Logan Ramsey
News Editor
Throughout all the chaos, fear and fury the historic events of 2020 have incited, I’ve observed a widening gap between the United States population. This isn’t the chasm that exists between our two major political parties, but the way the year has affected each of our worldviews.
Starting with the initial lockdown, people have fallen into two separate camps. For some people, the spread of COVID-19 caused them to desperately want the world to return to normal when restaurants and movie theaters were still open and they didn’t have to be scared of contracting a virus at the grocery store.
For others, it made them recognize that the world was never normal and hunger for a great change.
As students return to the Idaho State University campus, I can’t help but feel like everything has changed, but we’re pretending like it hasn’t.
The United States still has the worst outbreak of COVID-19 in the world, and we might not have seen the worst of it yet. Confirmed cases are currently decreasing, but that doesn’t mean the fight is over.
Flu season is fast approaching and this could make the continuing effects of the pandemic far more dangerous. Many people haven’t taken COVID-19 seriously because they believe the flu is more deadly. Join the two together, and researchers say it creates the “perfect storm.”
What our decreasing case numbers mean is that we’re at a crossroads with our fight against the virus. The choices that we make now will determine whether we continue to slow the spread or spiral even deeper into a pit of increasing sickness.
There’s a lot of danger with college campuses reopening. Regardless of my feelings about ISU’s reopening, the University is doing a respectable job at opening in a safe manner. We know how to slow the spread of the disease, and it appears to be working.
However, I foresee a threat posed by us, the students of the university. We’re all tired of being proactive in virus prevention methods, but if students stop wearing masks and get too comfortable with each other, we’ll undo all the ground we’ve collectively gained.
We know that the virus is on our campus, what we don’t know is how far it’s already reached. Idaho falls behind most other states in our testing numbers, which means we’re one of the states that knows the least about our outbreak.
By the time you’re reading this column, the Roaring Back page will be updated and you’ll know whether or not we’ve seen an increase in case count, or changed our operational level of alert. As of August 24, I can only guess what will happen. My guess is that we’ll see a moderate case increase, but nothing to panic over.
However, in the coming weeks, Southeast Idaho’s testing will rise dramatically with ISU’s purchase of a COVID-19 PCR test machine. With an increase in testing, I expect that we’ll see a massive increase in cases, which isn’t a bad thing. It just means we’ll know far more about our outbreak than we have in the months previous.
But will we be forced to go back online? That’s impossible to predict at this point, but we’re all collectively making that decision right now by how we treat the threat of the virus. The way that we’ve followed and continue to follow virus mitigation efforts as a student body will determine whether or not we get to keep the campus open for the entirety of the semester and continue learning skills that will help us change the world for the better someday.
I understand the temptation to treat Fall 2020 like any other semester at college. I would love to go back to partying and pretend like I’m not putting other people in danger by having fun. But my head tells me to not listen to my heart because my heart will get people killed.
The world was never normal, and we can’t pretend like it was. We have to adapt to the changing world, and hopefully, someday, influence it for the better.
