STAFF EDIT: Duties, common sense

With a delayed vaccine and more cases emerging every day, H1N1 containment on campus is becoming increasingly more difficult. It’s no longer a big secret that the Boston University administration is isolating students with flu-like symptoms in campus dorm rooms. What has been kept under wraps are the means the administration is using to accomplish the isolation of sick students. For example, residents of the Myles-Standish Hall Annex have confirmed the placement of a sick student in an empty room on the third floor, which shares communal bathrooms. The Centers for Disease Control indicate that one of the best ways to prevent contracting swine flu is by keeping distance from people who feel ill. And if SHS goes to such great lengths to isolate students, yet isolates them in dorms that share bathrooms, what’s the point?

This ironic decision by SHS and the BU administration is just proof that still, months into the outbreak and with many experts conjecturing that it’s going to get worse before it gets better, H1N1 management protocol on campus is still unorganized and inefficient. Still, students are being dragged into isolation and then forgotten there, told that they are not the responsibilities of RAs or SHS. Still, students are not getting the attention they need ‘- that which they are told they will get by McBride himself ‘- and healthy students are being kept in the dark. Not only was the Myles Annex case nonsensical because of the communal bathroom, but also the other residents on the floor were not told that the ill student had arrived and would be sharing sinks and showers with them.

If sick students are purposely moved by the administration into isolation-specific dorm rooms on floors populated with permanent residents who are not ill, it’s the administration’s duty to inform the floor. Likewise, if ill students are being goaded into isolation by administration, it’s common sense that they be taken care of. It’s been rumored that administration is far more worried about H1N1 breaking out heavily on campus than they’re letting on. But by ‘playing it cool,’ the administration is simply harming its students more so than they would be if they were just honest. Swine flu is a worrisome but manageable illness, and BU students are smart and supportive of one another. The outbreak would be easy to ride out if students could depend on their administration and health officials to organize a safe and viable plan, one in which ill students are given what they need to get better quickly and without infecting others, and one in which healthy students can stay healthy, help out their ill friends safely and keep themselves up to date about the progress of the illness on campus.

It doesn’t take a Ph.D to know the basics of how to take care of the sick, and how to stay healthy ‘- BU needs to keep both common sense and their sense of responsibility to serve students in mind as they continue to sharpen and revise their flu plan.