Practically 4 years after the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic, Yale Well being will finish its COVID Useful resource Line, transfer COVID-19 info from a devoted web site to the Campus Well being web site, and cease gathering reviews of constructive circumstances .
Tristan Hernandez
Staff Reporter
Karen Lin, Senior Photographer
Nearly four years after New Haven announced a state of emergency and students were first told courses would be online for the remainder of the spring semester, the University will end its collection of positive COVID-19 reports and other campus COVID-19 resources.
A Feb. 20 email from Campus Health Director Madeline Wilson announced that Yale Health would end the Campus COVID Resource Line, a phone line for information about COVID-19, on Feb. 23 and that Positive cases of COVID-19 would no longer be reported. to the University.
Instructions for those who test positive for COVID-19 are now on the Campus Health website, which has replaced the dedicated COVID-19 site.
But English teacher Katie Trumpener, who is currently teaching her classes on Zoom because she is immunocompromised and had hoped to return to hybrid teaching, while masked, next semester, worries that the lack of COVID-19 monitoring could make her return to school is unsafe. the classroom.
“I really miss college life, including informal interactions with students and colleagues,” Trumpener wrote to the News. “But I have to keep weighing isolation versus safety.”
According to Wilson's email, rapid antigen tests are still available on some campuses and college students will continue to have access to isolation kits at their residential colleges.
The end of positive case reports comes as the University has slowly moved toward relaxed COVID-19 policies since late 2022. Even as COVID-19 cases on campus spiked early in the fall 2023 semester, the University maintained reduced policies on isolation housing and contact tracing, following the World Health Organization's declaration of the end of the COVID-19 public health emergency on May 11, 2023.
“These system changes do not mean we are diverting attention, far from it,” Wilson wrote in his Feb. 20 email. “The Campus Health team continues to monitor local and national trends in COVID, other infectious diseases, and other issues that may impact campus public health.”
Yale College Dean Pericles Lewis told the News that other resources, such as isolation housing, have not been used much this academic year. In his email, Wilson wrote that the recommended isolation for positive cases remains at five days.
“I think the problem is that with all of our vaccines, and especially for young people, most people treat them a little bit more like they would any other virus,” Lewis said. “For faculty and staff, because we're older, there's a little bit more risk overall, so we definitely encourage people who have COVID to stay home and follow CDC guidelines.”
Current CDC guidance recommends that those who have COVID-19, or suspect they might have it and do not have test results, should isolate. Upon receiving a positive test result, they will be required to isolate at home for five days.
Albert Ko, a public health professor at the School of Public Health, told the News that the new COVID-19 variants are less virulent and more transmissible and more people are gaining immunity, either through vaccination or by becoming infected.
Ko said the changes to Yale Health's COVID-19 policy “make sense,” but also emphasized that high-risk people, including elderly and immunocompromised populations, are still at risk and should take precautions such as wearing a mask and stay up to date on vaccinations. .
“This is a difficult situation because COVID remains a disease that is causing significant mortality in the United States,” Ko said. “The good news is that there are ways to mitigate the serious effects.”
Yale Health is located at 55 Lock St.