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By Lucas Thomae
On Saturday, March 13, Duke University took one of its most drastic measures yet during the pandemic and issued a stay-in-place order for all of its undergraduate students.
Essentially, the campus went on lockdown; in-person classes went remote, common areas were closed, and on-campus students were only permitted to leave their dorm rooms for essential activities such as picking up food. The order went into effect Saturday at midnight and was lifted at 9 a.m. Sunday. The move was in response to an explosion of COVID-19 that rocked the university this past week, with 241 new positive cases from March 8 to March 14 according to the school’s COVID-19 dashboard. In its messaging, Duke put much of the blame on off-campus gatherings, citing “recent off-campus fraternity-related events” in an email sent to faculty and staff on March 13. Isaiah Hamilton, a freshman at Duke, was not surprised when he first learned of the stay-in-place order. “My first initial thought was ‘gee, this isn’t really a shocker to me,’ especially since our numbers have been ticking up over the past few weeks,” he said. Hamilton has a dorm in one of Duke’s residence halls, but he’s spent the past week at his older brother’s off-campus apartment in Durham, opting to avoid campus altogether. “I got the message, and rather than stay on campus I just chose to be off campus here,” Hamilton said. Another influencing factor in Hamilton’s decision was that he had already gotten his first dose of the COVID-19 vaccine as part of North Carolina’s 3B vaccination group, offering an added layer of protection from the virus. As the state’s vaccination campaign progresses, more and more college students, including those at Duke, have become eligible to receive the vaccine. Vaccination appointments were included in Duke’s list of essential activities for which students were allowed to leave their dorms during the stay-in-place order. Hamilton believes the key to containing COVID-19 at Duke is getting enough students vaccinated quickly. “I think it's a real question of time, right? Can students get vaccinated quicker than the numbers re-tick back up, or is it going to be one of those things where as soon as we go off of lockdown people just go back to doing what they were doing, then we’re going to be right back in lockdown?” One thing Hamilton noticed about the stay-in-place order was how divided the student population was in their reactions. He said there was — and has been for some time — a clear separation between students who took COVID-19 guidelines very seriously and those who didn’t. “I feel like if you are one of those people who are definitely partaking in a lot of the bigger gatherings or larger events… then you knew the risks going into the situation,” he said. “If you’re one of the students who, you know, have stayed inside your room a lot of the semester, or have kept to yourself and haven’t had a lot of contact with people then I could imagine it has been a lot more frustration.” Hamilton wondered how the student population would interact with one another after the worst of the pandemic is over and campus life becomes more normal. “Duke is one of those schools that prides itself on a sense of community since it’s a smaller school, so I’m very interested to see if that's going to cause any contingencies or shifts in what they had claimed to be a great sense of community previously,” he said. ● The Recommended Content Widget will appear here on the published site.
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3/22/2021
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