School Closures Came Too Late for Immunocompromised Teachers | Bitch Media

School Closures Came Too Late for Immunocompromised Teachers | Bitch Media

Immunocompromised Teachers Are on the Frontlines of Coronavirus

As COVID-19 continues spreading around the world, many people are paying lip service to the idea that precautions, such as social distancing, will prevent the immunocompromised, myself included, from contracting the virus. It’s an idea that has especially taken hold as some colleges and universities enact emergency protocols that will remove faculty, staff, and students from campuses and switch entire schools to distance-learning curriculums. Though colleges and universities across the United States have swiftly acted, closing their doors to students for the remainder of the semester, the damage may already be done.

On March 9, the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, located about 100 miles west of Boston, switched to digital classrooms and advised their students not to return to campus after Spring Break. Harvard followed suit on March 10, after the school’s administrators learned that 77 of the Greater Boston Area’s 95 cases of COVID-19 could all be traced back to a meeting held in late February by the Cambridge-based biotech company Biogen. But I, a disabled, immunocompromised instructor at Emerson College, took Boston’s light rail to the school on March 10 to teach. (Public transportation is my main mode of transportation because my disability prevents me from driving.) At that time, no classes had been canceled and my 8 a.m. freshman research writing course would be the first of my classes meeting after the college’s Spring Break. However, the majority of students had already commingled with other students during Monday class sessions and in their on-campus dormitories.

That morning, I discovered many of my students had spent their breaks visiting European countries. Most—if not all—of my students were under the impression that COVID-19 wasn’t a big enough deal (after all, they said, they knew the outcomes of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome, and Swine flu had gone) to cancel their Spring Break plans. If my 8 a.m. class was a microcosm of the student body at-large, then at CONTINUE READING: School Closures Came Too Late for Immunocompromised Teachers | Bitch Media