty, too, have had difficulties finding tests in the Williamsburg area. Biology Professor Margaret Saha wanted to get tested after a student who had visited her office hours tested positive. But when she went to get a test, access was limited.
“I actually went on the website for every single pharmacy within a twenty-mile radius of Williamsburg,” Saha said. “There was no test available until Saturday or Sunday. And so I started getting a little bit concerned about, how is a faculty member, who maybe doesn’t know of a close contact but they just don’t feel really safe, how are they going to get tested?”
Although the College is not offering prevalence or at-will testing, Sebring says the situation is being closely monitored.
“We’re still evaluating with the Public Health Advisory Team as to what role prevalence testing should play for this year,” Sebring said. “CDC guidelines really shifted on this and are saying that unless you’re symptomatic or have been a close contact, testing isn’t really serving the same role that it did last year.”
FACULTY RESPONSE
Despite the complicated and confusing COVID protocols, many professors, such as Saha, are excited to be teaching in person.
“We should be in person, I’m so glad we’re in person, and I just wanted to dance in front of the classroom the first time I had my larger bioengineering class, it was just so nice to see everybody,” Saha said.
However, faculty members bear the burden of communicating COVID information alongside teaching material.
“I’ve been in contact with a lot of students who have been very frustrated not knowing the ways that they should respond to the ever-growing case numbers on campus,” Saha said. “So I have been reading every email that I get and trying to guide them to fill out the correct forms, but I’m still hearing that not every student is getting the attention that they deserve. And when students are frustrated, they’re obviously not focusing on the academics, the classes, so that’s frustrating for us as well.”
Saha records all of her classes to make students more comfortable while quarantining, making sure that everyone is able to keep learning despite COVID.
“Students have family members who are sick, they have unvaccinated siblings, this Delta variant is nothing to fool around with, for many individuals,” Saha said.
Professor Rowan Lockwood has been at the College for over 20 years, but the pandemic has been the most difficult experience of her teaching career.
“The amount of time and energy you put into it is, for me at least, double or triple what I would normally put into teaching,” Lockwood said. “It’s been fascinating, trying to be flexible, trying to pivot, trying to stay on my toes and stay ahead of it.”
Lockwood has had many students who tested positive, so her classes have shifted to offer remote options.
“The difficulty with in-person opportunities is that when you do have a lot of students isolating or quarantining on campus, they feel very left out,” Lockwood said. “They feel like they’re not part of the class, they feel angry and frustrated and scared. So having a little bit of normalcy, being able to go to class on Zoom, I think makes a difference for these students.”
“The difficulty with in-person opportunities is that when you do have a lot of students isolating or quarantining on campus, they feel very left out,” Lockwood said. “They feel like they’re not part of the class, they feel angry and frustrated and scared. So having a little bit of normalcy, being able to go to class on Zoom, I think makes a difference for these students.”
CHANGING GUIDELINES
Overall, the College’s guidelines follow guidance from the CDC and data-driven approaches to contact tracing. Virology Professor Kurt Williamson points to the constantly-changing guidance from the CDC causing much of the confusion on campus.
“Part of the confusion I think may be due to a confusing set of guidelines that’s coming from above, for example CDC guidelines which is, once you’ve been vaccinated you don’t have to wear a mask anymore, and that can cause some issues because now we’re being asked to wear masks again,” Williamson said. “For the record, I think it’s the right idea, I agree with that move, but there can be some confusion there where the guidelines do change and have changed based on what is a changing situation.”
Much of the CDC’s guidance is based on the protection offered by the vaccine. But the majority (94.5%) of the cases on the College’s campus are breakthrough cases, showing that the vaccine doesn’t always prevent infection or spread.
“Part of the complication here is that the vaccine does offer protection, that protection is real, but it’s not absolute, and that’s the case for every vaccine,” Williamson said.
Sebring said that the College is constantly looking for patterns in infections, from classes to clubs.
“The two epidemiologists on the public health team are spending hours a week, they literally looked at all of the confirmed cases and close contacts to find patterns, looking by course, matching up the data with the courses the students are enrolled in, trying to find patterns within the courses,” Sebring said. “They’ve looked by student organization affiliation, they’re looking at where their residence is, it’s a very data-intensive review that they’re doing.”
Despite student concerns, Sebring emphasized that students are not getting infected from their in-person classes.
“We literally ask the question every day: we’ve seen no evidence of classroom spread,” Sebring said.
In response to the recent COVID spike, the College’s restrictions increased, encouraging student organizations to meet outside or virtually, and requiring outdoor masking.
“One of the best things we did last year was to establish a culture of masking, and in times of high transmission, masking is going to be really really important for us, and we’re likely to see episodes of spread throughout this academic year,” Sebring said in the Community Conversation.
“One of the best things we did last year was to establish a culture of masking, and in times of high transmission, masking is going to be really really important for us, and we’re likely to see episodes of spread throughout this academic year,” Sebring said in the Community Conversation.
But many in the campus community remain positive that cases will come under control as the semester progresses.
“Overall, it’s been pretty good,” Williamson said. “Personally I would love to know what our positivity rate was coming in at the start of the semester, but the current controls as far as requiring vaccines, requiring masks, that’s what we need to be doing.”
The administration, along with students, faculty and staff, continue to work with imperfect information and constantly-changing guidelines as the pandemic wages on.
“This is a really difficult time,” Lockwood said. “Everyone’s responding to COVID concerns differently, everyone’s responding to online and in-person teaching differently, I guess I’d just put a plea out there to faculty, staff, students, administrators and families to realize that we are all trying to do the best that we can.”