BY KURT MARTONE, NEWS EDITOR
hree weeks into the spring 2022 semester at St. Bonaventure University and, as of Wednesday, the school has had 67 COVID-19 cases since Dec. 27. Last semester, St. Bonaventure only reported 79 COVID-19 cases over a six month period.
“It’s a little unsettling to see,” said Tom Missel, co-chair of the COVID-19 Taskforce at St. Bonaventure University. “We are almost at the same number of cases this semester as last year. But again, it’s just a totally different animal.”
Experts predicted this with the rise of the Omicron variant; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention says that Omicron spreads more easily than the Delta variant or original virus that causes COVID-19.
“We recognized that this is likely going to happen. We have freed up a lot more isolation [rooms],” Missel said.
St. Bonaventure has 65 rooms set aside for students who need to be isolated if they test positive for COVID-19.
Omicron has started to decline across the county. New York State’s seven day case average has been on a decline for over a week, going from as high as 25%, to now 5%.
“We’re hopeful,” said Tom Missel, the chief communications officer at the university. “If it continues to trend downward, we’re hopeful that we can… [return] to essentially where we were [in the] beginning of last year.”
New York Governor Kathy Hochul’s mask mandate for businesses and other facilities is currently set to expire Feb. 10. If that does end, the university has plans to only require masks in the classrooms or for large events, with the exception of basketball games.
“Those are the places where… the exposure to somebody who is much more inclined to have serious impacts, being a faculty member,” Missel said.
St. Bonaventure still can set whatever rules it wants around COVID-19 safety precautions.
“Institutionally, we can make whatever decision we think makes sense for the safety of our campus community,” said Missel.
St. Bonaventure has a vaccine mandate in place for all students. So far, 95% of students are fully vaccinated. Even without a mandate, 93% of faculty and staff have gotten the vaccine.
The university says that it reached the high percentage of faculty who got vaccinated due to the threat of the country-wide mandate for all employees who work for entities that employ over 100 people to get the shot. That requirement was halted by the Supreme Court before it went into effect.
“I think a lot of people, believing they would need to get it anyway, went and got it,” Missel said. “We’re comfortable we are essentially [in] the same place without having mandated it.”
Martonkd18@bonaventure.edu
