St. Kate’s navigates first dorm quarantine

On Sept. 17th, St. Catherine University sent out an update to students detailing 11 new positive COVID-19 cases in the community. Included in those 11 cases were three first year students in the St. Mary’s dorm. This led to a quarantine of their entire floor.

The positive cases were discovered a week after exposure had already occurred, so the St. Mary’s residents quarantined for a little over a week. 

“I had never had contact with any of the people who tested [positive],” explained a St. Mary’s resident who asked to remain anonymous. “I understand that if I had close contact with a COVID positive person I would need to quarantine, but the fact that I had to quarantine was kind of extreme I think.”

Other quarantined residents agreed with this sentiment, questioning St. Kate’s procedure of shutting down an entire floor when positive cases are present.

“Most of the girls on our floor never came into contact with them,” said Noelle Slezak ‘24 (Accounting) of the positive testers, “and no other girls on our floor got it from them, so was quarantine necessary?”

The St. Mary’s floor quarantine was the first major quarantine on campus, and will likely pave the way for similar situations in the future should other residents test positive. As a typical college dorm with shared bathrooms, however, the St. Mary’s style of quarantine may not apply to residence halls like Georgia, where students live in apartment-like housing and rarely risk coming into contact with each other.

When asked about their experiences in quarantine, the residents agreed that it was hard to be so cut off from their friends and campus life.

“Quarantining was not fun whatsoever,” said the anonymous resident. She chose to spend her quarantine time at home, away from her tiny dorm space, for the safety of her mental health.

Still, spending all that time away from campus took its toll.

“The time went by very, very slowly,” she continued. “I was seeing all of my friends on campus having fun, going to soccer practice, and enjoying their college experience; meanwhile, I sat at home alone.”

Slezak, who plays tennis for St. Kate’s, felt the burden of quarantine in other ways.

“It's hard for the athletes to miss that much practice,” Slezak said. She also decided to go home after finding out that she couldn’t leave her dorm room for the duration of quarantine. “The only thing I missed was tennis and my teammates.”

Many might wonder what quarantine would really be like, with an excess amount of time and nowhere to be or go. The experience of the St. Mary’s residents differed, depending on whether or not they went home and what they had access to during their quarantine.

“Finding the motivation to do schoolwork was hard since I felt like I had so much time on my hands,” the anonymous resident said of her particular experience. “I knew I needed to get it done, though, so I got it done, it just took a lot of motivation to do it.”

Though missing tennis and her teammates, Slezak tried to make the best of the situation.

“I actually had a ton of free time to get caught up in classwork, as I didn't have tennis,” she said. “I took walks twice daily and the fresh air was nice and so was the weather that week. Classes from home were super easy as they were all over Zoom.”

“My experience... was not much different from other students,” said Anoosha Qureshi ‘23 (Business Administration and Marketing), the RA on the quarantined floor. “I did however take it upon myself… to reach out to my residents and make sure that they were doing alright.”

Qureshi, like most RAs, faces a unique challenge during COVID-19 as she navigates creating community on a virtual level.

“I feel the whole situation of living on campus is a challenge on its own,” she said. “We are all finding our place during this time, and I feel that the Resident Life team has made the transition smooth.”

Looking to the future, Qureshi acknowledged the struggles of living in a dorm room alone as a first year college student, with little to no interaction with others.

“It is easier when you have someone checking in on you often,” she said, a piece of wisdom we can all take with us as we continue to navigate life in a global pandemic.