By Steven Murnane Jr., Senator for the Class of 2023 | Photo by Jackson Chadwick
Note: The views of Senator Murnane do not represent the opinion of or an official statement of the Suffolk Student Government Association
In Fall 2021 students were excited to get back to campus and attend in-person classes for the first time in a year after declining GPAs, Zoom burnout, mental health issues, and a lack of quality education from professors who couldn’tnavigate online teaching. The semester was a breath of fresh air, but the anxiety has come back amid Suffolk’s decision to turn the first two weeks of the semester online.
Upon hearing the news that Suffolk will be going online for the first two weeks of the semester, I was frustrated and anxious that this will never end. If Suffolk decided that it wanted to move online so suddenly, what is stopping them from doing it again in the future as more variants come out? Will we have a repeat of the 2020-2021 school year that has affected us so much?
For the students living on-campus who do not go home, it is easy to look at the situation as frustrating, and to become anxious about when the school may go online again in the future. However, for commuter students who go home to a family member who is immunocompromised, young children unable to be vaccinated, or other vulnerable people, this can be a weight lifted off their shoulders when they are trying to decide between their education and their loved one’s health. Yes, the university does have health measures in place to prevent the spread of the virus, but as we all saw last semester, many students elect not to wear a mask or wear it below their nose which negates its use, so we cannot rely on these measures. Suffolk also has a vaccination policy, but we do not know how many people have been exempt from it, and science has told us that Omicron likes to ignore vaccines.
The Omicron variant has been ravaging the world because it is much more transmissible than past vaccines andcan easily break through vaccines. In fact, Omicron is over three times more infective than the Delta variant, and “the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron VOC is highly transmissible among fully vaccinated young and middle-aged adults.” This means that while people who are healthy and vaccinated are back out in the world, like in the Fall 2022 semester, they can still easily catch the Omicron variant and spread it to those who are vulnerable or unvaccinated. So, while we all sulk in frustration over this decision, try to think about those living with the decision to put their loved ones in danger in order to go to school in person.