“I told my students: ‘If you bring COVID into my classroom, and I bring it home, it is likely my wife will die,” said Lindsay Briggs, Chico State public health professor.
Students at Chico State University are no longer required to mask up indoors in order to prevent COVID-19. But Chico State public health professor Lindsay Briggs still requires students to wear masks in her class out of concern for her immunocompromised wife, who has lung problems.
The changes in campuses’ practices coincided with months of declining COVID-19 cases and hospitalizations in the state — though those numbers started ticking up recently. Public health experts said colleges could institute safety measures beyond requiring vaccines to protect immunocompromised students, including socially distanced classrooms, testing after breaks, encouraging mask use and online class options.
Kaplan has a musculoskeletal pain disorder that causes neurological dysfunction and fatigue. They take a steroid that reduces the pain and inflammation associated with their condition, but also lowers their immunity, making them more susceptible to severe COVID-19 and other diseases. A communications major and president of the Cal Poly Disability Alliance club, Kaplan was enrolled in one in-person class for the fall and winter quarters. Being fully vaccinated and on a campus with a mask mandate, they felt just slightly uncomfortable in a classroom full of students. But when Cal Poly SLO announced it was removing the mask mandate in late March, Kaplan worried more about their safety and decided to switch their in-person class to a virtual one.
For Kaplan, the dropping of the mask mandate illustrated a general lack of awareness about the issues disabled people face. Duarte spends most of the workday in his office wearing an N95 mask with his unmasked coworker. And although he mostly works on campus, he’s still often interacting with people on the phone or computer.
With most of his work done virtually, Duarte feels like he is missing out on a large part of what used to make his job fun: interacting with students. “So pretty much the combination of having chronic pain and having a weakened immune system, I was pretty much sick at least every other week, pretty much all of my childhood,” Patton said.
“We know that there are students and faculty who live with people who are immunocompromised, or have children who are not able to get the vaccine yet,” Su said.