Semester of Sobriety

By Sarah Woods

A good friend of mine worked as an infectious disease nurse in student health at a major US university from 2009 until last Friday. She left after the medical director, the head of nursing, and several providers. She suspects other staff are headed for the exits. After twenty months of obtuse mismanagement from university administrators, the student health department is functioning with five medical providers, less than half the staff that was barely meeting student health needs before the pandemic hit. Soon 23,000 undergraduate and graduate students will descend on the university town with no real student health service to manage their myriad medical needs and a paltry community health infrastructure to address the overflow as the COVID-19 delta variant surges.

I have no idea how many other colleges and universities have decimated their student health staff in the drive to reopen, but we will all know soon enough.

College students, unless you know for certain your student and community health departments are generously staffed this semester or you have some illicit back channel to medical care, assume you are on your own. Assume if you get black out drunk, no one will be there to set you up with IV fluids. If you are a bit tipsy and fall of your skateboard or a stack of crates, you might as well plan on asking your roommate to stitch you up. If you get COVID-19, plan on nursing yourself.

Your parents may or may not be aware of how secure the medical infrastructure is where you are attending…